The thickening of futures

This paper engages with biodiversity loss. In particular, it focuses on observations and scientific facts: the decline of pollinators and what that entails for the co-living of humans and more-than-humans. This kind of work often reaches the publics as thin stories of limited futures. The article explores how to situate the issue of out-of-sync plant – pollinator relationships into thick, ongoing presents rather than as a distant future that is out of one ’ s own hands. This is done through a collaborative design project that experiments with various formats for staging more material, embodied and experiential ways to sensitise and invite humans to experience the issue of pollination. We therefore explore and give an account of how we have situated the issues in a thick, ongoing present as an anticipatory practice. We thus suggest a practice that becomes both sticky and sweaty; in addition, the practice moves some pollination facts into not only matters of concern but also matters of care. In doing so, we forward the role that design researchers can play in environmental and collaborative anticipation by engaging with emerging approaches to both biodiversity loss and collaborative future-making that are simultaneously conflicting and harsh as well as hopeful.


Introduction
"Good stories reach into rich pasts to sustain thick presents to keep the story going for those who come after" (Haraway, 2016a, p. 125).Reports, observations, predictions and speculation often tell us stories that anticipate a thin and limited future, a future that often seems to be exhausted of alternatives due to various reasons and experiences.Thin ice, invasive snails eating the flowers in our backyard, documents and scientific facts describing increasing numbers of red-listed species and botanica going extinct-they all become layers in the compost pile of trouble in our ongoing epoch.Such knowledge and facts are of utter need and importance, but might be hard for the public to access and grasp.
In this paper, we will focus on one particular prediction of a thin future: the alarming loss of pollinators, which in turn will lead to the loss of many of the fruits, vegetables and other crops that we take for granted today.These are concerns on the individual, national and international levels.To give some examples, on a global scale, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report (IPBES, 2019) discusses the increasing loss of biodiversity, including pollinators.The European Commission (2018) has been working on an initiative to improve knowledge of the decline of pollinators, including its causes and consequences.The result was published in a report (European Commission, 2018) that included a suggested set of actions to be taken by the EU and its members to address the decline of pollinators and contribute to global conservation efforts.In Sweden, the Environmental Protection Agency has done significant mapping of what pollinators contribute, the preconditions for their existence, what affects them and their importance in maintaining the health of ecosystems (Borgstro¨m et al., 2018).Another administrative authority with a different agenda, the Swedish Board of Agriculture, has published a report (Friberg & Haldén, 2016) on how to improve crop yields by supporting individual pollinators.When these predictions, speculations, observations and suggestions are reported in the news, they run the risk of becoming too thin and too single-focused.There is clearly no lack of information regarding this issue; however, questions remain as to how they can be distributed and performed otherwise.As design researchers, we thus ask ourselves: How can such thin stories of the future influence the way we act in the present?How do they influence the way we relate to, prepare for, and intervene in the future?How can we stage such important information and reports in ways that might better sensitise us to the issue of pollination?
In response to these questions, we have set out to explore ways of thickening the present as a form of anticipatory practice.This approach was explored in an event called Appetisers for Un/Made Futures, in which we used designerly means to thicken the present in order to prepare for and navigate towards or away from uncertain (unwanted) futures.Through curating a set of specifically designed recipes for appetisers containing ingredients that stage different pollination relations, participants were invited to discuss and digest multiple ways of engaging in a troubled and thick present that is attached to ongoing pasts and still-possible futures (Haraway, 2016a).The ingredients can thus be understood as thickeners of a sort that enact or invite different kinds of imaginaries and practices.For example, they point towards such different ongoing and emerging approaches to future-making as that of tech-fix, bio-tech fix, rewilding, reviving, acceptance of loss, sacrifice, good enough, restoration and game over.In other words, the ingredients do not predict one particular future, but bring different practices of intervening in the future of pollination to the table.Thus, the recipes for appetisers offer one way of thickening the present rather than providing one well-defined prediction of a (thin) future.
