In dialogue with the more-than-human: affective prefiguration in encounters with others

I am talking about practices that give people the chance to feel differently. Not only the chance to feel different, but to feel relationships that are not ubiquitously available at present. I am calling this affective prefiguration. We have seen the idea of prefiguration enter design, related to prefigurative politics. Carl DiSalvo championed it (2016) and there is inspiring work now from, for instance, Mariam Asad and Alix Gerber. Prefiguration is commonly understood, in its political form, as enacting the change one wants to see. Much of this thinking has concerned itself with alternative and progressive organizational structures – new economies, different legal systems, regenerative care facilities – emerging in niches and created as part of social movements determined to do better. Sometimes the new structures become absorbed; others persist as alternatives and some exist only as long as needed to make a point. These structures and the imaginaries that accompany them are what Davina Cooper has called everyday utopias (2014). They leave a legacy, giving us something to aspire to: a direction of travel. In ways akin to utopian science fiction, they present us with a hopeful but practical vision. Even those that fail to take hold signal how difference could arise. Graeber and Wengrow’s colossal book “The Dawn of Everything” (2021) presents, in this spirit, the diverse ways the anthropologist/archaeologist authors believe people configured their societies in prehistory – making a manifesto on the mutability of political structure by showing both variation in societal framework and the processes for negotiating it.</p

More-than-human participatory approaches for design: method and function in making relations

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Make friends not art: mapping law, power and participation in designing an online platform during documenta fifteen

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Enacting entanglement: CreaTures, socio-technical collaboration and designing a transformative ethos

What happens when we try to enact theory in our practices of collaboration? The CreaTures project spent three years exploring the challenges of conceptualising and enacting entanglement in using creative practice to try and change worldviews towards understandings of interdependence. Acknowledging the backdrop to our work as pressing ecological breakdown, we sought to practice the cultural change we hoped to inspire. We discuss what we learnt about the socio-technical aspects of cooperation in managing entangled engagement as a methodological, as well as ontological, position. We centre this on a case study of how digital technology became a factor in both helpful and surprising ways during the project in response to the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper concludes with reflections on how taking the spatial metaphor of entanglement, rather than scale, has helped us understand agency in our work. In discussing this transdisciplinary project as part of CSCW scholarship, we hope to open a space for questioning dominant techno-economic values and show how alternative philosophy can be enacted in practice in supporting transformation to a different design ethos.</p

9 dimensions for evaluating how art and creative practice stimulate societal transformations

There is an urgent need to engage with deep leverage points in sustainability transformations—fundamental myths, paradigms, and systems of meaning making—to open new collective horizons for action. Art and creative practice are uniquely suited to help facilitate change in these deeper transformational leverage points. However, understandings of how creative practices contribute to sustainability transformations are lacking in practice and fragmented across theory and research. This lack of understanding shapes how creative practices are evaluated and therefore funded and supported, limiting their potential for transformative impact. This paper presents the 9 Dimensions tool, created to support reflective and evaluative dialogues about links between creative practice and sustainability transformations. It was developed in a transdisciplinary process between the potential users of this tool: researchers, creative practitioners, policy makers, and funders. It also brings disciplinary perspectives on societal change from evaluation theory, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and more in connection with each other and with sustainability transformations, opening new possibilities for research. The framework consists of three categories of change, and nine dimensions: changing meanings (embodying, learning, and imagining); changing connections (caring, organizing, and inspiring); and changing power (co-creating, empowering, and subverting). We describe how the 9 Dimensions tool was developed, and describe each dimension and the structure of the tool. We report on an application of the 9 Dimensions tool to 20 creative practice projects across the European project Creative Practices for Transformational Futures (CreaTures). We discuss user reflections on the potential and challenges of the tool, and discuss insights gained from the analysis of the 20 projects. Finally, we discuss how the 9 Dimensions can effectively act as a transdisciplinary research agenda bringing creative practice further in contact with transformation research.</p