Designing for the collective survival: design fiction game for the apocalyptic world

Authors:

Katerina Cerna, Vasiliki Mylonopoulou, Marvin Landwehr, and Minna Laurell Thorslund

Abstract

As various global crises increasing (environmental, poverty, population aging, wellbeing), we might be facing a future that is close to some apocalyptic visions. What role can design and HCI practitioners play in the far away future and what can we learn from that experience for today is something we need to explore. In this workshop, we want to create a design fiction based game which aims to explore the different ways how the more-than-human world will need to collaborate to be able to create livable conditions for all. Throughout the workshop, the participants will co-create a game that will envision an apocalyptic future and explore what role we could play in it. Through solving different apocalyptic scenarios, we want to explore the different skills and approaches designers might need to engage with to be able to contribute to the world. We hope this playful experience will help designers, HCI practitioners and researchers to reflect over their own current practices in relation to which future they are helping to co-create.

Introduction

The purpose of this workshop is to go beyond using design as a way to fix the future; and instead envision how to learn to live in a future that we cannot fix.

Many environmentally focused solutions today aim to “save” our future and fix the world (and the issues we created) so that we can continue living in it the same way we have done so far. However, some researchers also point out that our world is destroyed to an extent which is not possible to fix anymore [1]. As a result, societal collapse is not only a gloomy vision but rather an inevitable consequence which is gradually happening already today [2]. Instead of focusing on fixes, we should learn to live in a collapsed world. In a similar line, Tsing [3] proposes that we should rethink what living in the world means to us. As capitalism is a system that organizes the whole current world in a way that leads to its destruction. We cannot stop this process anymore - instead, we should look around and see how we can survive in the ruins of the world instead. But how to continue then, if survival seems to be the only option? Tsing suggests a solution through her redefined vision of survival. Instead of understanding survival as a fight of one against others, she urges us to look at the fact that staying alive for every species requires livable conditions which can be only created by collaborations. Collaboration here is not only “working together”, but rather takes a posthumanistic form as something that resembles contamination - through interacting together, we mutually impact and transform each other [4]. This is true for both human interaction but also interaction across different species.

Despite the warning signs of the ongoing crisis are becoming visible, the way the possible future will look is still unclear. However, envisioning the future is an extremely important part of design, as that is the time we are often designing for (in contrast to the now). Hence, we chose to work with design fiction as a method to enhance the playing experience and more closely connect it to design. Design fiction “is a conflation of design, science fact, and science fiction” [5]. The HCI research has embraced the design fiction approach however, in the past it has not been seen as a respectable method but as an “interesting approach” [6]. We decided to use a speculative design fiction approach in this workshop as it is greatly related to design - both investigate the future, not to predict it but to design it [7], [8]. In the past researchers used games as mediums to speculative design for prompting gamers to explore plausible futures especially related to environmental sustainability [9], [10].

Survival and how to cope with it has unfortunately recently come into our lives on a more global level - either through the experience of the global pandemic or the ongoing war. We hope that through exploring the far away apocalyptic visions of the future we can also understand the current underlying frameworks/approaches/visions people have that are building in the tools today. Connecting our current work to the future is a key step in overcoming the current and upcoming global crises.

With our workshop, we would like to create a space where designers and HCI researchers can reassess their work in the context of the (according to Bendell inevitable) societal collapse. We plan to set the basis for a design fiction based game that will support designers to speculate about the future. In this game, the participants will collaboratively try tackling challenges described in the together co-created scenarios. Their aim will be to create livable conditions addressing a more-than-human aspect of the world. The participants will be prompted to envision use of existing technologies (and their possible limits in the context of the broken world) as well as imagine new technologies. For example, a crisis can be a lack of fresh food as a consequence of overall environmental pollution; the task might be the necessity to distribute soil in a way so that different groups can grow their own food in it. How to support the distribution, decision, but also transport? How to include a more-than-human perspective on this problem - by for example collaborating with soil microbes or birds? Hence, the aim of this game is to explore the different ways how the more-than-human world will need to collaborate to be able to create livable conditions for all. The intended audience are designers, HCI practitioners and HCI researchers who are interested in how their current practices might be shaping the far away future but are also concerned about the current state of the world. However, the next iteration of the workshop would aim to include a more broad interdisciplinary audience from different fields.