The event was hosted during a symposium on Imagining Collaborative Future-Making1 and is part of an ongoing project Un/Making Pollination 2 that explores material and embodied forms for engaging with the making and unmaking of plant-human-pollinator relationships.

Design, futures and thick presents
This design research project is situated within an area of research that combines methods and approaches from participatory design (PD) with perspectives and theories from Science and Technology Studies (STS) (Andersen, 2012;Jönsson, 2014;Lindström & Ståhl, 2020).The original motivations of researchers in early Scandinavian participatory design projects were explicitly to counteract the dehumanising effects of an increasing technological presence in the workplace; these researchers were concerned with empowering workers whose jobs would otherwise be replaced by technology (Ehn, 1988).Today, PD activities are no longer confined to a specific worksite or a specific organisation but have entered into new areas, such as democratising innovation (Björgvinsson et al., 2010;Ehn et al., 2014), creating experimental methodological setups and developing public engagement events (Lindström & Ståhl, 2020) and more-than-human design events (Jönsson, 2014).Methodologically, participatory design often makes use of workshops, interventions and prototyping to facilitate participation in the design process.In recent years, this has increasingly been described as an engagement in design, where the social is a kind of design material, a turn towards an explicit combination of sociology and design (Andersen, 2012;Binder et al., 2011;Björgvinsson et al., 2010;DiSalvo, 2009;Ehn, 2008;Lindström & Ståhl, 2014;Olander, 2014;Storni et al., 2015;Yndigegn, 2016).
This growing engagement between experimental design researchers inspired by Science and Technology Studies (STS) and by science scholars experimenting with design and design methodologies (Jungnickel, 2020;Marres et al., 2018;Michael, 2012;Tironi & Hermansen, 2018) reflects the view in the social sciences that social life is not something that simply exists out there, but is something that makes it possible to create new relations among knowing, doing and intervening in social life.As described by Marres et al. (2018), one of the main points when bringing together social research with arts and design practices is that it makes possible new types of experimental intervention.For design's sake, and for this paper, we are mostly interested in how STS has (or has potentially) influenced how the notion of 'the future' is being used in design.As pointed out many times, designers inherently work with the intangible matter of the future: the as-yet-unknown, the projective and the undefined.Ideas about the future are at stake in many design arguments and practices; for example, they are used for rendering policy scenarios into more visual and publicly accessible formats (Candy & Kornet, 2019;Mazé, 2019).However, the future is not an empty space awaiting projected visions from an incomplete present or a predefined destination that we can simply foresee and arrive at.Rather, futures are always already here as part of a continuous unfolding of the past and the present (Kjaersgaard et al., 2016).Drawing from STS, it is argued that the presentness and transformation of the world are always in the making; the world is always open to being otherwise.There is no manifesto of what the world is, because it is always in a state of becoming; it is emergent.We even compose the world, according to Latour (2010), and we can compose it differently.It is a shift that moves us from a single world to the idea that the world is multiply produced.And there is not one future but many futures.This clearly engenders questions for design, of how to design for multiple futures, as well as the timely process of understanding what and whose futures were previously designed for, and with that, which future has not been designed for.
In this paper, we draw on feminist technoscience scholar Haraway to enable the exploration of such relations vis-à-vis the future.In her deliberate misreading of the suffix -cene, from the Greek kainos meaning recent, she suggests that we understand the present as "a thick ongoing now, the now that collects up inheritances and makes ongoing possible.The kainos of times that are not reducible to an instantaneous present, that is always disappearing into the past" (Haraway, 2016b, 14:43).To then be able to move forward in a more response-able way, the concept of the 'thick present' forces us to expand the very now to include troubling stories, such as different sorts of repressions and neglect that stretch back in time.This, to avoid making the mistake of imagining safe futures for the coming generations.Rather than trying to clear away the present and the past, Haraway suggests that we learn to be truly present "…not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings" (2016a, p. 1).
