For our Finnish speaking friends, head to 1hr 20 to listen to Tuuli’s talk in the YouTube link below ✨🎧✨

At Earth Systems Governance Conference 2022, Joost Vervoort facilitated a panel discussion – The value of creative practices for sustainability transformations – a dialogue about art, power and change between researchers, governing actors, and artists.

The program included insightful presentations about the Treaty of Finsbury Park LARP by Ruth Catlow, Open Forest by Marketa Dolejšová, and Baltic Sea Lab by Julia Lohmann.

🐲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 chief creature Tuuli Mattelmäki gave a Designer Talk at the Design Museum, Helsinki, as part of the Design for Everybody exhibition programme.

Tuuli has done pioneering research on design probes. In the Väinö project carried out at the beginning of the 2000s, she aimed to examine how design probes could be used to gain an understanding of the everyday life of the elderly, and thus to design better environments, aids and services for them. The Väinö project is on display in the Identity room of the Design for Everybody Exhibition.

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!

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. 

In this talk, Jaz Choi shared experiences and learnings from CreaTures and reflected on what it means to do design research together in relation to RMIT’s newly formed group, Design for Social Innovation (DSI), at The RMIT School of Design Research Seminar Series.

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)

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.

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:

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.

Abstract (SP):

CreaTures – Creatives Practices for Transformational Futures (CreaTures – Prácticas Creativas para Futuros Transformadores) es un proyecto de investigación que explora el poder transformador de las prácticas creativas para desplazar los mundos actuales hacia futuros ecosocialmente sostenibles. CreaTures, que nació hace 3 años (2020-2022), reúne un consorcio interdisciplinar de profesionales creativos e investigadores del mundo del arte, el diseño y las Ciencias Sociales, estructurado alrededor de una serie de producciones experimentales (ExPs: proyectos cocreativos que tienen como objetivo apoyar procesos transformadores sostenibles). La charla se enfocará en el trabajo en curso en torno al codesarrollo y evaluación de los ExPs, y se mostrarán ejemplos de proyectos concretos.

More details at the conference website: Nudos. Jornadas Magallanes ICC para pensar arte, ciencia, tecnología y sostenibilidad

Watch the event recording here. You can find out more information on the openCOP event here, and can read about The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 here.

Markéta Dolejšová will present CreaTures project and the Laboratory activities at the Nudos, Jornadas Magallanes ICC para pensar arte, ciencia, tecnología y sostenibilidad event in Seville on Oct 26^th.

Online program & more details here; LINK 🐕