This coda considers what we have brought together in the book and some of the challenges that remain in remaking our worlds with support from arts practices. It addresses the wonder that we can experience as people aware of our interdependencies with other life, looking at work to consider trees and care. Based in more-than-human philosophy, it asks how we might design with respect for other life to resist appropriation by consumer society.

The chapter gives an account of how a piece designed for a small group in a specific place might grow beyond its original context without compromising its intimate and relational qualities. Focusing on the “This Coastal Town” live action role-play (larp) workshop, it traces how participants are guided through three imagined future moments in their town, fostering the development of shared hyperlocal eco-social responses to uncertain and changing conditions. In adapting the workshop for new contexts, handling the specifics of place became a challenge: how far could structures be built that allowed residents to make both socially and physically grounded connections? While the larp proved easily transferable - emerging through interactions between participants and picking up their concerns - it also revealed the need to deploy small, precise details in the framing of it to give a sense of place. The chapter teases out mechanisms to engage participants in confronting ecological crisis through a demanding, yet caring, couple of hours. It concludes with insights from running the workshop for a dispersed community of interest, where shared place is less central. This highlighted both the continuing importance of the land and ocean surrounding participants and the need to reference these lightly to build and sustain relevance across settings.

This extended introduction makes a case for intimate, immersive, participatory and embodied practices drawn from the arts as vital, cultural and political resources in the context of climate, ecological and human crises. Focusing on sensorial, relational and affective experiences, it shows how artists and designers create spaces in which alternative futures are not just imagined, they are rehearsed and enacted. These practices do not simply resist narratives of loss and collapse; they seek to transform present conditions by cultivating ways of loving, caring and celebrating that support flourishing lives. From practical consultations to fantastical imaginings, via many creative devices, the work presented is grounded in a belief in the transformative potential of people acting together. The introduction articulates how embedded creative practices operate as both method and ethos, bringing together thinking and feeling to foreground climate care, mutual support and regenerative living beyond managing obvious harms. Across the collection, contributors engage compassionately and constructively with what it means to be human at a time of great reflexivity and change, while several approaches explicitly extend concern to more-than-human worlds.

Presenting accounts from artists and designers, this book explores how we can transform our societies to greet uncertain futures with greater readiness and care through immersive, creative experiences. Crossing performance, theatre, games, sociodrama, participatory design, socially-engaged art, live action role-play, eco-social commitments and more-than-human philosophies, this edited volume examines common processes by which transformations in culture may be kick-started or confirmed, revealing disciplinary differences, but united by an interest in the meeting of prefigurative politics, participatory method, immersive structure and care-based ethos. Readers will take away insights into conducting work that makes a documented difference, at a tier between the individual and society and looking past current failures of imagination to worlds beyond the (post)industrial ruins. Fourteen chapters, including one dedicated to participatory evaluation, describe practices of change-making from across Europe and beyond, offering inspiration and technique in tackling interrelated ecological, cultural and existential challenges at a time when trends doubling down on extraction and consumerism are clearly doomed. Sharing an opportunity to investigate an engaging approach to social transformation from all sides, this book will be of relevance to artists, designers, students of performance, transformation and sustainability professionals and anyone interested in how we move societies from current impasses to collective action and caring, collaborative worlds. The Open Access version of this book, available at https: //www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives (CC BY-ND) 4.0 license.

How can design help us explore questions of both possible futures ahead of us, and possible futures that never came to pass but continue to affect us? How could thinking about temporalities and dimensions be valuable for designers engaging with transformation, transitions, complexity, and pluriversal approaches to research and practice?

Following popular Conversations at DRS 2022 ('Designing Transformative Futures': Light et al, 2022) and DRS 2024 ('Mapping Constellations for Transformative Futures': Speed et al, 2024), we propose a third in the series, turning our focus to time and temporalities in design's relationships with futures. This highly participatory session combines ideas developed through previous Conversations with new perspectives from participants, to arrive at a shared, embodied creative mapping activity. In 2022 (Figure 1, left) with 100 participants, in-person and online, we explored what it feels like to be a designer situated within a world of uncertainties and structural forces, and how questioning our own practices can sow seeds of more radical transformation. In 2024 (Figure 1, centre / right) with 60 participants we used systemic constellation mapping, with participants positioning themselves into 'constellations' in which stances on ways the world could-or ought to-be come into tension with other conditions and actors.

The chapter traces a personal and pedagogical lineage from role-based teaching to educational larping using an autobiographical account. It touches on teaching drama using Teacher-in-Role during the heyday of British educational reform in the 1980s; the subsequent discrediting of the arts as a knowledge tradition; and the experience of being participant in a recent larp to teach the rudiments of edu-larping. It details how the processes of roleplay and reflection, informed by social justice goals, equipped young people with skills for living, before looking at how these techniques of performance-without-audience reappeared over the last 30 years as in larp games. Drawing on work over multiple decades, the chapter describes the contribution of legendary educator Dorothy Heathcote, illustrates the learning environments that preceded current initiatives and juxtaposes learning by doing with learning by imagining doing. The piece concludes with the author participating in Lumen: Journey to Hope, an educational game and reflecting on the differences and strengths of the two dramatic traditions and what they could learn from each other.

This document provides an overview of how BoS attempted “more-than-human, sea-facing eco-social change-making” as a particular feature of its work. The document starts with sections explaining how to understand key terms and activities and continues, using summaries of pilot work and case studies drawn from different areas of Europe and different roles within the project, to capture a sample of practices which might be adjusted for context and employed elsewhere. The report finishes with a discussion of how the work met its more-than-human ambitions, touching on its impacts, its limitations and what advice can be offered to other projects engaging with the same regenerative issues. In doing so, it accords with the codesign principle of hearing from individuals and groups in their own words. Unless stated elsewhere, material is drawn from interviews and visits with pilot teams over the three years of the project, conducted by the principal author. 

CSS ConceptsAs AI and data systems often falter when encountering queer identities and knowledge, reinforcing existing oppressions, queer people have resisted such systems and their normalizing tendencies. This pictorial explores tactics of queering AI through a collaborative zine-making project (i.e. zineography) that challenges generative AI and data systems. We share how we workshopped and materialized queering tactics in zine spreads; analyzed these spreads according to materials, content, and tone; and visualized our analysis as thematic collages. We contribute: (1) tangible characteristics of queering AI and data systems (i.e. materials, tones, and aesthetics); and (2) design opportunities for using zineographies as a radical method for building and collectively sharing knowledge about a marginalized community, including recommendations for enacting queer zineographies. By materializing queering tactics through zine-making, we invite embodied, action-oriented critiques that question dominant techno-solutionist movements and trace queer possibilities outside of their normalizing narratives.

In this paper, we report on a three-year endeavour that fostered 18 collaborations between academic and non-academic organizations to co-create responses to social (in)justice issues in digital societies. The projects and range of individuals and organisations connected to this programme offer a snapshot of the state of social justice thinking within the UK digital economy research sector. Our analysis shows how the programme’s constellations of actions enacted different modes of resistance attempting to reshape people’s relationship to power dynamics, addressing institutions and exposing systems, and developing and restoring values for social justice. We explore how these efforts invite nuanced understanding of what constitutes resistance in knowledge co-production endeavours and how they helped surface tensions at the intersection of agencies and the distribution of responsibilities. Drawing from our insights and experience, we discuss implications for HCI concerned with the creation of the conditions for social justice in our digital societies.