As design researchers situated in a participatory design research tradition, we then ask ourselves how the thickening of presents can be done collectively.How can we use designerly means to expand the now, to keep the story going?

The experimental and caring set-up
Our engagement with both pollination and questions concerning its futures draws methodologically on democratic design experiments (Binder et al., 2015) that aim to gather heterogeneous actors around matters of concern.Drawing from the work of Latour on "making things public" (2005), the word 'thing' is actualised in its double meaning: a meeting and a matter.The English word 'thing' has Germanic roots.In Scandinavian languages, 'ting' can also mean 'assembly' in contemporary language.Ting, thing and Ding all, regardless of language, refer to an archaic assembly where people would gather around diverse matters of concern to "… come to some sort of provisional makeshift (dis)agreement" (Latour, 2005, p. 23).Such assemblies do not have the character of 'matters of fact', but rather of 'matters of concern'.They typically connect people not because they are factually true but because they embody a common involvement that includes all the diverse viewpoints related to a matter.The politics of things is wherever something is at stake.Furthering these thoughts into a design context, Jönsson et al. (2019) and Lindström and Ståhl (2019) previously suggested additions to the democratic design experiments by adding insight from Puig de la Bellacasa's (2017) work on care.Puig de la Bellacasa suggested that "matters of care aim to add something to matters-of-fact/concern with the attention of not only respecting them but of getting further involved in their becoming" (p.66).In other words, approaching matters through care opens up for involvement and attachments, rather than distant concerns.And, she continues, "(d)e-centering the human subject in more-than-human webs of care has the potential to re-organise human-nonhuman relations towards non-exploitive forms of co-existence (Puig de la Bellacasa, p. 24).Matters-of-care is less about unveiling, deconstructing or explaining matters-of-fact, but is a suggestion to "engage with them so that they generate caring relationalities" (Puig de la Bellacasa, p.66).With the aim of generating, engaging with and giving form to big enough stories (Haraway 2016a) through design, Lindström and Ståhl (2019) suggest that this specific notion of care can support us in highlighting how to work with neglected things.
Designing with and for matters of care with specific attention to repressed or neglected things, along with the central challenge of how to make issues experientially available to engaged and diverse citizens (Binder et al., 2015), form our explorations of embodied storytelling in design.Against this background, we see potential in what might help us thicken presents.

Embodied more-than-human storytelling
Storytelling is a complex activity that engages both the teller's and the listener's abilities to use various kinds of semiotic resources, such as language, body parts and memory and requires both emotional and cognitive attunement (Hydén, 2013).For us to better situate our designerly practice in light of the ongoing issue of pollination, we have further drawn on how Haraway (2016a) proposes multispecies storytelling as a crucial practice for (better) "living and dying with critters on the edge of disappearance, so that they might go on" (2016, p. 8).
As discussed by Groves (2017), anticipation has tended to be humanised via a focus on language and representation and has in general failed to acknowledge its more than human dimensions.Hence, to understand how other creatures, specifically the many pollinators that already are at the edge of disappearance, might go on together with humans, not only must the story as text be in focus, but also more experimental narrative accounts.As stated by Haraway (2016a), "Science fact and speculative fabulation need each other, and both need speculative feminism" (p.3).Drawing from feminist knowledge politics that problematise epistemological distances, fostering haptic abilities for perceiving less noticeable politics is highlighted as a marginalised oppositional skill as well as an important strategy in our search for fostering and making other worlds (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2009), as well as cultivating response-ability for a damaged earth (Haraway, 2016a).
