Worldbuilding through Shapeshifting
Reflections on our first workshop at Regens Unite, Berlin
Last weekend, alongside Niels Devisscher, I have facilitated my first workshop on the topic of regeneration, in Regens Unite festival in Berlin. I wanted to share how the idea originated, the process, and my reflections. Here’s to learning in public.
Designing for More-Than-Human World
It started with an idea, sparked this summer in Denmark, Hvalsø. There, I participated in a multi-species-centered design camp for architects, researchers, designers, and artists, called INSECT.
We explored embodied and conceptual ways of getting closer to an experience of more-than-human. We focused on insect, fungi, and plant species—extending our senses and engaging our imaginations in ways that allowed for deeper empathy with those that we were designing for and with.
In the camp, I had an opportunity to design a guided visualization practice that allowed the participants to embody an insect of their choice, guiding their phenomenological experience beyond human.
How does it feel to leave your body, and become a dragonfly? How do your wings, then, feel in proportion to your body? How does it inform your movement through space?
In the second part of the workshop, the participants continued building body-morphing exoskeletons, with a purpose of moving further into an altered somatic perception.
Recognition comes, that much of our individual perception is guided by the way our bodies were shaped through evolution.
Shapeshifting as a Sensemaking & Design Tool
What allows us to go beyond human perspective are practices that our ancestors have lead and embodied for thousands of years: shapeshifting into different animals for purpose of survival, hunting, spiritual practice, and shamanism. It could be wrapping oneself in a fur of an animal and reenacting their movements and patterns of behavior. Now, we can adapt these ancestral practices to empathize with more-than-human world for everything that future design is asking for: a reality that is inclusive and regenerative for all living forms.
This might be the most comprehensive episode on shapeshifting you could find.
Imagine if decision-makers ( from any field or with any degree of agency ) could deeply submerge into the experiences of those, who will be affected by their decisions. Those who design our worlds—culture, economy, governance, web, urban planning, agriculture, energy, relationality, education, infrastructures—are creating mass ripple effects for individual experiences of the future.
Those of us who are working to shake up the foundational ways the world has been designed, are faced with questions that past generations were refusing to ask: what is the consequence of annihilation of the living personal experience?
Can a thought and embodiment experiment stretch our perception so as to change the way we design our futures?
What seems to be emerging in the collective design practice, is the significance of inclusive and relational worldviews. As we reimagine the future potentials for Earth, we are stepping into the sapience of the living world: it asks us to be recognized as equal in our perception of significance and to move beyond speciecism.
Sapience—
the ability to understand inner qualities or relationships.
How can we understand the relationality of reality, if we do not look through the eyes of a person, a unique experience? Reverance to individual stories and experiences is at the core of the new world building. A regenerative future reframes our perception filters: from an extraction-separation-centric worldview toward a regenerative-relationships-centric worldview. An applied recognition of relationality is at the core of our ability to reimagine new narratives.
Imagine you could take on a perception of a mountain, of a river, of a forest ecosystem, of a landslide, of a glacier, of a honeybee, of a mycelium network. How would that experience inform your understanding of time, culture, community, and relationality?
Here, world-building is informed through the eyes of a living system that experiences that new future. Decision-making in design and storytelling becomes informed by stories and perceptions of more-than-human participants.
Let us be informed by the experiences of all living systems.
If we are designing for regenerative future, we are designing for the shift in consciousness—away from separation dominance and towards recognition of relationality and deep support of other life forms.
Workshop—the Flow, Feedback, & Reflections
In this workshop we moved participants into a deep space of embodiment of a more-than-human life form from the future, allowing it to speak through the human participant. We wanted to highlight that future, in this context, was a sliding scale of experiences and timelines.
Part 1 — Guided Visualization and Movement
We took the 30 participants through a custom-designed guided visualization practice that lead them to temporarily leave the anthropomorphic somatic perspective and move into a perspective of Earth as the primary body*. This was a crucial step that allowed participants to disidentify with having a physical animal body.
Becoming Earth body meant that participants could later morph into any living being that has emerged from Earth, since the beginning of life. Ranging from a body of water, to an ecosystem, to a single cell organism, mammal, fungi, bacteria, or even virus.
Continuing the visualization, participants were guided to shapeshift into any living being they chose, which was further grounded through movement practice.
* Adapted from Daisy Hildyard’s book The Second Body.
Part 2—Group Inquiry into Potential Future Experiences
The participants were divided into smaller groups, where they had a chance to submerge into a deep inquiry of their chosen embodiment. Participants were given a set of questions that would spark the mapping of individual future-experiences: in the body, in the environment, in the relationality, in the memory.
Understanding experience, ultimately, allows us to understand the needs and desires of that individual: whether the needs are recurring or arising from a new set of circumstances.
Part 3 —Feedback & Reflection
We wanted to know how the shapeshifting experience allowed the participants to understand the malleability of our perceptions and how it could inform our design/ research/ artistic/ stewardship practices.
We have received a lot of encouraging and positive feedback and we hope to address and iterate together with the harvested responses. Below we share key reflection points.
Futures Literacy
A participant, after the workshop shared that Futures Literacy was made to be one of the most essential skills of the 21st century (by Unesco)—as essential as reading was in the 20th century.
But how can we design regenerative future for all living systems, if we are deeply subjected to a human-centric perception of reality?
This invites us to inquire further into future potentials through subjective experiences. The objective future is a collection of subjective futures of all living systems, many of them overlapping or completely diverging in contrast.
Inevitable Antrophormizm
What was also reflected, is that it’s truly impossible to leave the human experience behind fully. That it is hard not to anthropomorphize everything.
That indeed, is a good thing. We are meant to experience life through our subjective human perspective. This is a humble fact. However, our imagination and mirror neurons allow us to push our imagination far enough to empathize with what it feels like to be in someone else’s skin, fur, bark, roots. Here, we move beyond empathy.
Can a bumblebee inform the way we build communities? Can a forest teach us about the way we design healthcare systems? Can a glacier expand our understanding about rituals of death and mourning, that seem to be so far-removed from grief-phobic western society?
Beyond the Living Systems
One participant experienced themselves as a future city, inhabited by humans. This raised an interesting point: can we extend our perception into the collective consciousness and collective constructs? Can we imagine how the future city feels being inhabited by humans?
Taking Time
Another participant expressed that these type of practices gives us space and time to zoom out and think through the way we design new systems. In the presence of climate crisis, we feel a deep sense of urgency: the notion of taking time and space seems irresponsible, or counterproductive. Yet, we argue that creating experiences of slowing down—defining a boundary for space and time, allow us to co-regulate our inflamed / overstimulated nervous systems. It also gives us an opportunity to resource our creativity from empathy and systems change approach, rather than a fear-driven sensemaking.
We welcome all further feedback. For collaboration inquiries, please reach out directly to rutzem@gmail.com or @modern_psyche.
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