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Short abstract:

A workshop series convening a diverse group of designers, artists, Indigenous knowledge keepers and scientists used embodied, story-sharing approaches that embraced slowness, and ambiguity to interrogate and confront boundaries that exist between fields of expertise and lived experience.

Long abstract:

Designers and artists are often privileged to work with like-minded individuals in other disciplines with the intent to enable responsible engagement and care of our environment. This type of collective work involves acknowledging the ecological imperative to change current unsustainable behaviours and requires new approaches to collectively address the climate crisis. Seeking to find ways to develop relevant transdisciplinary collaborations, a participatory workshop series titled WITH Trees: The New? Material! Relations. Project was conducted, in Spring 2023. The project convened a diverse group of designers, artists, Indigenous knowledge keepers and scientists with the intent to identify new strategies and decolonizing approaches for working with biobased materials as alternatives to petroleum, in particular biomass (cellulose fibres) from the forest. Comprised of making/thinking/discussion activities, embodied approaches embraced slowness, and ambiguity to help interrogate, and confront boundaries that exist between fields of expertise and lived experience. The gatherings stimulated and captured expansive, iterative local collective sharing and envisaging related to our relationship with and use of biomass (cellulose fibres) from the forest. This paper shares approaches taken by the WITH Trees research team based out of a material focused design research lab within a Canadian art and design institution that has increasingly considered and sought ways of validating multiple and alternate histories (and presents, and futures) connected to material, practice-based research. Story-sharing Assemblages made up of made-material objects and language outputs (encompassing visual, tactile embodied, spoken and written modes of communication) that were applied in the WITH Trees workshops will be discussed.