Making and eating food, as exemplified through this project, highlight one way to set such almost unnoticeable and ordinary politics to work using all its connotations of 'yummy-ness', 'togetherness' and a long history of being an (often) delicate haptic experience.Working with food as a designerly material in design research and experimental engagement processes is nothing new (for a few examples, see Hasan, 2015;Lenskjold & Wilde, 2020).However, it is precisely the everyday qualities of food that make it interesting; it is easy to gather around, and it is a familiar material to work with for most.By attending to this specific sensory embodied experience, this project, much in line with the arguments of the above-mentioned scholars, more generally tries to further and emphasise the body as a marginalised oppositional device in knowledge production.In this lies the potential for anticipation, for ways of sensitising us to futures.As proclaimed by others, rather than contemplating distinct objects, other beings, the environment as separate from self, such a posthumanist mode of engagement insists that humans cannot be separated from an external environment.We are all stuff of this world (Alaimo, 2014), and accordingly, "Thinking as the stuff of the world entails grappling with the strange agencies of ordinary objects that are already part of ourselves, as well as considering what it means for other creatures to contend with the environments they now inhabit" (Alaimo, 2014, p. 13).Along this line, both Ingold (2008) and Tsing (2015) use fungi as a basis to L. Jönsson et al. illustrate how organisms are entangled and have many ways of interacting.This points to the interwoven relationships and dependencies between people and our food.Plants, animals, water and soil cannot be disentangled from human bodies, technologies and the wider world-and are thus all both biological and cultural.
As design researchers working with participation and inspired by feminist technoscience traditions, we develop the question we posed earlier.We ask ourselves how such posthumanist and sensory embodied experiences might contribute to expanding the repertoire of anticipatory practices to be collective beyond the human, in light of current ecological crises, to keep the story going.

Appetisers for un/made futures
Let us return to the issue of predictions and speculations of a thin future without pollinators and all the loss that might come from this.In this project, the aim was not only to discuss this, but to embody, experience and literally taste thin futures and thick presents.
The word 'appetiser' suggests that it comes before something else.It is meant to create an appetite for something as a kind of preparation.The recipes for appetisers are, in other words, not predictions about a specific and well-defined (thin) future.They do not Fig. 1.Staging of the split table.One-half contains popcorn, embodying stories of a predicted thin future.The other half contains the 'thickeners' that are offered to support participants to thicken their appetisers, or that which is yet to come.
L. Jönsson et al. tell us exactly what will come.Instead, the recipes bring together a variety of ingredients that tell us different stories about pollination to thicken the present.Below, we describe our attempt to stage and enact this issue in a workshop with invited participants.

The thickeners
When entering the room, participants are met by a table split into two halves.On one side of the table, which is filled with popcorn, one is invited to have a light snack from the crop, which is wind pollinated; this represents the predicted future without pollinators.The opposite side of the table is filled with ingredients or alternatives that might potentially thicken our imaginaries about the futures, described as 'thickeners' (Fig. 1).That is, it holds stories and objects concerned with the thick and troubled presents that are multiple and where there is a multitude of ideas and possibilities to draw on when imagining what is yet to come.At first glance, the table might resemble someone's pantry clear-out.The thickeners encased in glass jars, however, comprise carefully sourced and consciously chosen things and reflect that which somehow might trouble and thicken the issue of pollination.In one jar, there is a vanilla pod with an attached troubling description about how the vanilla today is always hand-pollinated since its natural pollinator has gone almost extinct.Another jar contains some scruffy-looking almonds with an attached description that notes they were picked in the local southern region of Sweden: "At the moment, there are only a few, but there are entrepreneurial hopes that almonds will become a new local produce in southern Sweden thanks to increased temperature.However, there are also fears of simultaneously unpredictable harvests since climate change seems to entail storms and other threats to the crop" (excerpt from label).
A third glass jar is filled with lupine legumes.The attached description notes that they bring hopeful futures, due to their qualities that might support Scandinavia in replacing its heavy import of crops to feed cattle from the southern hemisphere.In addition, lupines are not only beneficial for shifting destructive farming, but their early blooming allows overwintering pollinators to strengthen themselves on their very protein-rich pollen.
