This article proposes that creativity and criticality not only can but should be entangled and elevated in participatory futuring engagements. Selected concepts from creativity theory and critical futures studies are applied to develop a set of futuring games through action research. We claim that participatory processes designed to entangle and elevate creativity and criticality produce more novel and varied ideas that better fit the purposes of futures studies. This article offers four arguments for combining creativity and criticality in participatory futuring engagements. First, due to complexity and uncertainty, the future is ultimately unknowable and requires tools to probe the unknown. Second, novelty is difficult to achieve in practice while creativity and criticality can help overcome these challenges. Third, discontinuities are the main sources of futures that are most radically different from the present and will have the biggest impact. Fourth, creativity and criticality support the rigorous imagining required for exploring and discovering new possible futures. This article analyzes three experimentations in entangling and elevating creativity and criticality in game-based futuring, stemming from Causal Layered Analysis. Based on these examples, we demonstrate that creativity and criticality, when combined, help people break through the limitations of current understanding, reveal approaching tipping points, and find the "unvisited cavities" through rhizomatic knowledge creation. However, there remain challenges in evaluating how well various participatory designs support creativity and criticality in practice. Context-sensitive evaluation tools and open sharing of outcomes are needed to develop participation design principles capable of supporting creativity and criticality in participatory futuring.
This chapter builds upon the premise that a multiplex of shared and divergent Bio-Ethos -models of what would be a 'good' relationships among humans and other living beings -inform the actions humans take toward living nature and ecosystems. Global Warming and Environmental Change demand from people and our societies new ways of existing as part of living ecologies on this planet. In this setting, the Bioeconomy and Justice Project (BioEcoJust) aims to explore ethical troubles that could arise in the development of a global, pervasive, and dominant bioeconomy. This chapter demonstrates how a role-based futuring game piloted in the Bioeconomy and Justice project supports people in 'sensing and making sense' of emergent BioEthos. It presents and analyses the outcomes from the BioEcoJust Game session held at the 2019 World Futures Studies Federation Conference in Mexico City. The conceptual framework applied in the game interweaves theories of complexity, futures literacy, and scenarios as worldmaking, and operationalizes sensemaking tools developed in the earlier stages of the BioEcoJust project including BioWorlds, bioeconomy socio-technical domains, the Human-Nature-Technology triangle, and Bi-oEthos. The BioEcoJust Game pilot in Mexico City enabled its players to explore and critically assess the nuances and dimensions of an ethically troubled future situation and produce a new BioEthos which could be helpful to a unique set of roles for engaging the situation. While much of the literature concerning bioeconomy is concerned with the technical or social factors which can contribute to its development, little attention is paid to what larger ethical frameworks can support its just and fair evolution. The BioEcoJust Game emphasised 'keeping whole' the created worlds of a variety of roles responding to an imagined future situation and focused the participant's attention on the interface between assemblages of persons and their bounding conditions. The BioEcoJust Game can serve as a model for futuring games designed to help people develop skills for sensing and making sense of emergent BioEthos so they can apply these skills to develop a more just bioeconomy.
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