If, as designers, want to create desirable futures, one way is to prefigure desired ways of relating (to ourselves, the world and others who dwell in it), giving people something to aspire to in the changes to come. Affective prefiguration can make visible eco-social transformation as it happens. This prefiguration is an experience of relations […]
Evaluating Creative Practice for Transformation
Introducing tools that evaluate transformative creative practices on the creator’s own terms, yet with rigour. Connect to materials prepared for artists, funders, researchers and policy-makers with the desire to make radical shifts in meaning and cultures towards eco-social futures: CreaTures Framework – how to evaluate creative experiential work for transformative ends, while challenging evaluation practices: […]
Immersing in Alternative Futures: Playful Encounters with Eco-social Art and Design
Join this series of art and design activities led by some of Britain’s most inspiring creators. Delving into the futures we might wish for (or hope to avoid), the sessions explore how the experience of imaginative engagement might help society address global challenges, such as climate care. Each session offers the chance to follow alternative […]
2024 in Review – Actions for Change
This year has been exciting for a number of planet-centred things I have been a part of doing. All of them have had a focus on positive transformative action. In a global context that is frightening, working with others, focusing on the local and doing beautiful things together is some kind of heartening response. In […]
Participative intimacy
What’s wrong with changing the world one neighbourhood at a time; hands in the soil but looking at the stars?
Transformative Economies
Eco-social justice requires a redistribution of resources and capabilities. Develop relational assets and it is possible to create surplus care as well as fairer societies.
The condition of continuousness
It is only when it stops that it becomes apparent it was a major part of how life was regulated. I used to travel. I had endless meetings across the country and across different countries. I was on the move. No one thought to ring any more, because I was always likely to be somewhere […]
Name it: Race. Class. Gender.
There was no ‘in it together’ during lockdown. Depending on your place in the world, your experience with Government attempts to control the virus will have been very different. Here, looking from the UK, I discuss some of the factors that differentiate us and need naming.
The Themes that Get Me Out of Bed in the Morning
There are themes I return to that are not about human-computer interaction, design or people’s experience of them, but exist across these, as the reason I do my work.