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.

This article proposes un/making as a designerly response to urgent environmental issues. By focusing on the simultaneous constructive and destructive aspects of design, this effort attempts to challenge design's dominant focus on making new things. The implications and potentialities of un/making are explored through a designerly inquiry into ongoing and emerging attempts to ban the plastic straw. Based on this inquiry, the article proposes an approach to un/making that is driven by speculative, what if questions, informed by the history of the plastic straw: from coming into being to becoming preferable and now emerging as a matter of concern. Through a series of speculative design artifacts, the authors articulate matters at stake in the un/making of the plastic straw. They also show how these matters are a stake in the un/making of disposability as part of a preferable future. Rather than proposing one preferable future, the article highlights the frictions that emerge in un/making.

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.

What makes the design of futures sufficiently transformative? Worldwide, people are aware of the need to change and keep changing to address eco-social challenges and their fall-out in an age of crises and transitions in climate, biodiversity, and health. Calls for climate justice and the development of eco-social sensibilities speak to the need for dynamic and provisional engagements. Such concerns raise age-old issues of inequality and colonialist destruction. Our designs carry the imprint of this current politics, wittingly or unwittingly, into worlds to come. This conversa- tion asked how might we respond fluidly to coming uncertainties, questioning our own practices to sow the seeds of more radical transformation, while recognizing the structural forces that can limit or temper opportunities for design activism. It was or- ganized in three quadrant exercises, which we also reflect upon.

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.

Design is conventionally considered to be about making and creating new things. But what about the converse of that process – unmaking that which already exists? Researchers and designers have recently started to explore the concept of “unmaking” to actively think about important design issues like reuse, repair, and unintended socio-ecological impacts. They have also observed the importance of unmaking as a ubiquitous process in the world, and its relation to making in an ongoing dialectic that continually recreates our material and technological realms. Despite the increasing attention to unmaking, it remains largely under-investigated and under-theorized in HCI. The objectives of this workshop are therefore to (a) bring together a community of researchers and practitioners who are interested in exploring or showcasing the affordances of unmaking, (b) articulate the material and epistemological scopes of unmaking within HCI, and (c) reflect on frameworks, research approaches, and technical infrastructure for unmaking in HCI that can support its wider application in the field.

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.

This paper discusses craft and design practices through their impact on the environment. We consider how to act concerning the consequences of the craft and design industry. Also, we reflect on the agency of our field of practice in changing how we perceive the environment. We present three case studies of the European glass industry sites in Sweden, Italy and Finland, where we study contamination of the soil with participatory, speculative and craft methods. Through these cases, we reflect on our role in soil communities and ask how we may act in them with responsibility, hope and care. We conclude by proposing to act locally, to share our practices and make them visible, expanding our situated, personal skills and knowledge towards the political.

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.”

This paper takes as its starting point the fact that we live in the aftermath of previous making and design. For participatory design to adequately answer to this aftermath, we suggest building on a combination of participatory and speculative design approaches in everyday life settings and exploring the practice of un/making matters. The paper draws on two cases where participants have been invited to engage with recent scientific findings and practices - one where they explore the practice of un/making plastic waste through composting, and one on un/making polluted soil through plants that can accumulate metals. By not primarily aiming at feeding into new iterations of a design process, there is an openness for speculating beyond the given systems, and to bring into question imaginaries of constant progress, which have been part of generating these lingering matters.

We live in the aftermath of industrial design, which primarily has been guided by a focus on making the new. Through the project Un/Making Soil Communities, carried out where glass production has left pollution in the soil, the authors propose caring design experiments which aim to foster maintenance and repair for livable worlds. In this articulation, the authors draw on democratic design experiments (Binder et al 2015), but propose a shift from gathering around matters-of-concern (Latour 2005) to matters-of-care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Furthermore, caring design experiments also entail engaging with big enough stories (Haraway 2016) through going visiting and continuously crafting invitations.

