It sets out how creative practices can stimulate action towards socially and ecologically sustainable futures. There are four curated paths leading through the Framework – Research, Policy, Creative Practice and Funding – each offering a collection of resources charting the key concepts and terms, processes, tools for evaluation, and resources for various stages of creative practices.

The CreaTures Framework is the result of three years of intense research and collaboration between creative practitioners, artists, policymakers, funders and others both inside and outside the CreaTures project. We have gathered and analysed 140 creative projects that creative practitioners and interdisciplinary researchers have found transformative. We’ve commissioned 20 experimental artistic productions during which we have experienced, observed and evaluated for their transformational impacts jointly by CreaTures artists and researchers. We have co-created a tool for evaluating creative practices, and how they connect to transformative change. We have ran 20 seminars on art, creative practice and change with practitioners, policymakers and researchers. Insights from these, and many other, creative and research undertakings have been brought together into the CreaTures Framework.

Knowing that we can only invite you to pull on some of the threads of the tangled galaxy that has begun to gravitate around CreaTures, we have tried to compose a story that can best represent the emotions experienced on this journey.

A symphony of choral voices from the meticulous recording of many of the experimental practices that can be found in the CreaTures Co-Laboratory Catalog, the testimonies collected during our face-to-face encounters, along with the records from the CreaTures Festival, this piece just wants to be a brief approach to the hidden gems that we have found without knowing and without expecting it, moving in ways that we did not know we could still experience.

A short film about the motivations, aspirations, joys, and challenges of the CreaTures research project. Enjoy the show 🍿!

And if you just want a small taste of what we have encountered along the way, check out and share this little magic pill 🍬

You can watch the entire experiment at creaturesmessages.org.

So we asked the following researchers in the CreaTures project how they think creative practitioners could make the best use of their key research outcomes. Below are the links to the video recordings of their responses:

• Tuuli Mattelmäki, Aalto University (Open Creative Practice Framework; OCPF)
• Ann Light, Sussex University (Open Creative Practice Framework; OCPF)
• Iryna Zamuruieva, Sniffer (Open Creative Practice Framework; OCPF)
• Markéta Dolejšová,  Aalto University (CreaTures Laboratory)
• Joost Vervoort, Utrecht University (CreaTures Dimensions)
• Lara Huston, Sussex University (CreaTive Pathways)

Messages in a Bottle

To create such a learning space, we devised the following two overall objectives:

• To amplify the voices of creative practitioners, which often hold limited authority in how transformative creative practices are understood, valued, and supported through policy and other related systems and strategies 
• To provide a collective space to share diverse authentic, experiential, and practice-based learning in accessible and engaging ways for peers and the wider audiences

To achieve these, we decided that:

• The learnings must not be didactic and instead be guided by the direct voices of current transformative creative practitioners reflecting on their own experiences, as well as the learnings from the CreaTures project and related literature; 
• The space coalescing these should appeal to the broader audiences, especially those who are currently engaged in or aspiring to engage with transformative creative practices in the future.

OCP Training Guidelines

These led to the reframing of the OCP Training Guidelines, which became the Messages in A Bottle, an online platform that presents a collection of key learnings and experiences of current transformative creative practitioners in the form of short messages; connects each of them with some of the critical research insights from the CreaTures project and beyond, and; provides an avenue for other practitioners to contribute and share their learnings. 

We also decided to use the metaphor of “Messages in A Bottle” as it can be useful for communicating complex ideas in a more relatable manner and making the project easy to remember. The idea of sending messages in a bottle suggests that these practitioners are sending their knowledge and wisdom out into the world, in the hope that it will be found and used by others. The publication of these messages can be seen as a way of sharing learnings with and providing guidance to other practitioners who are interested in pursuing transformative practices. The metaphor can usefully remind creative practitioners of the value of sharing their work, experiences, and insights with others living in different places and temporalities, while encouraging the audience to engage with the ritual of opening and reading the messages, and remember them in ways that are meaningful for them.

So this is what we did

We invited the creative practitioners who directly contributed to – e.g. by showcasing their work, giving a keynote speech, and working as part of the ground staff – and participated in the CreaTures Festival for an individual face-to-face interview, taking advantage of the shared understanding and experience of the project and the festival as the project’s principal engagement “experimental production,” which brought together the project’s various insights, experiences, and outcomes.

