Connections to eco-social sustainability:

The methods that the Re.imaginary collective have gathered, designed and adapted are intended to spark alternative paradigms and mindsets. These help us to begin from where we are, by recognising and working on our own assumptions and worldviews (as part of a process of ‘inner transformation’ involving deep reflexivity). At the same time, creative methods can also help to generate inclusive spaces for group work, where others can be invited to participate equitably in the process of developing new forms of knowledge and action for sustainability.

“We want to support holistic and integrated ways of learning and knowing, opening the floor for different ways of creating knowledge, drawing from Indigenous perspectives, experiential learning, somatic embodied ways of knowing and sensing, but also the emotional side of producing knowledge – which is important and so many times dismissed. We have found that creative methods and Theory U processes can help us achieve that.” Angela Moriggi, Re.imaginary project

Creative methods can provide a welcoming platform to weave together these different ways of knowing, contributing to the aim of a truly trans-disciplinary and pluralistic sustainability science.

Transformative creative practice:

The Re.imaginary project has prioritised methods meant to evoke transformative mindsets –  new frames that help to direct and motivate people towards sustainability transformations. Transformative mindsets can be activated by new ways of seeing, sensing, feeling, and envisioning the world. These allow us to imagine and to experience a level of emotional connectedness and care for other beings that other ways of knowing may not. They challenge the anthropocentric worldviews and mindsets that we often carry with us and that shape our everyday actions.

“We try to understand issues from the perspective of other beings, and by doing so we enlarge our horizons. We enlarge our perspectives – not only to try to understand what an ant, or an eagle, or a bear would think of a certain situation – but also, to become more empathetic with other humans.” Angela Moriggi

An important aspect of the Re.imaginary website is that methods and resources are made  visible and usable for everyone. Each method is complemented by specific instructions, allowing people to experiment with them, as well as highlighting their importance as a wider strand of thought and action. The website encourages and enables translations – across different creative fields, into sustainability science (and beyond!). The development of the resources – and communities around the resources – also creates playful spaces where the direction of sustainability science can be (co-)creatively re-visioned.

On learning and evaluation:

Evaluation has been an important part of the events that the ReImaginary team have organised to promote the resource collection. They have been gathering feedback from education, research, collaboration and dissemination events. Iterative learning and evaluation is an active research topic within the team, currently developing new frameworks.

“What we really like to do is to create meaningful processes…not just to use creative methods because they are cool… inserting them here and there. Creativity is really tied into every step of the way. It’s really about the processes and not each specific method.”  Angela Moriggi

Learn more:

Visit the website at: https://www.reimaginary.com/

Pearson, K. R. (2021). Imaginative leadership: A conceptual frame for the design and facilitation of creative methods and generative engagement. In A. Franklin (Ed.), Co-creativity and engaged scholarship: Transformative methods in social sustainability research. Palgrave-Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84248-2

Moriggi A. (2021). An ethos and practice of appreciation for transformative research: Appreciative Inquiry, care ethics, and creative methods. In A. Franklin (Ed.) Co-creativity and engaged scholarship. Transformative methods in social sustainability research. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84248-2

Watch the Repositories event on the CreaTures YouTube channel, featuring Kelli Rose Pearson talking about the Re.imaginary website as a repository of transformative methods.

Project credits:

The Re.imaginary team includes Kelli Rose Pearson, Angela Moriggi, Siri Pisters, Anke De Vrieze, Sara Grenni, Marta Nieto Romero.

Partners include: SUSPLACE, RECOMS, Economic Transformations Group, Orca Song Institute, Sustainability Atelier, The Centre for Space, Place and Society, Imaginative Disruptions, ParCentra and Jan van Boeckel.

Reference works like dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauri usually give an elite group of experts the authority to assign meanings to words, even though language is a dynamic social thing. The Glossary thinks of language as belonging to no one in particular and to everyone at the same time. Anyone can participate, and there are several public invitations to do so. 

The Glossary author, artist Amira Hanafi, brings a radical understanding of “common” to the project. They understand language, as part of the commons, as a site where displays of power are continuously produced and contested. Rather than produce fixed definitions, the Glossary distributes power to define language throughout the community or collective that interacts with it. 

The Glossary tools – games, a website, workshops, and person-to-person interactions – capture the drama of everyday acts of linguistic co-creation. These tools are built to facilitate and document continuous linguistic interaction: Meaning becomes plural and fluid, and the lexicon is constantly changing. The tools are also metaphors, which enact some of the processes of change that the lexicon is meant to describe.

The website includes open-source, real-time text editors and games that request input from users who can contribute words or definitions, edit existing ones, or remove definitions entirely. Every contribution is meticulously documented via a real-time database, and users can witness each other making meaning simultaneously. Equally important, histories of these interactions remain freely accessible to any user on the site. The database feeds into the interconnected parts of the site, creating a hidden web of linguistic interaction that resembles real-life language acts. The website makes these interactions visible, which under other conditions might remain hidden.

The games that exist on the site are also played in a hands-on public program. The project has included a series of co-creative workshops (all held online and facilitated via Zoom). These include a Glossary workshop organised at the Uroboros 2021 festival as part of the CreaTures Feral track (May 2021), a workshop organised in the context of the CreaTures Plenary including researchers from the CreaTures team (September 2021), and a workshop with a group of experts in climate change and sustainability organized by RMIT Europe (November 2021). Three additional workshops took place in April 2022, inviting diverse public audiences including high school students.

