VIRTUAL: Learning. Life. Work.
Abstract
How can experiences of multispecies and multiscale perspective-shifting teach ecosystems literacy in the context of an environmental game or playable narrative? Research highlights the potential immersive design, games, and worldbuilding to meaningfully engage diverse communities with complex, multi-scalar content in ways that shape individual and collective decision-making (Strijbos & Weinberger 2010; Kumar et al. 2021). Our submission takes this as a foundation for a novel approach to pedagogical engagement with complexity learning. Post-Anthropocentric Design Lab (PADLab) is a creative educational approach to future coexistence that foregrounds systems thinking and the adoption of new perspectives as a tool for compassionate collaborative innovation. In its most basic form, PAD allows participants to assume Other-Than-Human (OTH) perspectives and envision futures through the impacts of decisions made at varying time scales, revealing how ecosystems (ecological or otherwise) are shaped by values, forces, and relationship dynamics. The PAD framework revolves around three core principles: situatedness, connectedness, and embeddedness. Each has a theoretical basis within the fields of art and design, as well as systems theory, futures studies and management studies. This approach to learning moves away from a correspondence-driven approach to perception, behaviour and decision-making, which rely upon a knowable ‘truth’, toward a coherence-driven approach, involving an assumption that we might intuit, calculate and/or render the larger shape of a given system by understanding its internal rules and structure. By engaging participants with the “many intelligences” present in a living system, there is the possibility to generate new futures, values, and relationships beyond the normative.
Nirit Binyamini Ben-Meir is an artist, designer, and associate lecturer at the Royal College of Art. She is doing her PhD at the Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence Centre, Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on More-Than-Human Interactions and the integration of living plants into digital systems. Her exploration focuses on the potential of using human-computer-plant interactions to identify current weak points in pro-environmental behaviour and care for ecosystems. She develops novel methods for evaluating the impacts of interaction design on humans and their relationship with ecology.
Danielle Barrios-O’Neill is a nationally established experimental education and game design scholar, recognized for developing novel post-disciplinary methods of advanced serious play for societal change. She leads the MA Information Experience Design at the RCA, a programme with a foundational interest in complexity and systems change through art and design. Dr Barrios-O’Neill’s research on systems approaches in the arts has been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals; she is currently completing a book with Palgrave Macmillan titled Systems Play, which develops a novel theory and approach to engaging humans with complexity and multispecies resilience.
Laura Dudek is a researcher and creative practitioner who uses design to explore how alternative values, belief systems, and ideals can be made tangible through the stuff of everyday life in ways that spark reflection on the kinds of worlds people wish to live in. Her practice investigates complexity— particularly within the nexus of design, sustainability and techno-social responsibility—and the potential of unconventional forms of interaction to help us navigate transdisciplinary contexts.
Carolina Ramirez Figueroa – is an architect, designer and researcher working at the intersection of architecture, design, living systems, and critical technologies. She is a Senior Lecturer in Information Experience Design (IED) at The RCA and her research explores the culture, practices, tools and economies of working and designing with living systems at different scales, ranging from experiences, products, architecture and urban ecologies. In her work, she also looks at imagining and delivering possible futures to challenge and provoke discourses of future technological, social, cultural and environmental issues. Carolina has collaborated with several artists, designers, and scientists and has exhibited and participated in different art and design venues worldwide, including Helsinki, Edinburgh, Canada, and Japan.
Michal Pauzner is a designer, researcher, and educator based in Tel Aviv, Israel. She is a joint founding director of PADLab Shenkar, and a senior faculty member at the Visual Communication department. Also serving as the Head of the Center for Teaching Excellence, Michal leads various projects and initiatives that look at possible futures of design, pedagogy, ecology, and technology. With her extensive background, Michal has honed her skills in developing effective and inspiring methodologies and creating impactful learning experiences.
Oded Kutok is an architect, urban planner, designer, and a faculty member at Shenkar College. Having served as a planning and social policy advisor for the government and municipalities in Israel, he contributes to the project’s outlook by fostering community-driven inclusive planning. In addition to his role as leader of many environmental projects (from leading urban sustainability plans to curating exhibitions focused on environmental crises), he provides environmental insights through a forward-looking perspective.