The focus of this workshop was ‘Interventions’, to further refine and develop fabulation as a mode of designing futures, paying special attention to how fabulation might be made more relevant beyond previously-explored situations. In the Oslo workshop, it became clear that there was a need to help participants to re-attune to fabulatory thinking, and that engaging with fabulation in the abstract was a little overwhelming. We therefore deliberately choose the provocative format of working with Design Briefs generated by generative AI, based on contemporary care concerns in the Nordics combined with future thinking. These resulted in the following briefs, each including overviews, objectives, focus areas, user-centered principles, and technology stacks: 

• Caring across More-than-Human and Planetary Timescales 

• Caring for the Ever-Changing Body 

• Nordic Robot Futures: Embodied Intelligence and Human Experience 

• Caring at the Margins of the Welfare State: Inclusive, Adaptive Systems for Belonging and Care 

• Follow the Food: Collaborating for a Sustainable Nordic Food System 

We hoped that these briefs would offer a starting point for fabulating rooted in technical contexts that could be resisted or criticized. Rather than being taken at face value, we hoped that the briefs could inspire the groups to react to how these ideas are being taken up and represented in systems, even with such a normative and technology-centered approach—at least to start. 

Day 1: Challenging ChatGPT Design Briefs for Care Futures 

The first day of the workshop explored the possibilities of Fabulation to address real-world scenarios of future care in the Nordics. Following the keynote, the day was organized in three sessions that were named ‘Think and Talk’, ‘Making in Silence’,‘Write/Materialise’. 

Think and Talk session introduced the AI-generated design briefs above. The Design Briefs offered a starting point for discussion in terms of what possible design directions care in the Nordics could take, with different orientations and domains of practice, ones that formed groups relatively naturally base on research interest, and returning to the core topics of care in the Nordics. As artificially produced text, the briefs offered frictions with the work presented in the keynote, by being both more tech-optimistic as well as generally flat in their considerations. This allowed the project groups to articulate what they could work with instead of the generated briefs. In that sense, the briefs offered a line of thinking to playfully oppose, inviting criticism and humour into the process. The session resulted in shared critiques of the provided design briefs, the sharing of own design research, and a rough annotated articulation of design openings on the printed hand-outs.  

In the second session. ‘Making in Silence’, a variety of materials were at every group’s disposal to initiate ‘tinkering with’, inspired by a long history of Scandinavian participatory and collaborative approaches to design. These materials were prepared in advance of the workshop, and consisted of pens, markers, glue, paper, and the typical office supplies; while also various other materials such as textiles, bendable wires, wooden sticks, similar from the studio space the workshop was held in. With Making in Silence, we wanted to offer a space for everyone to both exercise their creative ideas via play with materials, without the pressures of having to articulate these in the moment to other group members. This allowed the individual ideas to grow and mature. In practice, ideas and materials were shared in a natural way, resulting in a safe reflective space of individual making. 

In the session ‘Write/Materialise’, the ideas that emerged in the groups were shared and further developed in material and/or written form. Practically, this served to be a wrap-up of the previous session, that allowed each group to make plans for which care fabulation(s) to work on during the second day.  

Day 2: Developing an Exhibiting Fabulations 

The fabulations were refined in the session named ‘Making Connections’. The session allowed each group to bring together the work from the previous day, and to work towards an exhibitable format in the afternoon. We saw a variety of materials emerging here: a combination of visual collage, photographic enactment, fictional narratives, wearables, scale models, and film, among others. We closed the day with reflections on fabulations as a practice, the role of fabulations in design research, the relevance of materiality in developing fabulations, and ultimately, how fabulations can offer unique perspectives on care futures that other ways of futuring might not be able to achieve.