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 🍬

The ExPs were experienced, observed and evaluated for their transformational impacts jointly by CreaTures artists and researchers. Drawing on these insights, the CreaTures project has investigated how to make the richness and vital importance of transformational creative practices more visible to policymakers, funders and other powerful decision-makers.

The Catalogue is a free, open-access publication accessible as a pdf (December 2022) and soon also in print (April 2023).

Enjoy the reading!

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)

“Visitors will see an approximation of a domestic space of a single person, living in North America, isolating during the COVID-19 pandemic. Artifacts in the room gently narrate this person’s growing attention to health and care and their desire to disentangle from racial capitalism, as well as the tools that allowed them to begin to practice The Hologram alongside other mutual-aid initiatives and activist experiments in care.”

Cummings Center for the History of Psychology

The exhibition will be on display until October 2nd 2022, and is a part of the 2022 FRONT Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, titled Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows. Find out more here.

In Symbiosis: Sculpting the Art of Living Together, Los Angeles based artists “take inspiration from sources such as the ocean, animal exoskeletons, and the human body to challenge the way these disciplines intersect and unite through technology”. Nocturne honours the ocean through a multimedia installation incorporating audio, audio-reactive visuals, and light sculptures.

Find out more about the exhibition here, and about Isabel Beaver‘s Nocturne here.

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

On June 16th, The Hologram film was launched to conclude Fonderie Darling’s exhibition Feedback #6: Marshall McLuhan and the arts.

Also this week, Cassie Thornton ran a workshop with 16 people to discover the history and reasoning behind the practice of the Hologram, as well as the opportunity to experience it together. Find out more about the film launch here, and Cassie’s workshop here.

Isabel Beavers presented her Nocturne project at The Uncertainty of Rain exhibition organised by the Creative Impact Lab Amman, Jordan.

The Uncertainty of Rain is a hybrid exhibition of project prototypes developed by Creative Impact Lab Amman participants during an artist exchange. The works use sculpture, video, and projection mapping to speculate on the future of water and adaptation to the effects of climate change in Jordan in the broader region.

Creative Impact Lab Amman (2022) is a ZERO1 international exchange supported by U.S. Embassy Amman and hosted by IDare for Sustainable Development.