Fabulating Together collects reflections on and findings for fabulating Nordic Care Futures.

The result is a concoction of ideas, of potentials many yet unrealized that we offer in this book as partial learnings in a condensed, but hopefully useful format that we believe can open up new ways of doing design, doing technology, and imagining social relations. We invite others to be motivated and inspired to use fabulation in their research, practice, engagement with stakeholders, or everyday life, to think imaginatively and inclusively about futures (with or without tech). We see the contents of this booklet as ingredients and open-ended recipes that can be borrowed, adapted, re-mixed, critiqued, and imagined differently. Finally, we hope our thoughts and reflections on how fabulation can be used, including strategies and tactics for developing meaningful shared futures, will travel to other places, such as labs, universities, creative, or activist spaces. These ideas are intended to act as possible trajectories for crafting futures centered on care, both Nordic and beyond. We ask:

What does it mean to fabulate?
Fabulate is to think sideways.
Not to move linearly in time, but tentatively with hope.
To entangle concepts with one another.
To understand one through another.
To entangle ourselves and our identities.
To share ourselves with others and let other people’s experiences become lenses to understanding our own.
It’s making, but not making-for, nor
making-in-the-name-of, nor just making.
It’s making-with-hope, touching and feeling how materials and concepts could be combined otherwise
And think through how those materialisations ignite possibilities and openings.
For (re)telling stories that matter with a focus on “for whom?”

North Stars and Tactics for Fabulation

Finally, From the Umeå workshop, we offer North Stars for Nordic care futures and tactics for fabulation:

Download them here.