In line with the core methodological approach of the CreaTures favouring transdisciplinary, experimental methodologies, we asked the participants to complete a creative pre-interview activity: each to create a hand-written message for future creative practitioners, which was then to be kept in a physical bottle (see Contribute page for the instructions)

Each interview lasted between 30 and 45 minutes and was video-recorded at a place of the participant’s preference. It started with the participant sharing their response to the creative activity, followed by three key questions concerning their current creative practice; journey that has led to their current position, and; CreaTures Festival experience. 

All recordings, including one interview conducted in Spanish, were transcribed in full and reviewed by four researchers to identify the crucial learnings, related CreaTures Dimensions; Creative Pathways, and; CreaTures Resources. In addition, emergent themes from each interview were identified, leading to a total of 34 themes across all interviews. The second review of full interview transcripts guided a comparative analysis of these 34 themes, through which they were revised and their total number was reduced to 10, each with two to three related themes. Informed by the review of literature, the final themes were further interrogated and expanded to result in the Ten Learnings, each corresponding to the ten key themes respectively. Finally, through this winding journey, Messages in A Bottle came to life.

Mesosanctuary is a participatory mural which explores ecological grief and regeneration. Exploring how the Greek μέσος, or “middle” can be a space situated in between grief and hope, the artist DR KITKAT launched an open call in 2022 inviting contributors to enter an intimate 5-step process of co-creation as meditation, where the personal and collective would meet.

Ecological grief can be understood as feelings of loss, anxiety and mourning in response to environmental destruction. These feelings may manifest as a “natural and legitimate response” to a loss of ecosystems, dwellings and livelihoods, or a general sense of species loneliness, a “deep, unnamed sadness” which emerges from the estrangement of humans and non-humans (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018; Kimmerer 2016). In such a setting, what can ecological regeneration look like? How can we world new worlds which offer alternatives?

The Mesosanctuary mural, informed by DIWO (Do It With Others) practices and the Qiyi City Forest Garden in the city of Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province, explores the potentials and contradictions of transforming climate grief into regeneration. Media coverage of the City Forest Garden as an experimental site for new urban ecologies focuses on how only ten of its units are inhabited by humans, while plants, mosquitos and other species thrive. Those who live there, however, describe the joys of living alone in a tropical forest. “The air is good when you wake up in the morning,” a resident explains.  

The 22 Mesosanctuary contributions from around the world represent a diversity of co-creations across mediums, from collage and painting to sculpture and poetry – much like the more-than-human residents of an urban forest garden in a solarpunk future. Dwelling together yet alone, they reveal how loss and celebration are innately intertwined on an earth defined by interdependence.

Mesosanctuary is supported by the CreaTures project and has been launched in association with Art Tech Nature Culture, a global community of practice that connects creative experimenters across disciplines. 🌳✨

We invite you for an experimental walk with the SMEAR II research forest in the historical Hyytiälä forestry field station in Juupajoki. The SMEAR II (Station for Measuring Ecosystem-Atmosphere Relations) is a highly instrumentalized patch of forest equipped with a variety of sensors and other measuring devices to monitor the functioning of trees, soil processes, and their atmospheric interactions. The walk takes place on November 13th, 2022 at 2 pm local time.

During this peer-guided walk, we will explore the local forest and its creatures including trees, plants and squirrels as well as sensors and other data-gathering instruments. We will raise questions about power, values and structural inequalities that shape forests. Following the walk, we will share our observations and sensory impressions as forest stories, using the Feral Map portal. 

🐿️ The hybrid walk can be attended either in person or online, via videoconferencing. To join, send an email to marketa.dolejsova@aalto.fi and andrea.botero@aalto.fi before November 10th, specifying whether you plan to attend physically or online.

If you come by public transport, we can give you a lift from the Orivesi train station, meeting you there at 12:45 pm (a train from Helsinki / Tampere arrives there at 12:36 pm). Those coming directly to Hyytiälä should arrive by 1:45 pm. The address and details for arrival are available here. For those who wish to walk with us remotely, we will provide a Zoom link in advance of the session 🐿️.

