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? 

Design is storied, and stories are designed. While elements of stories have long been part of the field through methods like personas, scenarios and design fictions, there has been a recent surge of new approaches including fabulations, epics, memoirs, site-writing and design events. In this workshop we aim to understand how stories are built, what narrative traditions they draw from, how they co-constitute research processes and what kind of knowledge can emerge from them. Specifically, we will explore the role of storytelling in HCI, the craft of writing stories, relations between fiction, truth and knowledge and finally the risks, tensions and limitations of writing stories. We will outline an overview of this new wave of stories in HCI and what they are activating and advocating for, build a set of tips, tricks and advice for writing stories and keep track of ongoing issues and open questions for further research.

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.

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 chairs' introductory editorial for the theme track 'Doing and Undoing Post-Anthropocentric Design'.