Designing Immersive Participatory Practices for Enacting Eco-Social Transformations Playful Encounters, Recovering Futures

1. Introduction: Collective Enactments, Affective Prefigurations and Immersive Speculations

Ann Light and Harry Lewis

2. Learning by Imagining: Teacher-in-Role to Edu-Larps

Ann Light

3. From Opposition to Transformation: Building Resilience with Pretensive Methodologies

Mátyás Hartyándi

4. Rehearsing Relations: Imagining Alternative Futures as Artistic Practice

Zoë Svendsen

5. Between Knowing and Acting: A Dialectic Exchange with Superflux’ Anab Jain and Jon Ardern

Anab Jain and Jon Ardern (as told to Gabrielė Grigorjevaitė)

6. Unlocking the Resonant Power of Video Games to Mobilize Cultural Change

Joost Mattheus Vervoort

7. Being Mrs Rochester: Empathy in Live Action Role-Playing

Sara Bjärstorp and Petra Ragnerstam

8. Design Encounters: Inviting Speculation in the Here-and-Now

Thomas Binder and Eva Brandt

9. The Strategy Room: Using Interactive Performance to Create Democratic Design

Daniel Barnard

10. Boomtown: World Building as Experiential Design

Mair Morel, Megan Clifton and James Wheale

11. Collective and Urgent: Sociodrama as a Holding Space for Climate Activism

Valerie Monti Holland

12. Crafty Practices of Masking: Stories from Beyond Duality

Eurasian Wolf (Canis lupus lupus), Elisabeth Tauber, Seçil Uğur Yavuz and Lisa Maria Zellner

13. Building Readiness with Time Travel: Relevance and Scale in Adapting a “Here-and-Then” Futures Workshop

Ann Light and Ruth Catlow

14. Evaluation as Participatory Design Practice: Extending and Capturing Impact

Astrid Breel

15. A Coda on Flourishing Futures: Into the Trees

Ann Light

Biography

Ann Light is an interaction theorist and professor of design working at University of Sussex, UK, and Malmo University, Sweden. Trained in drama, interaction design, computer science and AI, her current research explores art-based immersive participatory processes, looking at how they can inspire sustainable futures through cultural change.

Harry Lewis is a researcher in social and environmental psychology. Before committing to a life of precarity in academia, he taught maths and English in a vocational college. Alongside research, he runs a record label called thirtythree circular and lives with his partner, Esme, and their cat, Flea.

'…incredibly useful for practitioners and researchers in the field of designing experiences that engage people with Earth Crisis histories, impacts and possible futures, this provides validation and quality principles for experimentation with modes of artist-led, affective, conversational and 'face-to-place' methods of imagination activism.'

Bridget McKenzie, Co-founder of Culture Declares Emergency.

'Eloquently reclaiming key concepts (immersion, participation, transformation) as guiding lights for designing such journeys, the makers of this manuscript break away from conventional, prescriptive and exploitative approaches to eco-social change and offer interdisciplinary accounts that illustrate existing practices and inspire emerging ones. A must-read book.'

Dr Eleftheria Lekakis, Author, Consumer Activism (2022).

'The environmental movement learned a bitter lesson over decades: we won’t stop the destruction of living systems just because we are told to do so. What does change behaviour are lived experiences of connection - with nature, and with each other. Such experiences are not easy to find, or access, but this is where the arts come in - and this essential book. A treasure trove of immersive, participatory and embodied experiences, it’s the gateway we all so badly need.'

John Thackara, Philosopher, curator (Doors of Perception, etc.) and author, How to Thrive in the Next Economy and more.