Designing Immersive Participatory Practices for Enacting Eco-Social Transformations: Playful Encounters, Recovering Futures

Presenting myriad accounts from artists and designers, this book explores how we can transform our societies to greet uncertain futures with greater readiness and care through immersive, creative experiences. Crossing performance, theatre, games, sociodrama, participatory design, socially-engaged art, live action role-play, eco-social commitments and more-than-human philosophies, this edited volume examines common processes by which transformations in culture may be kick-started or confirmed, revealing disciplinary differences, but united by an interest in the meeting of prefigurative politics, participatory method, immersive structure and care-based ethos. Readers will take away insights into conducting work that make a documented difference, at a tier between the individual and the society and looking past current failures of imagination to worlds beyond the (post)industrial ruins. Fourteen chapters, including one dedicated to participatory evaluation, describe practices of change-making from across Europe and offer inspiration and technique in tackling interrelated ecological, cultural and existential challenges at a time when trends doubling down on extraction and consumerism are clearly doomed. Offering an opportunity to investigate an engaging approach to social transformation from all sides, this book will be of relevance to artists, designers, students of performance, transformation and sustainability professionals and anyone interested in how we move societies from current impasses to collective action and caring, collaborative worlds.