Unpacking Perception

Definitions of perception 

Practicing awareness of how we perceive, can be a powerful way of moving through the world, one so deeply intertwined with our conscious, subconscious, sense of self, others and understanding of the truth. Design’s various mediums and methods are inextricably linked with perception, making it a close sister ready and waiting to amplify knowledge and ways of seeing the world. That’s why it’s important to understand how perception works and the many forms it takes in our lives—so we don’t overlook its power, but instead use it to create positive impact.

In MOLD’s latest and final print issue, MOLD founder and editor LinYee Yuan refers to “ways of knowing,” in other words, recognising the varied ways we relate, acknowledge and perceive each other and many forms of life on earth. 

Whilst we can believe and understand just how interdependent we are with others (human and more-than-human inhabitants), several cultural, behavioral and psychological obstacles influencing perception can prevent humans from reshaping how we live.

To position ourselves for the perspectives in this article, let us consider the following statements as a foundational starting point:

Part 1 of this article breaks down some psychological and societal impacts of how we perceive the hyperobjects of scale, the future, progress and kinship, and some respective consequences on environmental behavior. Part 2 includes design prompts that aim to help us re-perceive large natural entities, from being distant or abstract, to close and intimate. I hope the perspectives in this piece can reinforce how we, human and more-than-human species, relate to each other and can act on each other’s behalf. We need rescuing, from ourselves. 

Scale perception

Human beings find it difficult to comprehend abstract, large, endless and undefined magnitudes. We can just about imagine a room of 100 people. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s theory argues that one person can only really maintain about 150 social connections in one’s lifetime. So perhaps our minds can stretch to just about visualize 150 people. What about 1,000 people? It’s near impossible. When space and time come together in the form of large numbers or heavy statistics to relay an environmental impact, our relationality to “it” and of “it” to us, is often obscured. Our perception of that which we are part of but cannot picture can be an obstacle.

American industrial designers Ray and Charles Eames’ 1977 film Powers of Ten is a wondrous example of how design can communicate that which we are part of but cannot visualize. The film shows the relative size of things in the universe, beginning with a shot of a couple enjoying a picnic in a park bordering Chicago’s Lake Michigan, then zooming out incrementally by powers of ten, to show the Milky Way and galaxies. The visuals showcase scales beyond our human capacity to directly perceive through our senses, including the edge of an unknown universe or the molecules in our hands. We are shown what is invisible to the naked human eye at both micro and macro scales. The short film also positions the couple, in a human-centric manner, at the center of their wider ecosystem. On reflection, despite the numerous size and scales shown, we are likely only to truly perceive scales up to 10 meters wide (our immediate surroundings) or 10 cm (the skin on our hands), because we can easily see, touch and hear and maybe even smell them.

In visual designer Liaia Tremosa’s Interaction Design Foundation article “Why Do We Not Act on Climate Change?” she explains how the brain prioritizes the information it receives through the senses, focusing on the most immediate information and overlooking issues that are not perceptible or do not have substantial emotional impact. Despite our incredible capacity to process some types of abstract information, the brain is more likely to trust stimuli it can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell, as these inputs directly and immediately impact the sensory systems. Therefore, people can find it challenging to process issues they cannot directly perceive, such as the effects of climate change. Devastatingly, climate emergency is a daily reality for so many across the world, given the effects are present and ever growing, and experienced more directly in some geographies over others. One could argue that the need to address what we can do today and to save our collective future couldn’t be clearer. The evidence is overwhelming. However, our relationship with the future and how we perceive it could also have a part to play in our lack of collective action.

Future perception

The TIME article’s writer, Bryan Walsh, explains that because our communities of the future don’t exist yet, they are rendered voiceless, and cannot lobby for their needs. The United Nations exists in part to represent everyone living on Mother Earth now, no matter where they are. But as the New York University ethicist Samuel Scheffler explains, “There is no trans-temporal United Nations. The only way we’re going to work for the future is if we are motivated to act on their behalf.” 

A potential antidote to the emotional distancing of current and future environmental degradation, can be found through the lens of the past. Biomimicry 3.8, a consulting and professional training company headquartered in Montana, created a compressed timeline of life on earth, mapping out significant biological events in history according to 1 calendar earth year. On the Foresight Sustainability Podcast, Lola Bushnell, Senior Sustainable Futures Strategist at Arup, the global design engineering firm, refers to Mother Earth’s existence using this Earth calendar year, and in doing so combines a perceivable scale with what it means for our future. 

