Short abstract:

To explore the values of interactivity to creative research practices, we reflect on participants' counter-play. Herein participants question the set-up of design projects without disengaging from them. Rather than failure, counter-play highlights the creative potential of interactive methodologies.

Long abstract:

This paper explores the contributions of interactive methodologies to creative research practices, drawing on our own experiences as researchers and architects collaborating on community-oriented design interventions in climate debates. Our interactive interventions, which include creative workshops, theatrical performances, and serious games, seek to instigate conversations on different climate futures along the Dutch coast by drawing on environmental sciences and eco-philosophy. The interactive methodologies used in these projects encourage participants to explore various perspectives and values, encompassing human and non-human elements, rendering questions of climate change more tangible and open to politicisation.

However, we argue in this paper that the significance of interactive methodologies extends beyond their intentional objectives. To substantiate this argument, we engage in auto-ethnographic reflection on what we call 'counter-play': instances of friction wherein participants question the set-up of our projects without necessarily disengaging from them. Far from signalling a failure of design interventions, counter-play provides important clues for understanding the different values interactive methodologies bring to creative research projects.

By involving ‘unprogrammed’ ways of thinking and doing, counter-play highlights the creative liberation generated by interactive methodologies, actively engaging audiences in contemplating and crafting alternative climate futures. Furthermore, it provides an anchor for reflections on real-world climate politics, whose features the design reproduces or replaces. Finally, such situations challenge the role of ‘makers’ and thereby harbour creative potential for deepening artistic research practices and initiating new projects.