In response to a modernist optimistic path that has typically colonised narratives of addressing climate change, this paper ex- plores and proposes a prototypical pedagogy that aims to unlearn privileges and restore a sense of commitment and involvement in the unfolding future among the public. In our articulations of this prototypical pedagogy, we trace and reappropriate pedagogies of collective learning within participatory design in combination with contemporary discourses around the affective dimensions of climate change. The prototypical pedagogy is explored through a design- erly study circle in future orienteering that was designed to situate the transition to post-carbon futures within specific locations, en- vironments, and lived experiences. To support reorientations and explorations of alternatives to the familiar modernist path, a guid- ing principle was to foreground objects, values, and imaginaries that are often overlooked in current accounts of climate change and to activate grief and hope as both practical and conceptual orienteering devices.

How to imagine other kinds of world-making when there is a loss of species; livelihoods are threatened, and lives are on the line? Stoddard et al. (2021) note that there is a lack of social imaginaries. Critical, creative practices act in a tradition of responding to complex questions by turning them into embodied inquiries and opportunities to imagine how things could be otherwise (Mareis and Paim 2021; DiSalvo 2022). The project Un/Making Pollination is a designerly response to the twofolded lack of pollinators and imagination. It is an exploration on how to approach more liveable feminist futures by relationship building across species, with a focus on plant-pollinator-human relationships. The authors give a critical account of choices in the creation of a series of posters and hand pollination tools as feminist methods of opening ecosocial imaginaries. These feminist ways of knowing and worlding are also methods of inquiring, making, giving form, using senses, connecting temporalities, spaces and bodies, getting attracted, lured in and touched by the making and unmaking of biodiversity. We articulate and perform references of feminist methods for combining knowledge production with everyday life that can contribute to imagining otherworlds.

In the project Grief and Hope in Transition, our approach to transition has been one of reorientation, a departure from the belief in new technologies as the solution to all kinds of problems, an attempt at deviation from modernity’s familiar territories and road maps. Together with people living in different rural areas in Sweden’s southern most landscape Scania, we formed a study group in future orienteering.

This book is an outcome of the collaborative work done to explore how to transition into becoming fossil-free and how to let go of optimism that places agency elsewhere (such as in others' roadmaps and tech-fixes). It describes how we through designerly ways have addressed the challenge of how to restore a sense of attachments and commitment to the unfolding of the future.

A designer is somebody who points, who designates, and gives directions. Design thereby has a direction into the future. What directions are designers pointing out if design is coupled with posthumanism? Posthumanism has come into being in a landscape of both ideas and design. That which has previously been designed and produced is coming back and it can help us point out harmful inequalities if we sharpen our observational tools and concepts.

“An Emerging Posthumanist Design Landscape” is an overflowing designated area for examples and thinking on compositions of design and critical posthumanism. It is a landscape in the making, yet scarred by previous design cultures and histories. As design researchers operating out of Scandinavian academia, we invite readers/travelers to meander through an emerging hybrid landscape and to make a few selected stops at the sites of our own recent design interventions. We articulate concepts, frictions, and opportunities sprouted in a sprawling and increasingly populated landscape of design and posthumanism. Posthumanist thinking questions and recharges fundamental design concepts and methods/approaches, e.g.: Who are the actors of posthumanist design? Where does it take place? What do we design? What materials do we use? How do we work? When does design take place? Why are compositions of design and critical posthumanism important undertakings? The responses to these questions sketch trajectories for further travels and the co-creation of an emerging posthumanist design landscape.

The Swedish government has decided that Sweden will become carbon neutral by 2045. What are the implications for us as citizens in such a transition? What formats allow us to favour careful transformation over progress through radical innovation? In this paper, we attempt to understand grief and hope in the context of this transition. We describe a designerly format of re-production and translation aimed at collectively working through potential future changes, uncertainties and loss. Influenced by plaster moulding techniques used at a closed-down pottery, we invite participants to reproduce and translate original animal and plant motifs into present circumstances. These practical hands-on engagements allow us to notice and articulate change in relation to the past and orient ourselves towards uncertain futures. Hope can be found in the ruins of industries, in locally produced alternative energies and in small-scale attempts to undo biodiversity loss.