The walk is organised by the Open Forest Collective – a multi-disciplinary group of forest-curious creatures of diverse cultural, professional and biological origins – and builds on the Collective’s ongoing experimental inquiry into different forests and more-than-human dataflows. Since 2020, the Collective has organised forest walks in various parts of the world, inviting diverse forest creatures including forest dwellers, Indigenous forest guardians, healers, scientists, data managers, artists, designers, as well as dogs and trees to walk together and share their stories. Through these encounters, the Collective hopes to better understand how various stakeholders make sense of forest; questioning what can constitute a forest dataset, how it can be produced, and by whom. The main aim is to learn how forests and forest data can be produced, thought of and engaged with otherwise – in feral, co-creative ways that consider perspectives of diverse forest creatures and reach beyond techno-solutionist perspectives. Starting from the focus on forest ecosystems, the Open Forest inquiry aims to contribute to the existing critical practice and research addressing eco-social issues in a climate-changing world.

🐲Shedding the Skin🐲

With the 2022 theme Shedding the Skin, the art-design festival sustains its ongoing interest in exploring creative pathways to eco-social transformation, shifting the focus to internal, personal and embodied dimensions of change. How do inner transformations happening within our diverse private ecosystems – our bodies, hearts and minds – matter in the larger context of societal change? Can we, as socially and ecologically entangled individuals, appreciate and better understand our relational co-existence by turning inwards to our personal and, by definition more-than-human, interiors? How can this look and feel in the context of everyday living, working, playing, policy making? 

The festival proposes for critical reflection that to help foster eco-social change, we must embody and become a change ourselves. Through its program, Uroboros 2022 hopes to open a safe space for experimental mingling of human and non-human collaborators to explore how we can live and thrive together in the times of climate change and social segregation. 

🦑 CreaTures offerings to the Uroboros include:

🐍Feral Policy Panel (Lara Houston, Iryna Zamuruieva, Markéta Dolejšová, Ann Light, Julia Lohmann, Marion Lean): https://www.uroboros.design/events/feral-policy-panel/

🐍Design for Relating – Letting Go, Drifting, Making Shifts (Kirsi Hakio, Tuuli Mattelmäki / Aalto): https://www.uroboros.design/events/design-for-relating-letting-go-drifting-making-shifts/

🐍Interspecies Meditation and Sharing Circle (Ruth Catlow / Furtherfield): https://www.uroboros.design/events/the-interspecies-meditation-and-sharing-circle/

🐍The Feral Gift Exchange (Markéta Dolejšová, Danielle Wilde, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Andrea Botero, Iryna Zamuruieva, Ann Light, Felipe G. Gil, Martyna Miller): https://www.uroboros.design/events/the-feral-gift-exchange/

🐍 Walking with Feral Forests, Creatures, Stories (Open Forest Collective, led by Chewie): https://www.uroboros.design/events/walking-with-forest-creatures-and-feral-stories/

🎤🐕 Full festival program & details: https://www.uroboros.design/  

While most of the program happens in Prague, a remote participation at selected events is available as well, via online videoconferencing and streaming platforms. The festival is free-entry, only two specialised events require a participation fee. 

The Uroboros Festival is curated and produced by Markéta Dolejšová, Lenka Hámošová and Michal Kučerák, in collaboration with Tereza Lišková, Denisa Reshef Kera and Enrique Encinas.  

Uroboros Festival 2022, 5.–8. 10. 2022

IG: uroborosfestival

Twitter: @uroboros_design

FB: Uroboros Festival

Youtube: Uroboros festival

The festival is organised in collaboration with the CreaTures (Creative Practices for Transformational Futures) project.

Our creature Markéta Dolejšová took us on a trip into the forest for the Helsinki Design Week’s Pecha Kucha night, speaking about getting lost in relational entanglements and encountering the folly of more-than-human design. Her talk A Tale of More-than-Human Folly questioned the position of more-than-human design as a transformational creative practice, and showed examples of multi-species relating from the Open Forest ExP developed in collaboration with the Open Forest Collective’s member, Chewie 🐺.

Recording of the talk s coming soon!