All in all, around 20 thickeners-jars with partly speculative content and an attached label describing one specific hope or concern in regard to the future for pollinators-fill this half of the table.Some labels suggest quick tech-and biotech fixes, such as tech-drone Fig. 2. A close-up of glass jars showing selections of various partly speculative 'thickeners' on the table with attached troubling descriptions, including artificial pollinators, pesticides used in sugar production and seedless tomatoes developed through CRISPR technology.
L. Jönsson et al. pollinators and self-fertile almonds from genetic modification programmes (Fig. 2).Others suggest the reviving of past practices, such as rewilding the threatened European dark bees, and some suggest game-overs.
Gathered around the table and snacking away on the popcorn, literally tasting a predicted future without pollinators, the participants are asked to respond in different ways to the issue through the process of making appetisers.

Recipes for troubled presents and still-possible futures
Following the recipe for either Apple Punch or Marzipan Delight, participants are asked to collaboratively make appetisers.While the recipes do give the participants some methods for assembling the appetisers, the emphasis is placed on the ingredients.Like the above-described thickeners, but as longer stories, they are sourced to incorporate issues and hope that often seem difficult or contradictory when mixed together.These descriptive stories of the thickening ingredients draw on scientific facts or innovations concerned with past, present and future issues of pollination.To exemplify this, the two ingredients that make up the punch (apple and fermented honey) are described in how the actual apples used have been pollinated by bumblebees that were born and bred in a biotech factory in southern Europe (Fig. 3).
Just in time for pollination, they were sent by mail in a box through smooth infrastructures in Europe to a logistics centre in southern Sweden and then distributed to the apple orchard.The lid of the box was opened by the farmer and the continental subspecies of Bombus terrestris flew out to do their work, just like any other actor in the multispecies labour force.Often honeybees are feted as the great pollinators of crops and wild plants, but recent studies show that bumblebees do most of the work.They are well adapted to rough conditions, foraging earlier in the day and later at night, at lower temperatures and even in light rain.Introducing the non-native bumblebee potentially owes these well-formed apples their shape.Some of these apples might also have been pollinated by honeybees that live in hives kept by neighbouring farms.(excerpt from recipe) The description is written to point to and highlight how the recently growing innovation biotech businesses raise potential ethical concerns with regard to the production of an army of multispecies labour.In addition, they hint at huge and speculative future issues of introducing new subspecies into new local habitats and the consequences of this, such as the rivalry among different species over food.
Another ingredient that makes up the Apple Punch is a fizzy liquid made of fermented honey.This particular drink was developed by local natural scientists (Olofsson et al., 2016) to combat illnesses by drawing on prehistoric knowledges about the coexistence of honeybees and humans.As described by the scientist when meeting him (Olofsson, personal communication, November 5, 2019), the first human beekeepers weren't 'keepers' at all, but foragers of wild honey.This particular fact turns out to have consequences for the healing reputation of honey, since it was then always eaten as fresh produce.The healing enzymes in honey survive only a short amount of time and are killed when heated (as most commercial honey is today).Here, the thickener, the fermented honey, is both surfacing the past forgotten knowledge and practices articulated through questions of health for both humans and animals, as well as alternative presents by highlighting how hope is invested in bee's bacteria as a replacement for antibiotics.
When the honey is fresh, the enzymes are active for about a month if not treated with a heat process.Or, they can be preserved by a lactofermentation harvested from beehives with domesticated animals.Honey cannot, however, be found wild in Scandinavia.Both wild pollinators and domesticated honeybees are under threat.And it seems that when humans answer these threats by putting up beehives with agile honeybees, they are so efficient that they also take what the wild pollinators could have lived off.A conflict between different sorts of pollinators.(excerpt from recipe) Yet another example of troubling ingredients can be taken from the thickener of the Marzipan Delight.In this particular recipe, the almonds are presented as coming from a test field from a Spanish genetic improvement programme that has developed self-fertile almond trees-trees that can generate large, tasty almonds without pollinators.Fig. 3. Photo depicting the orchard where the apples were picked for the event on appetisers.The cardboard hive in the background is the home of the factory-bred Bombus terrestris, which is used for pollination in many fruit and berry farms in Sweden.
