Design briefs can be expressions of needs articulated not only by educators but also by external actors and society more broadly. Briefs are where societal needs, expectations, wishes and desires meet the internal, local and situated logic of design and design education. In this workshop, we aim to make an inventory of past and current design briefs and start to reimagine them by moving beyond the taken-forgranted starting point of continued growth. We are led by the overarching question: what could a design brief become when it is actively intended to shift away from notions of design as formulated in traditions of continuous financial growth and problem-solving connected to extractivism and lost life opportunities? 

The ecological crises we face are fed by a disconnect from interspecies interdependencies and misguided human-exceptionalism (the belief we are somehow distinct from nature). Given that design may contribute to our worsening socio-ecological conditions, this is seen as a pivotal moment to question and expand Participatory Design’s traditional tenets, such as those grounded in democracy, rights, fairness, inclusion and empowerment, to consider what a different philosophical starting point and commitment to more-than-human Participatory Design might bring.

The ecological crises we face are fed by a disconnect from interspecies interdependencies and misguided human-exceptionalism (the belief we are somehow distinct from nature). Given that design may contribute to our worsening socio-ecological conditions, this is seen as a pivotal moment to question and expand Participatory Design’s traditional tenets, such as those grounded in democracy, rights, fairness, inclusion and empowerment, to consider what a different philosophical starting point and commitment to more-than-human Participatory Design might bring.

This chapter explores the different traditions underpinning existing Participatory Design work oriented towards sustainability. We show the beginnings of a Participatory Design drawn from an appreciation of the innately interdependent and entangled nature of the world, called here the more-than-human. Two lineages of Participatory Design scholarship are traced: Sustainability (with branches in Modernist and rights-based thinking) and Entanglement (with branches in care-based and co-ontological being). The chapter presents three cases to ground our explorations and bring to light how human-nature separations in systems, structures, values and mindsets inadvertently condition our practice. Our cases ground the theories and paradigms identified in the four branches and show how commitments play out and evolve through practice. This allows us to critically examine existing tenets of Participatory Design and reinterpret the visions that these hold to explore what more-than-human relationality might entail. Our discussion reveals the tensions, politics, paradoxes and difficulties in turning towards more-than-human relationalities and in working across and between worldviews. The chapter closes with the questions that the ambitions of more-than-human Participatory Design pose for our practice. At best, we hope they present a means to tread more gently and responsibly on the earth we share.

Media och forskare har under de senaste åren rapporterat om de pågående klimatförändringarna och att om nödvändigheten av att ställa om samhället till att bli mer hållbart. Politikens gensvar har varit att fatta beslut som bidrar till att samhället ska vara fossilfritt senast 2045. Med de nödvändiga omställningar av samhället som klimatförändringar kräver av oss alla, riskerar vi att förlora både unika miljöer, växter, djur och tillgången till olika produkter och tjänster, livsomställningen som klimatforskare menar måste till för att undvika en klimatkatastrof väcker hos människor känslor av frustration, vrede och sorg. Skriften är en sammanfattning av hur svåra frågor får utrymme att diskuteras och hur sorg kan bli produktiv och leda mot nya mer hållbara strategier.

Design in general, including participatory design, has been and is still closely entangled with an idea of progress molded by modernism, technological development, rationality and economic growth. Today, when trying to shift towards other motivations and meanings in designing, we as designers find ourselves being haunted by this legacy. In this workshop we invite participants to make present and carefully untie designs' entanglements with progress and to craft concrete imaginaries of a more socio-ecological just design after progress. Through this workshop we hope to start building a community around present-ing design histories and making a repertoire of narratives of how to be better haunted in participatory design. The workshop will take the form of a séance that is based on stories and images from the participants' ongoing work that speaks to where they have sensed a haunting by the ghosts of progress embedded in design. This could for example be in a design method that you are using, a learning objective in your design curricula, an evaluation criterion, a design outcome that you have been involved with as a professional design practitioner, design educator or design researcher. It is imperative that the participants are in agreement with the workshop organisers that the séance is in itself an experimental attempt to explore a non-linear way of searching for the barely present or not easily discernible ideals or mechanisms of progress in participatory design. It is not to be confused with calling for supernatural spirits or deceased kins.

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.

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.

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.