The Pecha Kucha was organised as part of the Helsinki Design Week’s Cooler Planet program presenting works of Aalto University designers, artists and researchers. The CreaTures showcase at Cooler Planet exhibition is open till October 12th, 2022 – if around, come visit!

📍Aalto Otaniemi Campus, Espoo, Finland (Väre | Floor 2, FK lobby)

A selection of seven experimental productions from the CreaTures Laboratory will be showcased at the Cooler Planet exhibition organised as part of the Helsinki Design Week 2022 🌿🌲🌡️.

The seven CreaTures experimental productions featured at the exhibition are:

🌿The Cooler Planet event:

When: 7.9.–12.10.2022
Where: Väre building in Aalto University campus, Otaniementie 14 – the CreaTures exhibition is located in the FK lobby, at the entrance of the Department of Design (2nd floor)
Opening hours: Mon-Thu 7:45–21:00, Fri 7:45–20:00, Sat 9:00–17:00, Sundays and 10.9. Closed

🎤🦑 The CreaTures showcase will be introduced at the Helsinki Design Week Pecha Kucha Night – join us on Wednesday 07.09.2022, at 6-8 pm, in the Aalto campus. More details and registration are available here.

CreaTures showcase at Cooler Planet web.

More about the wider Cooler Planet exhibition is available here.

The Cooler Planet event is organised as a part of Helsinki Design Week’s official festival programme and a World Circular Economy Forum 2022 (WCEF) side event. Aalto University is also one of the EU’s New European Bauhaus partners.

This year, the CreaTures made generous offerings to the Participatory Design Conference, many of which got accepted 😌. Below is a brief overview of our contributions, with links to open-access papers and presentations:

🍄 Following Seals and Dogs: Experimenting with Personal Dimensions of Transformative Design 🐕💨
Exploratory paper by Kirsi Hakio, Markéta Dolejšová, Tuuli Mattelmäki, Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi, Cristina Ampatzidou | 📅 Online, 25th August 2022

Present eco-social crises call for transformative design practices, which include personal dimensions of transformation and self-reflection. This paper builds on ongoing discussions in participatory design about personal transformation and its impact on broader societal change. The paper presents two reflective accounts of transformative encounters with creative practices, to explore how to better understand and nurture personal transformations in participatory design. The common themes emerging from these accounts point to the importance of noticing small events that might seem subtle or mundane at first, but upon reflection, become critical in contributing to personal transformation. The paper argues that the personal dimension of transformative design plays an important role in fostering eco-social change and that self-transformation can be nurtured by creating space for spontaneity, letting-go, shifting of perspectives and trusting emerging elements that unfold beyond our control as designers.

View the full paper here.

🍄 Open Forest: Data, Stories, and Walking-With 🐺🌲
Situated action by Markéta Dolejšová, Andrea Botero, Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi, Cristina Ampatzidou | 📅 Newcastle, hybrid, 30th August 2022

Open Forest is a collective, experimental inquiry into different forests and more-than-human dataflows. The project explores how forests and forest data can be produced, thought of and engaged with otherwise, in co-creative ways that consider perspectives of diverse forest creatures and reach beyond techno-solutionist perspectives. In Newcastle we will take an experimental, hybrid walk in the Ouseburn area followed by a co-creation of forest stories, following on our previous walks in other forests around the world. Through these engagements, we hope to entangle the existing, mostly quantitative forest datasets with more messy, abstract data to question the currently available understandings about the forest as a resource to be used.

Full paper is available here.

🍄On Participative Intimacies and Other Invisible Achievements 🌟
Keynote by Ann Light | 📅 Newcastle, hybrid, 1st September

Participatory design is subtle, with a focus on process and an intrinsic collaborative orientation that leaves traces only in the quality of its outcomes. While civilizations are judged on their rich architectures and artifacts, structures for negotiation and co-creation may be entirely invisible. Yet our work hinges on these mechanisms. What are the fleeting relations that we value so highly but rarely see captured or conserved? And how might a greater understanding of the feeling of being-part-of-something hold secrets for urgent transformations in society? This talk addresses the crafting of encounter, from invitation, through action to reflection, and explores what years of engaging with such details might tell us, not just about the creation of better artifacts, but of the relations that support life and flourishing at a time of planetary upheaval. It draws on work on CreaTures as well as other projects addressing eco-social futures and asks what traces of process we might want to leave and why.

