Wilding Practices Through Design: Playful Encounters for Reframing Control in Multispecies Cohabitation

This article explores how design can reintroduce elements of wildness into urban environments through artifacts that foster multispecies interaction. Wildness is not defined as a return to nature, but as a relational and semiotic rupture of control. It is an opportunity for nonhuman agency to emerge within human-managed spaces. Drawing on theories of affordances, play, cultural heritage, and metacommunication, we investigate how artifacts can function as semiotic prompts for interspecies encounters, and how cultural familiarity can afford ecological disruption. We use design interventions in a Stockholm allotment garden as our example, where prototypes created as habitat elements for newts also provoked human curiosity, connections to gardening traditions, and multispecies activity. We argue that design should prioritize attunement, ambiguity, and divergence over mastery or harmony, thus supporting new forms of cohabitation within the constraints of urban life.