On a generic level, caring can be described as "everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible" (Fisher and Tronto, 1990). This paper asks how we as design researchers in Scandinavia come to care, for our world and more specifically for the local NORDES community. We do this by describing how we have maintained, continued and added (as a practice of repair) in relation to the most recent NORDES summer school (2018). The summer school invited students to work with tensions between despair, in a site marked and haunted (Tsing et al., 2017) by the aftermath of industrial design practices and hope, by making time for soil (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) in a community-supported agricultural scheme. The paper invites you to share some cruxes and insights that emerged, and to imagine teaching with care as a collective process that attempts to bring things together, not as oppositions, but as generative and productive relations.

The article engages with the politics of inviting by proposing a shift in what we invite to, and when. Rather than inviting stakeholders to participate in design projects before use, the article argues for the value of inviting participants to take part in co-articulations of issues that arise in the course of the ongoing living with technologies. Based on two public engagement projects, it is shown how co-articulations emerge through a combination of invitations and responses by the participants. When the issue emerges more inventively is usually when the assumptions enacted through the invitations do not t well with how participants live with technologies.

What practices can we imagine in this world where progress, novelty, and production of the new has been privileged to the extent that it has had profound impact on not only culture but also nature and how we understand the relationship between the two? Jackson has, for example, suggested practices of maintenance and repair as stories and orders that can handle the decay and breakdown of the 21st Century.[1] In the accompanying text, we imagine a conversation between the ragpicker and the composter that suggest different ways of living with transformation in the aftermath of a plastic era. When plastic materials started to be used they came with the modernist vision that technologies would rid us from restrictions posed by nature.[2] Plastic materials were used as alternatives to, for example, wood, glass and metal, which suggested a world without material scarcity. As a cheaper alternative they have often been used for disposable products meant for one-time-use only. And, at the same time as plastic is hard to mend, maintain and repair, due to the way it wears and tears, it generally doesn’t breakdown and decay as other non-industrial materials. Rather, it accumulates.[3] The text is a speculative fabulation,[4] but it draws on ethnographic material that has been produced during a series of public engagement events where we invited participants to explore two kinds of emerging hybrid matters that are related to plastics. The first hybrid matter is plastiglomerates,[5] which is a new kind of stone partly consisting of plastic debris coming from such varied sources such as fishing industry, leisure activities and mundane living. The second hybrid matter is common mealworms that can biodegrade Styrofoam.[6] In the first set of public engagement events, we invited people to walk along beaches in Finland and Iceland to look for plastiglomerates. In the second set of public engagement events, we invited people in Denmark and Sweden to use common mealworms to compost plastic waste in their home.

This paper connects with recent movements within participatory design that move beyond democracy at work and into public engagements with matters where stakes and stakeholders are uncertain. This is thus a shift from earlier participatory design projects where identifiable stakeholders were a pre-condition. To enable the becoming of stakes and stakeholders that are responsible, this paper argues for a new design space within participatory design: to enable material participation in yet unarticulated issues connected to socio-material entanglements. This becoming of stakeholder is not necessarily about solving a problem but to sensitize oneself to one’s entanglements, response-ability and agency in relation to potential issues. The proposal is discussed through a design experiment centred on co-living and the messy practices of composting plastic waste in domestic settings.

This piece in the interactive exhibition shows a prototype of a domestic plastic composting kit. More specifically it's a repurposed glass jar with a lid that has been cut open and replaced by a metal net. Inside it common mealworms are biodegrading styrofoam. A democratic design experiment, where similar prototypes were distributed to explore how it is to live with it, will be present in this exhibition through photos. A 30-minute workshop builds on this democratic design experiment and explores the becoming of stakeholders when the actors and issues are multiple and uncertain.  

A crucial but little-explored practice in design anthropology is the crafting of invitations: invitations to user studies, to interviews, to ethnographic fieldwork projects, to co-design workshops, to prototyping and to public engagement events. The reason for issuing these invitations is partly to widen the epistemological community, partly to democratize the development of new designs or technological systems. In this chapter we engage with the politics of inviting by proposing a shift in what we invite to, and when. Rather than inviting stakeholders to participate in design projects before use, we will argue for the value of inviting participants to take part in co-articulations of issues that arise in the course of the ongoing living with technologies. This, we argue, is an important shift, because the issues and potentialities that emerge as things are used can never be fully predicted in a design project, whether by designers or potential users. We have termed this practice of inviting to collaborative formations of issues connected to the ongoing living with technologies designerly public engagements.