🍄Feasting on Participatory Methodologies for Regenerative Food Transitions 🍲🥕 Workshop by the Feeding Food Futures network: Markéta Dolejšová, Danielle Wilde, Hilary Davis, Ferran Altarriba Bertran | 📅 Helsinki, hybrid, 27th September 2022

Human engagements with and through food are essential to the health of more-than-human communities and present a key opportunity to foster positive eco-social transitions. The 21st-century global food system is largely driven by the dominant ethos of extractivist capitalism. Many human-food practices in this system are troubling: the ways that people produce, transport, eat, and dispose of food are destabilising local and planetary ecosystems; contributing to the biodiversity loss and declining health of humans and non-humans alike. Food practices, and the entangled web of social, cultural, ecological and economic relations within which they exist, thus need careful attention.

Full paper is available here.

The workshop Feasting on Participatory Methodologies for Regenerative Food Transitions brings together food-oriented researchers, practitioners and others who use participatory and co-design (PD) methods to collectively envisage how we may leverage co-creative methodologies to meaningfully respond to food-related 21st century concerns. In the workshop, we will share, feast on, and digest our existing methodological practices, with the objective to enrich each other’s work and co-construct a firmer methodological foundation for participatory food design and research. 

The CreaTures festival in Seville hosted a lively Pecha Kucha-style introduction of the experimental productions (ExPs) that were delivered by their authors.

Contributions by:

• Felipe Gil (Commonspoly)
• Markéta Dolejšová (Open Forest)
• Isabel Beavers (Nocturne)
• Ruth Catlow (The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025)
• Sonja Nielsen (Sustainable Futures Game)
• Markéta Dolejšová (Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Food Futures)
• Genevieve Rudd (Yarmouth Springs Eternal)
• Michal Mitro (Open Urban Forest)
• Martyna Miller (View from the Window)
• Josefina Buschmann & Daniela Camino (Fallen Clouds)
• Taro Knopp (MyCoBiont)

The Understories is a loose and messy collection of tales bringing to light unseen, yet critical conversations that make a research project alive.

Designed by Super Eclectic studio & published with love in 2022.

Free pdf available here / printed copy available upon request (creatures@aalto.fi).

During the 15-minute sound performance, the DIY electronic sound instrument will transform the signal from mycelia inside the self-sustainable globes with local plants and fungi, which are the integral parts of ml-iso|la|ti|o|nis|mus art installation. Symbiotic organisms will be connected with electronic devices in a way that allows the technology to be incorporated into an organic circle of information. OctoSens is a multi-sensory interface and digital sound synthesiser. Data on the mycelial conductivity information, which comes from the electrodes inside the mycelial body, will be used to manipulate several aspects of sound. Multiple oscillators produce a low-frequency ‘square’ signal, which will result in an organic-sounding drone that changes the sound texture, but also turns on the synthesiser in chosen interesting rhythms.

Led by Taro Knopp, Nastja Ambrožič, Eva Debevc / Production: Kersnikova Institute / OctoSens: Osmo/za, Jakob Grčman

The festival is open to all and will be of particular interest to people in the creative sector, government, industry, research as well as anyone interested in exploring how creative practices can contribute to socio-ecological transformation.

The festival will be officially opened by the Mayor of Seville, Antonio Muñoz Martínez, on Wednesday 29 June 2022 at 18:15 at the Real Fábrica de Artillería.

See the full program and register to attend here.

Climate collapse is forcing us all to rethink our practices, from our daily habits through to coordinated intergovernmental action. Yet to create a shared sense of urgency and motivation, we also need to establish integrative approaches to transform how we live together on the planet, which in turn depend on our cultures, value systems and world views.

While policymakers on all levels of government talk about natural resources management, ecosystem services as well as land use planning and biodiversity conservation, creative practitioners and social scientists use terms such as more-than-human, nature-cultures and feral. 

This panel brought together both groups to provide a space to rethink relationships between humans and the other species and ecosystems on our shared planet. 