Whilst many strive to answer this question with care and dedication, others actively assault this quest. On January 21st 2025, the current US president withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement, under which nations work together to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. It makes the United States one of only four nations–along with Iran, Libya and Yemen—not party to the agreement. One analysis by Carbon Brief estimated that a second administration under this president would result in an extra 4 billion metric tons of climate pollution, negating all of the emissions savings from the global deployment of clean energy technologies over the past five years—twice over.

This is devastating. Heartbreaking. Disturbing. Many of us desperately try to hold on to hope, and ask ourselves ‘What next?’, when with every week that passes, the future can feel so terrifying and uncertain. How are we to move forward for the benefit of each other and the earth we are but mere guests in? What does our collective and climate future look like? 

Whilst this article doesn’t come close to answering this existential moment, it has some ingredients and provocations to consider in relation to our day to day reality and its impact on our shared futures.

For example, it’s worth acknowledging that acting on behalf of our future selves is not a conceptual reach. For example, consider how we act in the present to shape our future? Depending on our socioeconomic background, lifestyle and priorities, we do necessary training or studies to get a good job. To put food on the table and pay our bills. We save up for a holiday. We put money aside for a housing deposit. We take out a loan for college tuition. Perhaps we invest in green tech. We can understand why it’s worthwhile to make day-to-day decisions in the present, to give ourselves or our children a better future. Then why does society at large, not take daily actions to prevent environmental degradation or to promote biodiversity, in the same way we may plan for a college fund? One way of answering this question is by pausing to consider how we understand or define progress.

Progress perception

Anthropocentric cultures across the globe are largely dependent on a capitalist framework that associates progress with productivity, profit, speed, efficiency, consumerism and comfort found in convenience and instant gratification. A cultural obsession with maximizing productivity dovetails with AI’s “promise” to make work more efficient and “relieve” humans of certain tasks (impacting carbon emissions, energy consumption and environmental equity, not to mention creative processes). 

The word “degrowth” became prominent after the first international degrowth conference in Paris in 2008, but is said to have originated as a radical economic theory in the 1970s.

The Latin roots of degrowth include, “la décroissance” in French or “la decrescita” in Italian, referring to a river going back to its normal flow after a disastrous flood. In other words, the perception of degrowth can be linked to restoration.

However, opponents of the degrowth theory argue that economic growth has given the world life saving benefits including cancer treatments, neonatal intensive care units, smallpox vaccines, insulin and longer life expectancies as stated by Vox article, “Can we save the planet by shrinking the economy?” Another counter argument to degrowth explains that several countries have shrunk their emissions while also growing their GDP by using renewable energy technologies, as stated by The Breakthrough Institute, a global research center that identifies and promotes technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges. Wherever you may lie on the argument for degrowth, it’s worth considering that cultural and economic measures of growth such as GDP, do not count for growth in biodiversity and other crucial planetary needs. Perhaps there is something to take from the concept of degrowth when we consider the notion of reduced growth, or living in a more limited way. 

Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, is a marine biologist, policy expert, writer and co-founder of the non-profit think tank Urban Ocean Lab. In conversation with David Marchese for The New York Times, Dr. Johnson discusses the importance of living in a more limited way, including embracing reduction and redistribution to improve environmental welfare and our quality of life. 

Johnson mentions that 62% of US adults feel a responsibility to do something about climate change, however 51% don’t know where to start, especially in regards to moving beyond the three R’s of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” of which the first is largely ignored. It’s worth noting that “reduce, reuse, recycle” is a largely western concept. There can be a natural sensitivity involved in demanding citizens living under the breadline or going through a cost of living crisis to reduce, given they are likely already practicing reduce and reuse in order to survive. For those who have a standard of living that requires greater effort to meet the demands of “the three R’s”, Johnson explains that reducing is difficult for the average person in the global north to think about, because of its association with sacrifice. In Johnson’s words, it’s about “an opportunity to live a different or better life” over a cultural dependency on unsatisfactory consumerism. 

The opening lyrics to rapper Kendrick Lamar’s N95, nod to this cultural “norm” of unsatisfactory consumerism shaped by a list of societal distortions referencing fakeness, insecurity, money and “designer bullshit.” Lamar frames the consumerism we’ve normalised through a powerful call to action, asking his listeners to take off multiple consumer tendencies and superficial displays of wealth.

