Paper short abstract:

We discuss our efforts to nurture collaborative learning in futures-oriented design through our joint teaching. Drawing on our experiences in the classroom, we focus specifically on how futures-oriented design pedagogy can converse with anthropologically rooted ideas of what is humanly possible.

Paper long abstract:

We spell out some of what we have learned in the classroom as we have explored ways to nurture collaborative learning and radical thinking beyond capitalist normality in futures-oriented design pedagogy. Our approach in co-teaching two courses as part of the Creative Sustainability Masters Programme at Aalto University, Finland, has been to combine speculative futures work with empirically grounded social research.

One of us is trained in (sustainable) design and the other in (environmental) anthropology. Over the five years that we have worked together, we have developed ways of nurturing students’ imaginations as well as bolstering their confidence in a professional field that has definite socio-political legitimacy but many challenges. Besides the technical issues prominent in public debate, these challenges have to do with occupational identities and political conjunctures but also with the philosophical legacies around (un)sustainability. Unsurprisingly, the challenges faced by our design students merge with those of faculty as well as of society at large.

We find that playing with empirically grounded alternative notions of futures, values and what is sustainable, is inspiring and productive. Students work on both speculative and real-world practical projects, informed by literature in futures-oriented design, anthropology and other social research. We find this has promoted collaborative epistemological work or “thinking with”. By bringing our divergent perspectives into the classroom, and putting sustainable design into conversation with anthropology, as a ‘record’ of human possibility so to speak, we have also fostered some unlearning of knowledge born of Western, neoliberalised, political imaginaries.

Paper short abstract:

Building on the ideas of interdependent Crip methodology, this multi-modal paper shows how the coproduction of a science-fiction film by a filmmaker with mild intellectual disabilities and a PhD researcher in medical anthropology opened up a space where different kinds of knowing could flourish.

Paper long abstract:

Collaborative approaches have become increasingly emphasized within both anthropology and disability studies. Following the premise of “nothing about us, without us”, participatory, or inclusive, approaches strive to put the voices and experiential expertise of participants with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) at the center of research activities. At the same time, academic standards of what it means to produce knowledge remain to cause trouble in the practice of collaborative disability research. Considering the intellectual and discursive nature of research practices, demands of competency and skill inherently exclude possibilities of collaboration with people with MID. Thinking about how to solve this tension, this paper centers around the question of how to collaborate with people with MID in a way that centers around their ideas, skills, dreams, fantasies and ways of knowing. Building on the ideas of interdependent Crip methodology, this multi-modal paper shows how this is done through the coproduction of a science-fiction film by an artist and aspiring filmmaker with MID and a PhD researcher in medical anthropology. In doing so, this paper aims to reflect on our creative and collaborative process to show how science-fiction can create a space where different kinds of knowing can flourish.

Paper short abstract:

My research on roleplaying games investigates collective narrative practices and contingency in Singapore. Collaborating with a producer to develop a solarpunk game set in a post-climate collapse Asia, I show how games enable people to explore alternative ways of thinking about the future.

Paper long abstract:

A renewed focus on multimodal anthropology invites us to consider anthropological production not in the form of single-authored textual exegeses but as “encounters in which the unexpected, the unforeseen, and the otherwise may be coproduced” (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón 2019). Focusing on tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) in Singapore, my research investigates collaborative narrative practices and how they relate to experiences of contingency in everyday life. Part of my research involves a collaboration with a game producer to develop a solarpunk game set in a post-climate collapse Asia. The game is designed to reflect a politics of hope rather than apocalyptic despair; its setting invites us to approach crises with a sense of possibility, and reflects resource distribution and ideological systems that call into question current social realities. Its mechanics make popular TTRPGs’ valorisation of wealth accrual and combat as methods of advancement both explicit and ironic, offering a metatextual challenge to implicit assumptions of how we, as players and as people, are and can be in the world. I unravel how tabletop roleplaying games, as a method of knowledge production as well as a tool for research, create open and generative spaces for people to collectively create alternative ways of thinking about the future. I propose that games are a way of inviting others to participate in encounters of knowledge production not as researcher/subject, or even as creator/audience (as implied in mediums such as films, exhibitions or installations), but as players and co-creators, with generative, unexpected and protean outcomes.