Negotiating sustainable futures in communities through participatory speculative design and experiments in living

Title of the Paper

Negotiating sustainable futures in communities through participatory speculative design and experiments in living

Paper Information

• Research Domain: Sustainable design, community participation, future visions
• Keywords: Sustainability, grassroots communities, food cultivation, participatory speculative design, visioning

Research Background and Issues

• Identified Problems or Challenges:

  • Sustainable HCI has emphasized the need for long-term participatory projects with grassroots communities, yet faces challenges in collaborative efforts to address climate change and support actionable practices within communities.
  • Current research on community food cultivation primarily focuses on cooperative planting behaviors, neglecting potential conflicts and tensions during collaboration.
  • Previous speculative design approaches have been predominantly expert-led, rarely incorporating the voices and active mobilization of community members.

• Why This Problem is Important:

  • Climate change is a pressing global issue, and communities are critical units for mitigating its impacts. Effective approaches can directly enhance community resilience and resource sovereignty.
  • Community food cultivation not only represents green living but also holds the potential to inspire and provoke imaginations of new technological forms.

• Research Motivation and Related Work:

  • Collaborating with food cultivation communities to design a method that explores how to envision futures at the intersection of social, technological, and ecological sustainability.
  • Utilizing participatory speculative design to address conflicts between differing perspectives and goals, thereby improving social and technological frameworks for food cultivation.
  • Existing studies, such as Heitlinger et al.'s work on urban agriculture and Norton et al.'s research on value construction, have informed this study.

Proposed Solution

• Method or Solution Proposed:

  • Introduced a methodological approach called Participatory Speculative Design (PSD), framing it as "experiments in living" collaboratively explored with communities.
  • Designed and implemented four speculative modes: mapping, situated walking, game-based speculation, and material crafting, to progressively guide the community's speculative process.

• Innovative Contributions:

  • Innovatively combined speculative design with participatory methods, redefining potential technological and social futures based on the everyday practices and values of the community.
  • Facilitated deeper community discussions through conflicts (e.g., differing opinions on food cultivation spaces), expressions of anger, and shared visions.
  • Proposed a framework to balance community members' real-world anxieties with technological aspirations in design.

• Implementation Steps and Key Techniques:

  1. Mapping: Using maps to mark food cultivation locations and potential improvement areas, reflecting community members' experiences and knowledge.
  2. Situated Walking: Combining fictional scenarios with specific locations, conducting "speculative walks" in real settings to stimulate imagination.
  3. Game-Based Speculation: Designing board games to simulate future challenges based on fictional future scenarios.
  4. Material Crafting: Constructing models of new worlds through material crafting, enabling the physical expression of future visions.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Results:

  • Successfully developed a participatory speculative framework for community collaboration, inspiring community members to deeply reflect on future technologies and food cultivation methods.
  • Through iterative workshops, shifted traditional community approaches to future visioning towards more creative and critical thinking pathways.

• Comparison with Existing Solutions and Advantages:

  • Unlike existing expert-led speculative design methods, this study emphasizes local knowledge and adopts radical participatory forms, offering greater inclusivity and empowerment.
  • Explored challenges to normative scenario understanding in design and demonstrated how "making" can inspire experimental and diverse future conceptions.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  • Different workshop participation modes revealed the community's deeper understanding of food cultivation and sustainable living concepts:
    • "Situated Walking" highlighted conflicts and barriers in public cultivation spaces.
    • "Game-Based Speculation" uncovered divergences between political narratives and daily life.
    • "Material Crafting" fostered a freer atmosphere for creative expression through materialized future visions.
  • The experiments underscored that technological visions should not be detached from community values but require longitudinal interactive collaboration rooted in community practices.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Limitations include the relatively small and less diverse participant group, particularly the insufficient representation of non-mainstream voices within the community.
  • Future directions involve exploring long-term impacts (e.g., through sustained follow-up experiments) and further identifying technological tools to support community-led actions and vision design.