This chapter will outline what we label ‘collaborative future-making’ (CFM), which can be understood as an interplay between critical imagination and collaborative engagements in future-making processes. Using critical imagination to break out of (imagined) political and scholarly deadlocks is an important theme within collaborative future-making. Imagining should not be confused, however, with an abstract practice. Instead, critical imagination links directly to forms of participation and engagement. Collaborative engagement concerns how we can work together. At the centre is an ethos of democratizing processes of change, that is, to acknowledge people’s skills and rights to influence their everyday environments. This approach should be understood as a shift from engaging with the future through forecasting to a concern with how critical imagination can challenge basic assumptions, norms and structures to widen the perspectives on what constitutes socially, culturally, ecologically and economically sustainable futures, engaging not only professionals and policymakers, but also citizens and civil society. This chapter presents opportunities in what we call ‘collaborative future-making’, as well as highlighting the potential problems and challenges in collaborating. This critical perspective is illustrated through a series of empirical examples that combines critical perspectives with constructive and collaborative aspects.

In light of current environmental challenges, it often seems that optimism is a required emotional state for addressing our future. This can be seen in how different technological fixes are assumed to sort our futures out at the same time as requiring minimal change in our daily lives. Moving beyond our existing high-carbon and material lives requires not only that we deal with the optimistic end of the spectrum but also that we envision fragile and uncertain futures. In response, this article proposes a designerly format for supporting public anticipation that attends to and cares for tensions between hope and grief, with the aim of nurturing grounds for living with uncertain futures. In contrast to abstract and decontextualized visions and images of the future that can be hard to relate to, the format situates anticipation in lived futures, that are ongoing, emerging and situated in specific locations, environments and experiences. By tending to anticipated losses related to the transition to a post-carbon future, the workshop format created space for confronting shared difficulties and vulnerabilities. Despite the lack of easy solution, the format also opened up for articulating alternatives and less tech-oriented hopeful engagements and practices.

This paper engages with biodiversity loss. In particular, it focuses on observations and scientific facts: the decline of pollinators and what that entails for the co-living of humans and more-than-humans. This kind of work often reaches the publics as thin stories of limited futures.

The article explores how to situate the issue of out-of-sync plant–pollinator relationships into thick, ongoing presents rather than as a distant future that is out of one’s own hands. This is done through a collaborative design project that experiments with various formats for staging more material, embodied and experiential ways to sensitise and invite humans to experience the issue of pollination. We therefore explore and give an account of how we have situated the issues in a thick, ongoing present as an anticipatory practice. We thus suggest a practice that becomes both sticky and sweaty; in addition, the practice moves some pollination facts into not only matters of concern but also matters of care.

In doing so, we forward the role that design researchers can play in environmental and collaborative anticipation by engaging with emerging approaches to both biodiversity loss and collaborative future-making that are simultaneously conflicting and harsh as well as hopeful.

Collaborative Future-Making is a research platform at the Faculty of Culture and Society at Malmö University that is concerned with how to envision, elaborate and prototype multiple, inclusive, and sustainable futures. The platform gathers around 20 researchers that share a methodological interest in how critical perspectives from the humanities and social sciences can be combined with the constructive and collaborative aspects of making and prototyping in design research.

The research centers around two major themes:

• Critical imagination​, which focuses on how basic assumptions, norms and structures can be challenged to widen the perspectives on what can constitute socially, culturally, ecologically and economically sustainable and resilient futures.
• Collaborative engagements​, which focuses on how we can set up more inclusive collaborations to prototype and discuss alternative futures, engaging not only professionals and policy makers but also citizens and civil society.

During 2019 the research group set out to make a shared glossary for collaborative future-making. The glossary is multiple in purpose and exists in several versions. Hopefully there will be more to come. At first, the making and articulation of the glossary was used within the research group as an exercise to share concepts that we found central to collaborative future-making, coming from different disciplines. This published version of the glossary was assembled to be used during a workshop called ​Imagining Collaborative Future-Making,​ which gathered a group of international researchers from different disciplines.

The collection of concepts reflects the heterogeneous and diverse character of the research group and a strong belief in that plurality regarding ontologies and epistemologies will be crucial to be able to handle the multiple uncertainties and complex challenges we have to face in the future. Some of the concepts are already well established within different research communities, but gain a specific meaning in relation to the research area. Others are more preliminary attempts to advance our understanding or probe into new potential practices within collaborative future-making. In that sense the concepts in the glossary are well situated and grounded in past and ongoing research within this research group, at the same time as they are meant to suggest, propose and point towards practices and approaches yet to come.

The concepts in this glossary are not only meant to be descriptive but also performative. In that sense, assembling and circulating this glossary is part of collaborative future-making. As pointed out by Michelle Westerlaken in her articulation of “Doing Concepts” (see page 15), “...without proposing, critiquing, or working towards a common or uncommon understanding of certain concepts, it becomes impossible to ‘make futures’ in any deliberate fashion.”