A
Accountability: We are accountable for the stories we tell and reproduce in our design work. Choosing to fabulate instead of conducting design work that reproduces harmful assumptions and power dynamics can be an act of Reponsibility, of Worlding otherwise, of creating ethical possibilities for pasts, presents and futures.
Arpentage: A form of collective reading aimed at building a shared understanding of theoretical subjects. Useful to gather theoretical foundations of fabulation by inviting participants to read fragments of texts on fabulation. Results can be any form of networked arrangement of theoretical concepts and cut out quotes from the texts. These can be used for developing fabulations more directly connected to specific theories or concepts. Stimulates rhizomatic thinking and free association of concepts. Care must be taken to carry some of the context of the text, making sure it is not lost, which can be done through discussion.
B
Bodies: Human, More-than-Human, bodies of Knowledge. Always porous within and without Boundaries.
Boundaries: Rather than fabulating and imagining in silos, the fabulator makes the boundaries of the design process increasingly porous to many ways of being and points of view. Boundaries are the many ways we look in the seams and cracks, in how things might be different or similar, and in the many ways phenomenally different things overlap. Examples can be boundaries of bodies and environment, of self- or collective care. Requires a slow, deliberate process of being aware of, and negotiating spaces (see also Time).
C
Care: Present everywhere, but also very often omitted or generalized. Care worlds produced with Others- human and more-than-human. Needs maintenance, repair and reflexive thinking. Should not be taken for granted.
Center: (see also Margins)
Collective: As a noun, a group united by a cause or shared interest. Collects the motivation of the many into shared action. As an adjective, a coming together. In either case, something that is practiced and created, not existing on its own.
Colonial: A system of domination that produces truth and history. Its narratives, gaps, silences privilege narrow ways of thinking. Pervasive to institutions and habits of thinking, colonialism may well be the site of intervention.
Community/ies: A fiction of uniformity and interconnectedness. Can be defined internally, by its members, but it always contains trouble and heterogeneity. Or externally, which may do more harm than good. Nevertheless, communities can be starting points for fabulating, for if they contain affinity, they may hold the power to move from imagination to action.
Complexity: An acknowledgement of our inability to know it all. Yet, we act from positions of partial knowledge. A starting point for thinking about responsibility.
Courage: A goal to pursue. Stories should foment courage and light fires. The fabulator needs to have courage and be effective at resisting problematic ways of seeing, managing and caring for the world, and engage in the labour- and time-intensive process of imagining and developing alternatives (see also Hope, Labour).
Critique: The work of the design fabulator is not only to produce analysis and pushback against current relations that devalue caring, but to actively propose alternate ways of relating fueled by a critique of the status quo (mediated or not through technologies which themselves are both phenomena and apparatus). When using fabulation as an approach to imagining and developing alternative futures, it is not so important how novel, finished or perfect something you imagine and create as a possibility is, but how it aims to critique (or trouble) existing norms.
D
Data: Data is a particularly powerful type of discourse that gives the impression of mirroring reality almost perfectly, and as such it can be used to shape it. Data, big data, massive data, and research data. Many factors can contribute towards something that remains unquantifiable, such as: 1) researchers having limited access to phenomena (e.g. secret, proprietary), 2) lack of access to spaces and people and resources, 3) phenomena being fuzzy, difficult to pin down, and describe, such as individual subjective experiences that are difficult to aggregate and compare. Can we find other ways to make these visible? Methodologically, we may need to develop ways of “listening to the silence(s)”. We could also focus on finding other ways of engaging with the world, beyond data and representation. Should we un/data or should we instead re/data the world?
E
Empathy: A process and state that can only be acknowledged by the receiver. Instead of empathy, use affinity and sympathy (with trouble). Can we fabulate in relation, together with Others, out there? Whose Others? Porousness: creating ties and relations. Sharing control and authorship (see also Boundaries).
Ethics: (See Feminist Care Ethics). Tightly interconnected to the relation to power and hierarchy of humans and more-than-humans, e.g. how to communicate with multi-species (see Power).
F
Fabulation: One of many existing approaches that offers a set of techniques and orientations for developing alternative futures, focusing on storytelling: what stories we want to tell and what stories we are consciously omitting telling. It has ties with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and feminist technoscience, oriented towards alternative forms of critical and radical worlding. Fabulation has also been gaining ground in design research within HCI. It is not “one single and specific thing”, but it can be seen as an approach of thinking, making, relating, and being which has strings and ties to many different concepts, theories, literature, critical and design traditions (including but not limited to design futuring, speculation, science fiction, string figuring, Afrofuturism). It foregrounds absent or neglected relations when imagining alternative lifeworlds. It places less emphasis on designing/imagining technology and more on social and cultural relations, political tensions, and power hierarchies among human, non-human, environmental, and technology co-existence. It is not so important how novel, finished or perfect something you imagine and create as a possibility is, but how it probes, critiques or troubles existing norms/values.
