This special interest group acts as a forum for exploring creative practices that help faciltate a transition from design approaches that enforce one-world-world futures towards a pluriverse of futures embodying the Zapatistas desire of “a world in which many worlds fit”.
Much of our work is a practical response to the problematic nature of some methods and tools used in futuring to create a more inclusive consideration of potential futures. For example, we problematise the futures cone, often attributed to Joseph Voros, and extensively used as a starting point for futuring activities. Whilst there are a number of contentious elements to the cone the main problematic aspect is that it assumes a collective (western) acceptance of a particular historicity and notions of time and thus serves to enforce the notion of what the eminent sociologist John Law calls a one-world-word view. It does this by representing a single point from which futures emanate presenting a supposed accepted present reality and takes no account how history, beliefs, values, and fiction which are all implicated in the cultural construction of a plurality of past, present, and future realities as shown.
This pluralistic approach to futures forms the scaffold of our world-building wherein we prototype possible worlds through collections of diegetic artefacts, that, when viewed together, build a fictional world. The artificially built world is a prototyping platform for the very designs that define it, meanwhile, those designs reciprocate in kind and prototype the world.