Panelists reflected on how moving away from anthropocentric thinking and understanding nature as “out there” can change the way institutions work and what policies are made. Possible leverage points and spaces for translating feral and more-than-human thinking into action were also explored: parliamentary processes, national & regional governmental processes; organisational policies, strategies and plans. 

The panel was be moderated by Ann Light, Professor of Design & Creative Technology (Engineering and Design) School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, who also introduced the CreaTures project and ongoing work on the transformative potential of creative practice. 

Watch the event recording here (link coming soon)

Speakers:

🌿 The nineteenth CreaTures and Friends seminar will take place on

May 17th, 2022, 12:00-13:00 CEST 🌿

Creative Carbon Scotland spent nine months working with the staff and board of Creative Scotland, Scotland’s development agency for the arts, screen and creative industries, to write a Climate Emergency & Sustainability Plan. Ben Twist will outline the process, the outcome and what it might mean for the creative and cultural sectors in Scotland.

Participation is open to everyone but registration is required. To join, please fill in your details in the registration form and we will email you the link a day ahead of the seminar. 

The seminar will be recorded for archiving and research purposes; by joining the session you consent to the recording. Please read the Participation Information Sheet and Privacy Notice. CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.

🌿 The eighteenth CreaTures and Friends seminar will take place on

May 3rd, 2022, 12:00-13:00 CEST 🌿

Through a series of open calls, CreaTures has commissioned five new Experimental Productions. The aim of these calls was to enable smaller organisations and/or individuals to participate in the co-creative activities of the research project, by contributing site-specific, small scale projects. This seminar is an opportunity for the creative practitioners that have recently joined the CreaTures family to present their practice and ongoing work. 

Pixelache – Andrew Gryf Paterson

Pixelache Helsinki is a Finland-based creative association on emerging creative practices with almost 20 years of activity, engaging issues in electronic arts and subcultures, eco-social and technological transformation, with a dynamic community that has produced an annual festival with various formats. This presentation will share our attempts this Spring to consider Pixelache Helsinki’s parallel organisational transformations, engaging with that which remains in our office, using memory recall and narratives towards an audio fanzine.

Yarmouth Springs Eternal project – Genevieve Rudd

Yarmouth Springs Eternal is a community arts, walking and nature project, instigated and led by community artist Genevieve Rudd. The project celebrates and connects with everyday or overlooked aspects of the natural world, whilst recognising the inequality of access to natural spaces, and challenging definitions of ‘nature’

Visual trace to establish relation – View from the Window and DOMIE: Martyna Miller

Project View from the Window is a participatory process involving neighbors whose windows overlook DOMIE. DOMIE is a ruin, for four years becoming an engaged cultural center. The building looks like a small home in between tall, older tenements around. When photographed from above, due to the unusual shape of the roof, it visually resembles the first photograph ever taken by Nicephore Niepce in Le Gras (France). By playing with this visual connotation, I invite neighbors to evolve the feeling of something dear and beautiful, connected to memories and storytelling, and by this – slowly search for a sense of belonging and caretaking.

The Fallen Clouds – Josefina Buschmann, Daniela Camino

Josefina Buschmann and Daniela Camino will present the ongoing creative process of THE FALLEN CLOUDS, a speculative research-based project that delves into the socio-environmental impacts of digital infrastructures in Chile to break the great myth of cloud computing. The narrative follows a digital cloud searching for its body and origin extended among submarine cables in La Serena, data centers in Santiago, and minerals in the Atacama salt flat. On the journey it becomes entangled with human and more-than-human beings; socio-environmental conflicts; past, present, and future myths.

Open Urban Forest – Michal Mitro

Michal Mitro of ssesi.space will present the practical and conceptual background of the layered artistic research taking place in and about nature-reclaimed community garden in Brno, Czech Republic. Stacks, more-than-human actants, hyperobjects, as well as bees, retired gardeners and bonfires are all on the menu.

Participation is open to everyone but registration is required. To join, please fill in your details in the registration form and we will email you the link a day ahead of the seminar. 

The seminar will be recorded for archiving and research purposes; by joining the session you consent to the recording. Please read the Participation Information Sheet and Privacy Notice. CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.