Looking to the future, Dr. Johnson explains there are already myriad actions we can take to prevent climate change. These include retrofitting our home—taking out boilers, changing our heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, putting in heat pumps, induction stoves, electric water heaters, solar panels and green roofs. Prioritizing these types of refurbishments would involve a significant short-term cost but could reward our health, communities and ecosystems from the moment the changes are made to our homes. Instead of saving for a material item, would progress look like putting aside money to retrofit our home, for example? Or pressuring our local banks for an “eco-retrofit” loan? Would visualizing the direct link between taking these measures and their impact on our health catapult us into action? 

Whilst these questions are valid and needed, the aforementioned retrofits would rely on a governmental level energy grid to be transformed. And therein lies an ongoing tension between governments unfairly putting the onus on individuals to tackle global warming, and individuals expecting governments to take much more drastic action. 

So what are we to do? Towards the end of the podcast, Johnson expresses that one of the key answers lies in community and kinship. Engineer Haasna Shaddad, reinforces the message of kinship and community action in her climate activism speech given to Beal High School students in London, U.K. in 2023. 

Kinship perception 

Kinship. We know it through human relationships and our animal companions. But what about other nonhuman species we do not perceive in our day to day lives? Revisiting Timothy Morton’s work, he discusses the universal truth of the relationality between human and nonhuman species in his book Being Ecological: 

The rigid categories Timothy describes are largely based on Western culture’s categorisation of life forms and different elements in nature. By contrast, Indigenous community teachings and eastern philosophy alike believe all of Creation is circular, and by being part of Creation, we live and move through multiple spheres. These spheres may be separate by name at times, but they are not separate by nature, because we are all interconnected, through a web of kinship.

Kyle Whyte, Environmental Justice Scholar, believes that to solve the climate crisis, we must first repair our relationships through kinship with each other and as a way of perceiving time.

In Whtye’s lecture on Indigenous Approaches to Environmental Justice, and paper on Time and Kinship, he delves deeper into how climate kinship is a more appropriate way of referring to climate change, which is typically described in a linear and statistical format, for example, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Instead, scholar and Indigenous ecologist Melissa Nelson defines climate change through the basis of Anishinaabe intellectual and scientific traditions and relationships, outlined below.

Melissa’s words are relatable. Part of western culture’s challenge in how it perceives the hyperobjects of climate change and health, can largely be due to a separatist tendency that does not acknowledge, nurture, or respect, the deep rooted interconnectivity between our spiritual, physical and mental selves let alone that of others—human and non-human species alike.

Last year I joined a dear friend to see Dr. Gabor Maté speak at the Barbican in our beloved city of London. Dr. Maté is a Canadian physician and author, and one of the several topics he covered leant on his expertise in deconstructing the fixed truths of modern western medicine. Whilst acknowledging all of western medicine’s brilliance and life saving achievements, Dr Maté explained how sometimes its science can unjustly disregard the impact of the subconscious mind on physical ailments, and how the power of self compassion can be a core healing agent to mental and physical conditions. As part of his talk, Dr. Maté shared learnings from Indigenous communities he has learnt from over the years, and emphasized the power of the Medicine Wheel of First Nations communities in North America, in particular. Made of four quadrants, the Medicine Wheel represents the relationality between human and non-human species, as well as providing, in a sense, a visual design framework for the foundational principles of a well lived and balanced life. Kinship is at the core of this framework.

All aspects of the Medicine Wheel are considered sacred, equal and interrelated. To achieve health and well-being, all four quadrants need to be balanced amongst the spirit, self, family, community and nation. Whilst the Medicine Wheel is often portrayed as a two-dimensional circle, it has been represented as a spiral, from distinct levels and vantage points, whether integrated within the environment (left) or in the from of a modern day diagram (right). 

We have reflected on the perception of scale, the future, progress and kinship. I hope these serve as springboards from which to ask, what else am I perceiving in a way that is obstructing what is healthiest for Mother Earth, my spirit, self, family and community? The following design prompts listed below may be of service in this process.

The design prompts below are starting points to help us reperceive the four “hyperobjects” discussed in this article; ‘scale’, the ‘future’, ‘progress’ and ‘kinship’. An additional four hyperobjects, ‘bioregionalism’, ‘humanity’, ‘information’ and ‘language’ are also included to encourage us to question what other hyperobjects we may have in our lives, and how our perception of them may dominate our behaviors in relation to our communities and ecosystems. Each hyperobject is repositioned as something worth reperceiving with closeness instead of abstractness, intimacy instead of otherness. 

