Co-Designing Futures - Processes and Practices of Thinking-with and Making-with a Multiplicity of Agents

What do short term living lab experiences have to offer in stimulating relational creativity toward multispecies speculations? In this paper we present an innovative theoretical-methodological approach that merges living lab methodology with futures studies techniques to help us rethink our position as humans within the ecological system and develop a sense of understanding about how to best use the power of nature to respond to the challenges of our time. Our Living Lab approach consisted of four phases: (a) problematizing and exploring new approaches to relate to other-than humans; (b) co-researching and designing multispecies pathways; (c) evaluating the consequences of these new pathways; (d) sharing and discussing alternative possibilities through social fiction writing. We initially piloted the method between the safe walls of the university with a bunch of scholars of the antroposcene. Three of us took the experiment beyond these walls by means of a voluntary lock down in a 24-hectare art park under severe pandemic conditions. The park was approximately 60 km from the university and presented itself as a protected paradise that offered us three large knowledge containers. Our involvement in this experiment of thinking outside the box from within a container box, while at the same time residing in the fertile frontier between wilderness and civilisation, was at first an act of academic disobedience. It was based on our assumption that to be able to re-imagine a social reality differently (with inclusion of how to relate to something relatively small and invisible like a virus) one needs to be able to collectively experience some of the potential future scenario's first hand. It raised awareness about the sort of human we were capable of becoming in an ecosystem where different species compete for space.