Thank you for joining us today, we are sharing a summary of our paper Designing for Transformative
Futures: Creative Practice, Social Change and Climate Emergency, on behalf of all co-authors.
We are creative practitioners and researchers of diverse backgrounds working in the area of
eco-social transformation, using creative art and design methods. In the paper, we reflect on three
examples of our long-term work that were brought together within the CreaTures research project.
Our three projects address large-scale social issues related to climate emergency through
small-scale, situated actions experimenting with more sustainable models. By discussing
how the projects work towards transformation and analyzing how they proliferate across scales,
we hope to expand emerging scholarship on the transformative potential of creative practice.
Current research suggests that creative practice can bring experiential quality to sustainability
projects and bears considerable potential to support transformative eco-social action,
but this potential is underused. Much of this creative work focuses on
small-scale social innovation that originates within locally-situated communities, while
aiming to inspire large-scale social change. This proliferation strategy is similar to the
conception of scaling-out drawn from transition theories that is oriented at building people’s
capacities, as opposed to scaling up, which is oriented at building generalised solutions
that is typical for the least sustainable industrial practices.
Scalar tensions underpin our research. Using our three cases – the Hologram,
the Commonspoly, and the Feeding Food Futures – we look into how creative practice can grow
in ways that link diverse scales of operation, while being purposeful in making social change.
The Hologram project enacts a socio-technical system for peer-to-peer health-oriented at the
wellbeing of individuals, as an alternative to neoliberal healthcare systems.
It is built around a simple structure: a person – the hologram – invites three other people – the
triangle – to meet on a regular basis to discuss their physical, emotional and social health.
The project follows a viral mechanism of scaling, where the hologram individual,
after receiving care from her triangle, is tasked to support the triangle members to set up new
hologram groups for themselves. The project thus supports people’s personal transformation through
a self-replicating system based on mutualistic care rather than normative transactional models.
Commonspoly is a non-profit, open source board game designed to stimulate a collaborative,
commons-based approach to the use of public resources.
Commonspoly embraces collective authorship and is open to ongoing re-design, inviting
players to develop their own game versions and disseminate them in their local communities.
Using this relational model of game development and distribution,
Commonspoly scales into a distributed community network
that connects diverse local stakeholders in peer-learning about commoning strategies.
Feeding Food Futures is an
experimental design research collective developing co-creative events to engage food-oriented
researchers and designers in critical inquiry into sustainable food transitions.
Through the ongoing practice, the project sprouted into a globally distributed network
of collaborators who propose new research activities and develop them autonomously,
leveraging the network as a knowledge resource. This decentralised network of
contributors of diverse backgrounds supports a post-disciplinary change in food design academia,
which is seen as a small but important step towards large-scale food transitions.
All three projects address large-scale social issues and bring them to a scale at which they
can be engaged with by interested individuals and groups. All have encountered challenges
within their practice, which we discuss in the paper. For now, we summarize three main areas
of insights into the transformative potential of creative practice drawn from our fieldwork.
First – we show how creative practice enables a shift
from sustainability projects oriented at top-down solutions for behavioral change,
towards a participatory building of stakeholders capacities and relations
Second – we show how creative practice proliferates towards social change by
scaling-out, performing small iterative steps and embracing diverse situated knowledges
And third – we show how creative practice nurtures long-term, open-ended sustainability engagements,
as a counter to the ‘rational actor’ myth prioritising quantitative evidence
as the main measure of success. These insights may not only
support creative practitioners, but address policy-making and evaluation,
so that creative transformative practice is recognized, valued, and supported more broadly.
If you are interested in learning more,
read the full paper and reach out with any questions or comments.