Glossary functionalities

Build vocabulary: A game played in workshops and on the website, adapted from the Rapid Word Collection method developed by linguist Ron Moe. Moe’s method is intended to assist language communities in capturing the words and meanings of their languages. It uses a series of semantic domains and related questions. This project utilizes the semantic domain of change and associated prompts, such as, “What is a word used to describe a big change?”

The game also generates questions that align with the research aims of the CreaTures project, about the practices, tools, feelings, and impacts associated with transformational change. The terms generated by the online game feed into the Playground feature of the site – a free space where users can organize words and create word communities, which later appear elsewhere on the site as ‘related terms.’ Users can click on words in the communities to navigate through the glossary. The user-generated vocabularies can also be read as short narratives.

Interview with a word: This game asks players to become words, to embody and speak as them. When played in person-to-person interaction, an interviewer asks the word questions, becoming a collaborator in making meaning. In digital play, the computer asks interview questions selected from an array of questions that were developed during interpersonal play.

Print the glossary: A function to allow users to produce a text version of the glossary, containing definitions as they exist on the site at a particular moment. The glossary is open, fluid and changeable, both in its definitions and in the set of terms that it defines.

Real-time collaborative text-editing: The website dynamically produces a real-time collaborative text editor for each term that is added to the platform. Users can see the existing definition for a term; they can also choose an ‘edit’ button that allows them to add to, change, or erase part or all of the existing definition. For users who are hesitant to disturb existing text, a simple input box asking, “What does this term mean to you?” offers a straightforward, additive way to make a contribution.  

The CreaTures Glossary is a set of tools for giving meaning to a lexicon of terms related to creative practice and transformational change. The project includes games, a website, workshops, and other interactions that facilitate language as a social practice. The Glossary aims to give meaning to a lexicon that is particular to the field of creative practice and eco-social transformation, but which might also work more broadly to describe transformational change. In the CreaTures project, the Glossary has been envisioned as a compilation of key terms and processes that could aid with creating better understandings through the use of a common language.

Reference works like dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauri usually give an elite group of experts the authority to assign meanings to words, even though language is a dynamic social thing. The Glossary thinks of language as belonging to no one in particular and to everyone at the same time. Anyone can participate, and there are several public invitations to do so. 

The Glossary author, artist Amira Hanafi, brings a radical understanding of “common” to the project. They understand language, as part of the commons, as a site where displays of power are continuously produced and contested. Rather than produce fixed definitions, the Glossary distributes power to define language throughout the community or collective that interacts with it. 

The Glossary tools – games, a website, workshops, and person-to-person interactions – capture the drama of everyday acts of linguistic co-creation. These tools are built to facilitate and document continuous linguistic interaction: Meaning becomes plural and fluid, and the lexicon is constantly changing. The tools are also metaphors, which enact some of the processes of change that the lexicon is meant to describe.

The website includes open-source, real-time text editors and games that request input from users who can contribute words or definitions, edit existing ones, or remove definitions entirely. Every contribution is meticulously documented via a real-time database, and users can witness each other making meaning simultaneously. Equally important, histories of these interactions remain freely accessible to any user on the site. The database feeds into the interconnected parts of the site, creating a hidden web of linguistic interaction that resembles real-life language acts. The website makes these interactions visible, which under other conditions might remain hidden.

The games that exist on the site are also played in a hands-on public program. The project has included a series of co-creative workshops (all held online and facilitated via Zoom). These include a Glossary workshop organised at the Uroboros 2021 festival as part of the CreaTures Feral track (May 2021), a workshop organised in the context of the CreaTures Plenary including researchers from the CreaTures team (September 2021), and a workshop with a group of experts in climate change and sustainability organized by RMIT Europe (November 2021). Three additional workshops took place in April 2022, inviting diverse public audiences including high school students.

Glossary functionalities

Build vocabulary: A game played in workshops and on the website, adapted from the Rapid Word Collection method developed by linguist Ron Moe. Moe’s method is intended to assist language communities in capturing the words and meanings of their languages. It uses a series of semantic domains and related questions. This project utilizes the semantic domain of change and associated prompts, such as, “What is a word used to describe a big change?”

The game also generates questions that align with the research aims of the CreaTures project, about the practices, tools, feelings, and impacts associated with transformational change. The terms generated by the online game feed into the Playground feature of the site – a free space where users can organize words and create word communities, which later appear elsewhere on the site as ‘related terms.’ Users can click on words in the communities to navigate through the glossary. The user-generated vocabularies can also be read as short narratives.

Interview with a word: This game asks players to become words, to embody and speak as them. When played in person-to-person interaction, an interviewer asks the word questions, becoming a collaborator in making meaning. In digital play, the computer asks interview questions selected from an array of questions that were developed during interpersonal play.

Print the glossary: A function to allow users to produce a text version of the glossary, containing definitions as they exist on the site at a particular moment. The glossary is open, fluid and changeable, both in its definitions and in the set of terms that it defines.

Real-time collaborative text-editing: The website dynamically produces a real-time collaborative text editor for each term that is added to the platform. Users can see the existing definition for a term; they can also choose an ‘edit’ button that allows them to add to, change, or erase part or all of the existing definition. For users who are hesitant to disturb existing text, a simple input box asking, “What does this term mean to you?” offers a straightforward, additive way to make a contribution.