In recent years, many have combined actor–network theory (and after) and collective design. In this emerging field that we call participatory design and after, many have proposed and appropriated figurations such as networks, fluid, fire, thing and meshwork. In this paper, we argue that figurations do not only contribute to knowing the world, they also intervene in the becoming of worlds. This recognition of the performative character of figuration suggests that knowledge-making and world-making are inseparable, and makes it very important to be careful what figurations we imagine, articulate and use. In order to continue the work done in ANT and collective design that focuses on uncertainties, boundary-making, complexities and time, we propose the figuration of patchworking. What we particularly find generative with the figuration of patchworking is that it figures design as entanglements in multiple temporalities. Through the figuration of patchworking, we offer an approach that allows for understanding and working with multiple and overlapping collectives. This means to refigure how and where to draw the boundaries of co-designing in technological societies.

This is a collaborative practice-based thesis by publication written across two disciplines: interaction design, and media and communication studies. Based on Threads – a Mobile Sewing Circle, a travelling exhibition in which participants are invited to embroider an SMS by hand and with an embroidery machine connected to a mobile phone, this thesis puts forward the concept of publics-in-the-making. The potentialities of publics-in-the-making is explored through the figuration of patchworking. Patchworking has, for example, been used in the writing of this thesis and in the composition of Threads. As a method, patchworking ways of knowing should be understood as a response to a widespread call across disciplines for new ways of knowing mess and complexities in technological society. We are in dialogue here especially with those engaged with new feminist materialism, the material turn, and posthumanities. More specifically, patchworking ways of knowing means knowing through collective interventions and staying with such interventions. In this thesis patchworking is used to explore and speculate on the potentialities of publics-in-the-making, publics that emerge out of making things together, in which actors and issues are not pre-set but in the making. This kind of public engagement in issues of living with technologies is proposed as part of a larger repertoire of designerly public engagement that happens within participatory design, media archaeology, critical making and speculative design. Drawing on American pragmatism and feminist technoscience, we argue that everyday living with technologies makes us entangled and implicated in diverse issues characterised by multiple uncertainties. Given that it is not always possible to know what the concern is, who is concerned, and how it could be addressed, making is explored both in terms of its potential to bring humans and nonhumans together, and as a mode of engaging with issues related to living with technologies. Publics-in-the-making is thereby put forward as publics that gather because of a shared area of curiosity, rather than an emergency, and where issues are co-articulated in the making. While these co-articulated issues are rarely resolved, we argue that the making in Threads becomes a way of practising caring curiosity towards ongoing and emerging issues related to living with technologies. Publics-in-the-making should not be understood as an argument against other kinds of public engagement, but as complementary, since all handle different aspects of living with technologies. In line with most practice-based research, we argue that method and that which is explored cannot be separated. This means that method and problem emerge together, or are made together. In this case the patchworking ways of knowing have been used to speculate on and to explore potentialities of publics-in-the-making. The patchworking of Threads is thereby both the method and that which is explored and speculated upon. Through patchworking publics-in-the-making we build on and contribute to re-patternings and re-imaginations of interaction design and communication studies through a turn to feminist technoscience. We are thus able to explore multiple temporalities, issues of linearity and discreteness, and concerns around human-centeredness - as well as the ethics of such boundary-making. This thesis works simultaneously with several temporalities: that which is at hand, as well as that which is yet to come.

In this chapter we will explore the potentialities of publics-in-the-making—that is, publics that come out of making things together and that are continuously reconfigured by their participants, human and nonhuman. The potentialities of such public engagement will be explored through Threads—a Mobile Sewing Circle, a traveling exhibition in which people are invited to embroider a message received by means of SMS, either by hand or with an embroidery machine connected to a mobile phone with bespoke software. This is an invitation to stitch together different kinds of technologies, temporalities, materialities, practices, and participants. What makes participants gather in Threads is not that they necessarily know each other since before, neither that they necessarily have a shared problem that they want to address. What they do share is that they have responded to an invitation that, we argue, articulates an area of curiosity—ways of living with technologies—rather than a predefined problem. Our concern in this chapter is the co-articulations that result from a particular way of gathering and from particular ways of engaging with everyday technologies.