Scale intimacy

Definition of intimate, according to Google:

Consider writer and artist Jenny Odell’s project, titled “Where Almost Everything I Used, Wore, Ate or Bought on Monday, April 1, 2013 (That Had a Label) Was Manufactured, to the Best of My Knowledge.” 

Jenny challenged herself to record the origin of everything she touched in one day. In Odell’s words, the project is “a meditation on our relationships to things, and the geographically schizophrenic path we trace through their use.” For the writer, just 29 out of the 179 things she used, wore, ate or bought in one day, were made in the US, her country of residence. That is only 16%. Can you and I get to a point that even 50% or 80% of the objects we use everyday are made in our country of residence? How could buying locally help reduce emissions, minimize waste, and contribute to a smaller environmental footprint? 

Future intimacy

Consider the Lebanese family tree of the Ghobaira family of Ghazir in Mount Lebanon, between the years 1720 – 1925, alongside Drew Dellinger’s poem, Hieroglyphic Stairway. The family tree is a work of art in its own right, with the names of male descendents written on each leaf (many family trees of the era and across various cultures list male names only). Nonetheless, the simple act of mirroring the beautiful Ghobaira family tree, prompts us to pause and consider descendents, in the same way Dellinger’s words force us to reckon with generational impact, and what we are doing to act on behalf of our potential descendents. 

Progress intimacy

In a previous MOLD article I wrote, titled Death and the Lightness of Being as Design Cornerstones for Climate Action, I refer to the role design can play in shaping desirability and feeding a consumerist culture; the opposite of reduction. For example, the concept of a “designer item” being linked with conspicuous consumption for those who wish to differentiate themselves based on their wealth and the material objects they own. One could argue that type of material possession is a misconstrued definition of progress. 

The questions below aim to serve as a provocation, to help us reperceive progress when it comes to consumerism, “designer items” and the accumulation of “goods.” They are inspired by Dr. Ayana’s words, Kendrick’s N95 opening lyrics, and anthropologist Kit Davis’ quote on the importance of “treating the familiar and strange, and the strange as familiar.” 

Kinship intimacy

How can we honor the Medicine Wheel as a key framework for how we design, make and problem solve? How can we better design for the non-human personas that are invisible and visible to us? 

As described by Life Centred Design Lab, a consultancy founded by Australian UX designer Damien Lutz in 2023, “non-human and non-user personas represent the animals, environments and ‘invisible’ human factory workers, miners, farmers, communities etc. impacted by a product life cycle so that we may design to protect and respect them.”

In 2020, anthropologist, UX researcher and environment-centred design advocate Monike Snzel wrote about non-human personas and how they can be impacted by a product’s life-cycle, including when and where threats to their current condition can occur. A first-person narrative is used to personify the non-human persona, to establish greater empathy between the designer and the non-human personas (that by no choice of their own, are impacted by the product and service design process). 

We can also challenge ourselves as designers to perceive non-human personas beyond the human-centric title of the phrase in itself. One could argue the language “non-human” infers that other species are secondary or adjacent to the human experience. Language matters. Using phrases like “more than human,” or “interspecies” can widen the aperture on multispecies perception. Projects like designer Oscar Salgueros’ Interspecies Library invites humans to consider “alternative species futures” and “more than human worlds”.

Additional hyperobjects

The hyperobjects below aim to help us question what else we may abstract in our lives, and how our perception of them may dominate our behaviors in relation to our communities and ecosystems. 

Bioregional intimacy

Bioregionalism is the belief that human activity, including environmental and social policies, should be based on ecological or geographical boundaries rather than economic or political boundaries. 

Humanity intimacy

Information intimacy

Language intimacy

Thank you for taking the time to read this piece and for sharing this journey across multiple perceptions.

In the words of the Jain axiom Parasparopagraho jivanam, all life is bound together by mutual support and interdependence. May our minds be fertile ground for re-perceiving the interconnected nature of our existence, whilst staying rooted in our local ecosystems and communities. As the British author and journalist Oliver Burkeman states:

Finally, may the notion of intimacy serve as guiding light on our shared journey in acting on our relationality, preciousness of life on earth, and reliance on all living things. Our hyperobjects are more intimate than we think.