Caring through: Engaging with temporality of care in more-than-human design

Care is a political and ethical everyday practice with nested processes and relationships. In more-than-human design, care is a practice that allows a deep engagement with time and temporality. Existing terms such as caring for and about fall short in accounting for this engagement by not bringing to the fore the diverse temporal frames embedded in care relations and the fluidity of agency between caregiver and receiver roles. This paper provides a typology informed by different kinds of care based on engagement with time and labor, such as caring for, about, and through. Specifically, we contribute caring through as a concept emphasizing the role of more-than-human temporality in care practice. Caring through accounts for plural engagements with time, the interdependence between caregiver and care receiver, and mediated aspects of care where care becomes making time for the other.