A reflexive research project.
An alternative speculative design project. An artistic practice.
Washing,
Drying,
Pausing,
Grinding,
Making,
Waiting,
Re-(use/cycle/claim/peat) - in season
with the land.
"It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrestled a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats… No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain."
- The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Le Guin, 2019)
What does a paradigm shift entails, practically?
Complexities and wicked problems, probably. Nuances beyond words and thoughts that have to be uncovered and unpacked. Messy, uncategorised, time-consuming, hands-on, quieter practices.
Anything but silver bullets.
"Being involved with science and technology and working with many technology companies, we regularly encounter thinking about futures, especially about “The Future.” Usually [...] it is always about trying to pin the future down. This is something we are absolutely not interested in; when it comes to technology, future predictions have been proven wrong again and again. In our view, it is a pointless activity. What we are interested in, though, is the idea of possible futures and using them as tools to better understand the present and to discuss the kind of future people want, and, of course, ones people do not want. …Could design help people participate more actively as citizen-consumers?"
- Speculative Everything (Dunne and Raby, 2017)
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2 years and still an evolving practice, storifying and sharing through encounters, with human and non-humans
- open to collaboration.
Studio
ANDNAND is a participatory speculative design and art practice by Stephanie Pau, who is working on non-extractive alternatives to the status quo of strategic foresight
and futures imagined in a more-than-human world.
Works are related to, but not limited to, health and ecology - because the lived worlds are made of systems and entanglements, not silos.
COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION
The concepts we think with matter, the people we think with matter, the tools we think with matter.
Non-extractive, inclusive convening through methods and tools of participatory speculative design, design games and probes. Sometimes, inside an installation.
Facilitate collective futuring
e.g.
Futures thinking workshops
Collectively make sense of each others’ worlds
and
re-imagine differently
- online, offline or in hybrid workshops and, maybe, systems change.
Produce discourse e.g.
Sensory XD
A conference track and a catwalk show in a health innovation conference.