Feminist Care Ethics: Considers ethics as always relational, contextually and culturally embedded.
Figuration/Figure: The tension of Hydra and the Crone as two figures of reproductive labour and care. The figure of the Witch reminds us of local knowledge and thinking otherwise. The healthcare system as the figure of the Monster, always within reach and always beyond reach. Find hidden figures in problems: reveal them.
Future: Connected to the Past and Present. A useful fiction, but needs to be used with caution, for it influences the present. Do not evaluate the future on its ethics, but rather on its effects in the now. Take over the future with imagination and care (see Care and Feminist Care Ethics), for it will influence the present (see Hope and Time). The future is an argument. As such, imagining futures is a foundation for the present day. We can subvert prevailing future narratives by drawing on alternative histories and forgotten visions from the past.
G
Gaps: When we think of how humans and technology (in the broad sense) relate and interact with one another, we should also discuss the relationship between e.g., global standards of health and personal stories of menstruation and chronic illness. What gaps are there in global data flows, and what should we do about them? What would it mean to fill the gaps? Or perhaps we should widen the gaps and create silences? (see also Scale).
H
Hero: They solve a Problem. A sometimes-useful oversimplification. Look for heroes in the Margins. Look for counter-heroes. Read the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Urula K. Le Guin, where she shows that the Hero story often centers the perspective and knowledge of those who are at the Center and hold many privileges.
Hope: A form of relation to the future. It can have different temporal scales (see Scale, i.e., hope for today, hope for the next century). We need to create a language for hope. Hope, like Scales, should be troubled. Hope is experiential. When you evaluate the things you build and imagine, which Horizon are you considering?
Horizon: (See Time). What is the horizon of the future you are creating or imagining?
Human: (See More-than-Human) an abstraction of humans, ever-shifting and evolving across time and humans’ relationships with other humans, more-than-humans, and with tools and technologies (see also Future). Who is the Human, and who is included/excluded from this? (see Boundaries).
I
Inaction: “I would prefer not to.” Inaction can be ethically grounded. Going against the grain. Related to civil disobedience. Are we too blindsided by the need to act? We need stories to exemplify inaction as a virtue. A design team was hired to redesign an urban garden, but they left it untouched, believing it was already perfect. Was this a failure to design, or a success? Can we celebrate inaction, if it is ethical? How to do so in our practice?
Indigenous: something other and foreign, or native and ancient (see Colonial). A label to use with extra care, with attention to the assumptions it carries and reproduces. Indigeneity may foster a closer connection to the places and ecosystems that we inhabit (see Nordic, Local). Becoming knowledgeable about the herbs, nature, culture, land of a country that is not your own can perhaps be a way of becoming native.
Infrastructure: Hidden systems undergirding our assumptions and what is possible. Infrastructure is durable up to a certain point. Use it as a backdrop. What does infrastructure do? What is durable, and what can change? What does durability mean? (See Restoring).
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K
Knowledge: What is the role of knowledge? Always look for the things you do not know, those that have been omitted or overlooked. Knowledge is constructed based on the phenomena and apparatuses that are available to us. There is not one objective knowledge. What is the knowledge that we de-prioritize (e.g. what is not funded by institutions, and where do we not look?). We reflected upon our role in perpetuating silence(s), and the fear of failure if we embark on “risky” research (see Data). Knowledge is situated and often comes from the body (within) (see Body). Exchange knowledge with Others.
L
Labour: It is important to acknowledge the labour involved in fabulating. As nothing is “given” when crafting alternative lifeworlds, and when putting to the fore narratives that escape predominant norms, one can feel exhausted. This can also lead to losing Hope, or courage. Developing an accountability of such feelings and mental and bodily states, for the individual fabulating and/or for a group fabulating collectively is important.
Local: (see Scale) Possibilities for everyday mundane actions in the “here and now”, everyday care, moving across horizons for small-scale interventions of self- and collective care. When something becomes hyper-local, hyper-ritualistic, and shifts from the “I” to the “we”, to being entangled with Bodies and nature. Fabulation and storytelling can be mobilized towards articulating alternatives ways of knowing and caring, across different scales. This can be used to problematize the notion of local knowledge (see Indigenous).
M
Margins: Make sure to highlight voices from the margins, who are typically excluded from conversations about the center/dominant/canon. Instead of looking at the Center, what Future visions are missing, excluded or peripheral? These could be past future visions that never got to be, or that were forgotten or ignored. Counter-examples of Center future visions manifest utopias of how futures could be different, including different ideologies, values, and intentions for change. We changed Center to Margin (and Care); proposing not a stable fixed center, but a plural patchwork of caring utopias from the margins that embody resistance to the dominant forces.
