Design-as-performance

Game-based and performative futuring

Imagining futures and rehearsing transitions

Why attend

Times are changing and we can't solve new problems with old solutions, in response, we’ve been exploring new playful and performative ways to engage social imaginaries in crafting alternative futures and how we get there.

Futuring is not a science, it is an act of what Ernst Bloch called “anticipatory illumination”, suggesting that scientific knowledge of the future is not possible, so our orientation towards the future must be informed by the imagination and enactment of the social-whole. To inform a world becoming otherwise.

What we'll be doing

Grace will be sharing methods, tools, and techniques that can be applied within research, strategy, art, and design practice contexts to better consider possible futures and transitions.

Participants will be introduced to game-based, reflexive and performative ways to future, intervene with systems and simulate multi-layered multi-scale transition. This practice views the world through a systems theory lens and sympoietic (collectively-producing) systems, which Donna Haraway refers to as being ‘complex, dynamic, responsive and situated systems tied to ‘worlding with, in company’.

Participants will engage with narrative creation and system interventions to negotiate power and agency in shifting transformative change.

Participants will be invited to confront socio-technological issues such as data sovereignty, decoloniality and climate change, to inform how different objects of design, like services, organisational culture, policy, market mechanisms, legislation, finance models and incentives, governance structures, identity, and daily life behaviours.

Methods and topics covered in the Masterclass

Systems Thinking
Worldbuilding
Game-based Futuring
Speculative Prototyping
Role Play Games
Image Theatre

Who should attend

This master class is designed to offer designers, change-makers, transformation leaders, councils, policymakers, activists and innovators ways design respectfully with courage, curiosity, and compassion to enact transitions that realise transformative change.

Who’s facilitating the session

Becoming Studio

Becoming facilitates and produces playful futures through social research + experimental, performative narrative design, proposing alternative means of knowledge production through speculative, contestational and participatory worldbuilding to transition towards more-than-human alternative futures.

Grace Turtle Polifroni

Grace is a post-disciplinary designer, futures researcher and educator using experimentation and performativity to explore collective imaginaries that give insight into re-storied worlds and how we interface with them from policy to services. Grace plays in a few worlds, as a member of Becoming a transition-oriented experimental design and research studio based in Barcelona and as a Manager within Applied Design, Deloitte Netherlands, creating conditions for collective action and systems-level change.
Email: hi@becoming.network

P.S.....

Tea and coffee will be served. Please bring a keep cup with you.
If you need snacks please BYO.
If you want to have lunch together after to continue the dialogue, there are many cafes very close to the venue.