This paper, which contributes to discussions on techno-ecologies by drawing on feminist technoscience, is divided into three parts. The first part is written by Lindström and Ståhl and outlines the figure of the rag and bone wo/man. It also recounts stories from their travels, where they collected both obsolete phones and also personal accounts on the part of the owners of these phones, and then moving on to explain the process of unravelling and repeating these materials into a composition of an SMS novel. In the second part, Snodgrass gives an account of the experience of subscribing to the SMS novel P.S. Sorry if I Woke You, which Lindström and Ståhl composed from the materials they collected as rag and bone women. Snodgrass’s focus is on the kinds of relational, media ecologies style dimensions that the piece can be seen to bring to the fore. Finally, all three authors join in a concluding discussion on the notions of staying with, working through and performing obsolescence.

In this paper we propose temporary assemblies where the sharing of stories and concerns are facilitated. Possible challenges and characteristics of such temporary assemblies will be discussed through the project Threads – A Mobile Sewing Circle, which is designed in order to support conversations in relation to everyday use of information and communication technology as well as to other means of communication. The participants do not necessarily belong to an already existing community and do not need to reach a consensus. The discussion in this paper will focus on how the design of Threads allows and encourages the participants to bring past lived experiences to the table, as well as how the act of participating in the sewing circle brings out new concerns. Despite the transient character of this assembly we will also look at how the things produced in the sewing circle might support longer lasting, future conversations.

This paper addresses accountability in academic and artistic writing. We use the narrative position of the patchwork to tell stories of the travelling exhibition Threads - A Mobile Sewing Circle. This particular narrative position is chosen as it can handle fragments, as well as multiple voices and perspectives, while still being held together. In addition, we argue that Threads is similar to the practice and object of patchwork. It comes into existence through processes of exclusion and inclusion of connections, alliances, and separations – through putting things in relation to one another.

In this paper the exhibition Threads – a Mobile Sewing Circle is used as an example of a design that travels. To tell the story of how Threads travels we use the concepts of immutable mobile (Latour 1990) and fluidity (de Laet and Mol 2000) – concepts that invite us to think of standardisation and stability on one hand and changes and adaptability on the other. Since Threads is continuously assembled, disassembled and reassembled in different contexts and by different actors, we argue that Threads needs to be able to deal with changes and local conditions and cannot strive for stability in the sense of ‘no change’. On the contrary, Threads is dependent on local actors’ engagement, which partly is done through adding, replacing and altering parts and practices of Threads which also redraws its boundaries. We further argue that it is through what has been called design-after-design (Ehn 2008) that Threads can become entangled in the local setting and thereby matter. Through examples from Threads it is also shown that, what we call, a fluid designer role is helpful when making fluid designs travel.

In this paper we propose temporary assemblies where the sharing of stories and concerns are facilitated. Possible challenges and characteristics of such temporary assemblies will be discussed through the project Threads - a Mobile Sewing Circle, which is designed in order to support conversations in relation to everyday use of ICT as well as in relation to other means of communication. The participants do not necessarily belong to an already existing community and do not need to reach a consensus. The discussion in this paper will focus on how the design of Threads allows and encourages the participants to bring past lived experiences to the table, as well as how the act of participating in the sewing circle brings out new concerns. Despite the transient character of this assembly we will also look at how the things produced in the sewing circle might support longer-lasting, future conversations.

I stitching together är konstnärerna Kristina Lindström och Åsa Ståhl ute efter kraften i att sy tillsammans. Det sker i fysiska möten i en syjunta och med hjälp av digitala kommunikationskanaler. De blev förvånade över att nålar och trådar kunde stöta på så många maktstrukturer och provocera i en mängd olika riktningar.