The objectives of the workshop are hence the following:

1. Through design fiction, develop visions of the far away future

2. Together develop a design-fiction based game which can be further used by the authors and the workshop participants

3. Enable participants to reflect over their current practice by providing them a suitable future-oriented space

Organizers

Katka Katerina Cerna Ph.D. is a researcher and educator deeply interested in enabling people to live well in a sustainable way, especially in the context of the current environmental crisis and possible upcoming societal collapse. Her background is a mixture of HCI, learning science, sociology, strong drive to understand the impact of technology on our society and will to do something about it. Currently she works as a senior lecturer at University of Gothenburg (Sweden) (GU) in the division of Human-Computer Interaction on fighting nature and environment destruction by helping people develop a deeper relationship to plants through sensing technology and the related participatory design process.

Vasiliki Mylonopoulou Ph.D. is a Marie Skłodowska Curie alumnus with experience in designing technology for health and wellbeing related to behavior change by using social influence/comparison. Her background is in human-computer interaction and her Ph.D. thesis resulted in a design tool that can be used by practitioners in designing social aspects in health and wellbeing technology. Due to her involvement on raising awareness on neurodevelopmental disorders and alternative ways of teaching and learning, she was nominated and awarded the diversity and equality award by University of Oulu (Finland) in 2019. Currently she works as a senior lecturer at University of Gothenburg (Sweden) (GU) in the division of Human-Computer Interaction on designing technology in service to people's diverse social, mental, and physical needs.

Marvin Landwehr is a Ph.D. student for Pluralist Economics and Socio-Informatics at the University of Siegen (USI). He has a M.Sc. in mathematics at the University of Münster. His thesis connects the societal and environmental impact of data capitalism with potential technological alternatives in the field of Distributed Ledger Technologies. His interest in the potential that DLTs might have for sustainability issues includes but goes beyond their application for currencies.

Minna Laurell Thorslund is a PhD student since the spring of 2020 at the Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design (MID) within the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. As a member of MID's Sustainable Futures Lab, she is a researcher in socio-technical transformation into a fossil-free society. She is specifically interested in developing methods to inspire people to collective action in the transition, with Daniel Pargman and Elina Eriksson as supervisors. All three work in the research project Event Horizon, which is funded by the Swedish Energy Agency.

Planned activities

In this section, we describe the different activities which will take place before the workshop, during but also after.

Website creation

Our first step will be to create a website, where we will collect all relevant information (the call for papers, schedule of the workshop, information about the authors). This website will be created already before the notification of possible acceptance, so that it can be shared immediately upon the workshop acceptance.

Distributing activities

We will prepare an invitation email with a summary of the relevant information and a link to our website. We will share the invitation through our professional channels (university email list of KTH, GU and USI) as well as our social channels (social media). In addition, we will also share the invitation to the usual mailing lists of the community, such as CHI, CSCW, IRIS or NordiCHI. We will also individually invite people who we might deem as interested to ensure that there is enough participants taking part.

Pre-workshop activities

Participation in the workshop will require a submission and acceptance of a position paper. The position paper should be written in a form of design fiction addressing one or more global crises and the question “If this will be our future, what will I do in it?”. The submitted design fictions will serve as an inspiration and basis for developing the game. Interested participants should use the ACM SIGCHI Extended Abstract Format to outline their research and/or interest in the workshop (maximum length 4 pages). All submissions will be judged by the organizing committee. Selected contributions will be made available on the workshop website.

Workshop program

The workshop program will be based on exploration of what the participants want, fear, and expect from the future translated into co-created scenarios written during the first phase of the workshop. These will be later used as the basis for the game played during the second phase. Details on the schedule below: