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Short abstract

This paper examines a speculation workshop in which participants remix 100-word fictional descriptions of parallel worlds to explore desired visions of alternative fashion systems. It illustrates how participatory settings shape what futures can be imagined and which visions acquire epistemic value.

Long abstract

This paper investigates collaborative future-making within Fashion Fictions, a participatory speculation project founded by the author in 2020 that has involved more than 7,000 people worldwide. The project invites participants to imagine and explore alternative fashion systems through structured processes of writing, prototyping and enactment, guided by desire and curiosity rather than expert prediction or technical modelling. This generative activity produces new narratives and nurtures an expanded sense of possibility among participants.

The paper focuses on one accessible workshop format from the project: a cut-and-paste activity in which 100-word descriptions of fictional parallel worlds, previously contributed to the project’s online repository, are playfully remixed. Participants adapt, combine and build on propositions authored by other contributors to create new worlds that reflect their own interests and priorities. While the remix method lowers barriers by eliminating the blank page, the use of existing material introduces constraints and challenges participants to think laterally and creatively.

Using this remix activity as a focus, the paper investigates how the architectures of participatory settings organise imaginative horizons. It recognises participatory speculation workshops as materially and procedurally structured environments that shape what can be imagined; how visions can be expressed; and how speculative propositions acquire, or do not acquire, epistemic value. Shifting attention from the content of imagined futures to the infrastructural conditions that organise their emergence and stabilisation, the paper contributes to STS debates on collaborative future-making and the politics of co-designing futures.

The workshop activity requires only printed sheets, scissors, glue and pens.