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!

You can find more about the report and read it here:

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. 

Their presentation Walking in the open forest: Playing with stories and data takes place on Friday 29th April, 13:25 – 14:30 EEST. Conference entry is free, so you can stop by easily. The full conference program is available here 👀.

Abstract:

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 playful ways that consider perspectives of diverse forest creatures and reach beyond geo-engineering, techno-solutionist perspectives. In practice, the project consists of experimental forest walks followed by a co-creation of forest stories. Through these playful activities, we hope to entangle existing forests datasets with data that question and obscure the currently collected and available – mostly quantitative – insights about various forests. Our goal is to support collective imagination and care-full sustainability actions towards flourishing more-than-human futures.

Full downloadable PDF is available in the Pivot 2021 conference proceedings.

Abstract:

Creative practices have a role in mediating and supporting concrete, meaningful actions towards sustainability transformations. With this in mind: What are the possibilities and limits of the tools and resources that contemporary creative practices are using to reconceive and redesign forms of interaction between different disciplines, audiences and cultures for sustainability transformations? This contribution presents preliminary findings from a transdisciplinary workshop where the participants were invited to share their experiences of designing or using “tools and resources for feral ways of knowing and transformation” within creative practice. While the concept of “feral” remained open to a wide range of different interpretations, participants used the term in two main ways: to foreground embodied, situated, bottom-up, ways of working with organic material and more-than-human issues that require relinquishing control, and; to refer to reappropriating existing tools and processes in ways and for purposes different to the original intentions. We look at the transformational possibilities of these feral tools and resources, and their feral uses in terms of 1) Enabling the shared imagining of sustainability transformations, 2) Proposing concrete actions toward sustainability transformations, and 3) Expanding meanings and feelings.

Full citation:

Cristina Ampatzidou, Markéta Dolejšová, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi and Andrea Botero Cabrera. 2022. Feral Ways Of Knowing And Doing: Tools And Resources For Transformational Creative Practice. Proceedings of the Pivot 2021 virtual conference, OCAD University, July 22-23, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0016

Key Insights

→ There is an urgent need to better understand, care for, and imagine forest futures.
→ The Open Forest project is a journey of collective, experimental inquiry into different forests and other-than-human dataflows.
→ It is important to encourage the questioning of existing forest data, how it is produced, and by whom through performative drifting across space-times.

Discussing themes in transformative creative practice, eco-social sustainability, and scaling of relational networks, the paper brings together three CreaTures ExPs: The Hologram, the Commonspoly, and the Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures.

A short presentation & abstract are available below; the full paper (open access) can be downloaded here.

Abstract

“We discuss three cases of transformative creative practice that aim to address large-scale societal issues related to the climate emergency by taking a series of interconnected, small-scale actions. Drawing on our first-hand perspectives, we reflect on how the cases address such issues by proliferating across different social contexts and supporting creative engagements of diverse stakeholders. We offer this empirical reflection at a time of rapid social and ecological change that has affected all life on the planet. Eco-social challenges and structural inequalities caused by shifts in global economic, political and technological power require new approaches and transformative actions to stabilize and restore ecosystems on which life depends. Our research shows that creative practice in art and design has a critical role to play in these processes of transformation. By discussing the opportunities and challenges encountered by our three cases within their transformative efforts and analyzing how they proliferate across diverse scales, we aim to expand the emerging scholarship on the transformative potential of creative practice.”

Two creatures Anab Jain (Superflux) and Julia Lohmann (Aalto University) were featured on the ARTE documentary The Power of Design (Design ist niemals unschulding in German). It was directed by Reinhild Dettmer-Fink as a collaboration between ZDF/ARTE and Kobalt Documentary.

🌿 Read more:
https://gettotext.com/the-power-of-design-on-arte-its-political-and-ecological-issues/
https://www.baumeister.de/arte-dokumentation-design-ist-niemals-unschuldig/

The Feeding Food Futures collective just published their More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook 🥕🍕🌱.

The cookbook contains eleven experimental food futures recipes that aim to provoke imagination and inspire critical thinking on how human-food practices could be different, supporting sustainable flourishing.

From a picnic meal reimagining the human body as a resource to slug-driven food governance, the recipes capture co-creative thought experiments of 33 contributors who came together for the two-day workshop Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures held online in July 2020.

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.

“We both believe that radical change must start with the self, and that we are not singular but holobionts, a coalescence of animals and other living things. In this column, we have both responded to the matter of global mobilities from the perspective of our everyday lives, focusing on what time and movement mean to each of us now.”

Full text of the Movement, Time, and Space, Two Ways is available in the the ACM Interactions magazine.

Join the conversation:  #GlobalMobilities #LocalMovements #TheCo #InteractionsMag

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.

“Digital food technologies carry promise for better food futures but they are often problematic in their impact on food systems and cultures. While proponents suggest that food-tech products such as smart kitchenware or diet personalisation services can support efficient food practices, critics highlight various risks. This paper presents our findings from Edible Speculations, a long-term design research project exploring the contested space of food-tech innovation through a series of speculative design (SD) events situated in everyday public contexts. We illustrate the opportunities and limits of eventful SD in supporting critical engagements with food-tech issues through an Edible Speculations case study called the Parlour of Food Futures. Our discussion of selected Parlour events can inform readers interested in food-tech themes as well as those keen on experimenting with eventful approaches to SD research.”

🥦 🍍🌶️ Full article to read & digest available here

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.

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.

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.

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.

Did you know Furtherfield has a podcast series called News from Where We Are?

Hear more about their Treaty of Finsbury Park via: https://soundcloud.com/furtherfield/news-from-where-we-are-1

Upon the decision to postpone The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 due to the pandemic in 2020, Furtherfield wrote a concept paper.

Read more: https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/finsbury-park-2025