More-than-Human: Animals, technology, organisms, nature. The “rest.” This framing of entities is imbued with Ethics, Power, and hierarchy, especially when viewed in relation to humans. Do we sometimes use the notion of the more-than-human to represent many different things we do not have a good understanding of placing them in one big basket? More-than-human is full of trouble, for the term Human is a shifting and narrow term (see also Colonial). Can be used as a placeholder that allows us to see things from another perspective. Part of a constellation of terms, including non-human, posthuman, and to different epistemologies. Once the more-than-human is embraced as a placeholder, discussions can revolve around the Pluriverse, as an approach/viewpoint/stance towards the world, which already encompasses the idea of “other than human persons”.
N
Narratives: Complexity is always there, and the elements are not presented as either good or bad, anything can come up to the surface. There is not a “good” narrative. A fabulation can work with the relationships of multi species multi-environment polyversal thinking through elaborative narrative building, in which different actors, human, non-human, technical, spiritual, ecological and environmental, merge, blend, swim, fly, and transverse this polyverse. Every artifact, installation or system has narrative potential. Predominant narratives can be shifted through un-naming, among other tactics. Look for inspiration in narratives and materials, both locally and in different countries and cultures.
Nature: A term used to separate human lives from the lives of others. We are here, they are there. The split is made to make alienation seem natural—We are of them, they are of us.
Nordic: A polite fiction based on geographic convenience. An identity that emerges in relation to elsewheres. “Nordicness” is hard to grab a hold of. Is it a country club? Is it a coincidence? Mountains, forests, water, welfare states, wealth, whiteness? More than this, surely. But possibly not. At least, a context and situation for speculating how care works from “here”.
Nurturing: An individual and collective effort to develop the conditions for something. Start in the present, learn from the past, and aim for inclusive futures. Nurturing Nordic care infrastructures of health, means access to the healthcare systems in the Nordic countries, accessibility and knowledge coming from bodies or others, e.g. doctors, plants, (non)local cultures.
O
p
Past: Connected to the Present and Future.
Present: Connected to the Past and Future. You are here.
Problem: Identify for whom a problem is a problem. Fabulation is useful to work with the complexity of the multiple “problems” and their Boundaries. Seeks to reclaim design from a capitalist problemist framework. Rather than attempting to solve them with one big Solution, think in ways that allow to explore several options (especially if problems or stories are framed with the Hero story, look for the counter-hero); often we can see better and more from the Margins, therefore other perspectives and knowledges are needed (see Knowledge).
Power: A pervasive relation that produces specific disciplines, narratives and truths. Always present, therefore never ignore it (see also Colonial)
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Q
R
Responsibility: (see Accountability). Related to our ability to respond to the world in all its complexities, accounting for more-than-human agencies: a response-ability (ref. Haraway) This is also predicated on our ability to forge relationships with the world.
Restoring: To restore, we could stop designing (see Inaction) and focus on Undesign/Unmaking and abolitionist approaches (e.g. “let humans die out” was also discussed). Relates to co-living with Others (see More-than-Human).
S
Scale: Information and communication technologies are used across all scales (from individual bodies to global networks) and indeed they in many ways produce and link said scales conferring power to those who control the flows at a larger scale. Think of the liminal spaces of scales. This may mean reflecting on the ways that different forms of Care relationships intersect with and draw from each other across scales. Examples: how do church and state forms of care influence each other; or how are these reproduced in everyday care relations? And vice-versa? How is global policy enacted and affected locally? Where is the meso? Subvert scale, invert scale, create new ones.
Surveillance: Knowledge is often invoked as a pre-condition for caring. Researchers do it all the time: “We need to know more about a vulnerable Community“. Care and surveillance become closely intertwined when we equate one with the other. This dynamic is visible in how states invoke the need to care for their citizens to justify implementing national security and social surveillance, a practice historically extended to colonized and occupied territories. It is also seen in eldercare agencies, which use the promise of independent living to justify constant monitoring through sensors and cameras, blurring the lines between providing support and maintaining control. Can we care without knowing, without surveillance?
Sustainability: The notion of Restoring should replace “sustainable/sustainability”, as the latter is often used to justify maintaining the status quo, as seen in the concept of “sustainable development.” The focus should instead be on actively restoring what has been damaged or depleted.
T
Time: (see Horizon) We relate to one another through time, whereas analysis of relations (think of actor-network theory for example) focuses on the present mostly. Think of relations across different time Scales when designing. Our relations are never fixed, but always evolving. How does your action/inaction change the relations of the actors you care for, across time?
U
Undesign / Unmaking: A design practice that is not only of adding the new and more, but of re-enlivening, maintaining, repairing and caring for the aftermath of that which has already been made.
V
W
Worlding: Collaborative, ongoing process to think about how multiple, interconnected “worlds” are co-created through a complex network of relations that involve not just humans, but also other non-human species, technologies, and the environment.