L. Jönsson et al.The honey used to sweeten the marzipan in the appetiser is described as being produced by the very popular and trademarked Buckfast Bee, a bee most often used for honey production in Europe, since it is considered to be a well-behaved bee that rarely stings.Again, the thickener is attempting to both surface the past forgotten knowledges and practices, this time by highlighting the almost extinct and less 'well-behaved' local honeybee: The honeybees are unusual since they are domesticated insects, due to their skill of both producing honey and pollinating our crops.Once, Apis mellifera mellifera (the European dark bee) was the most common local honeybee.This bee was good at coping with rough weather but not very easy to control and not as gentle as the trademarked monastery bee.At the turn of the last century, the local European dark bee had almost gone extinct, partly due to the heavy import of other bees and cross-breeding.(excerpt from recipe)

Making, digesting and altering recipes
Gathered in groups, the participants dive into making the appetisers (Fig. 4,Fig. 5,Fig. 6,Fig. 7,Fig. 8,Fig. 9,.Peeling and pressing the apples requires that we use collaborative brute force to get liquid for the Apple Punch.Through the monotonous labour of shelling, grounding and mixing the almonds with honey, the participants start shaping the Marzipan Delights . While making the appetisers, the groups are also invited to imagine altered versions of the recipes by considering how they might have been situated in the past or in a present elsewhere or in an imagined future.These altered versions of the recipes are not made during the event but named and scribbled on the back of the printed recipes to be passed on to someone else to use at another time (Fig. 11).
In support of these imagined altered versions of the recipes, the participants can also use the thickeners on the split table to enrich their stories and to create narratives that further trouble both presents and futures.
Towards the end of the session, we gather and serve each other appetisers and attempts at altered recipes with thick troubling stories.This is predominantly a moment of celebrating the fruits of the labour that has been put into the appetisers.The participants are starting to digest what they have been experiencing (Fig. 12).However, a more focused and collective reflection was referred to the next morning.The choice to make time for digesting the experience was based on the idea that thickening takes time.
As we reconvene the next day, each group has the chance to share their altered recipes with the rest of us.Most have only made Fig. 4. The split table is positioned in the middle of the room during the event.
Fig. 5.Some participants gathered around the table are curious, and some are more doubtful about how to make use of the thickeners to make their own recipes and stories.
L. Jönsson et al. short notes on possible alterations to the recipes that were made the day before; however, these are further elaborated on and even performed as we gather.Some recipes are altered to incorporate more easily grown crops for the local cold climate of southern Scandinavia.One group attempted to replace the almonds with alternative local, "better" thickeners, such as sunflower seeds and buckwheat, while the sweet alternatives to honey could be polypod, birch sap, maple syrup, carrot or berries.These new alternatives raise questions and uncertainties in terms of having to imagine the consequences of the alteration.This is in terms of taste qualities-might it become too fatty, and not so delighty?However, they also consider how these alternatives might relate better or worse to the local ecosystems-do they perhaps need more water for growing?The production of the paste making up the delight is also considered-can they easily be ground without the use of an electric mixer?Another group focuses on making a range of alternatives with different shapes and forms out of the marzipan by adding some of the thickeners from the split table.For example, they explore locally grown versions of rare almonds from Malmö that we put in one jar-but could not find an appropriate tool to crack the hard shell.Their experiments keep their hands busy while they are, as they describe them, scrutinising their experiments through ethics and taste.In hindsight, the group notes that they needed to work through the given recipe to then break the rules and come up with their alteration.The outcome of their work, 'Dusty Delight', is described as having a peculiar taste, made of sunflower seeds, resin from pine trees as a sweetener and rosemary as a flavouring.An experiment in Fig. 6.While reading the recipes on the pink paper and eating popcorn, the appetiser Marzipan Delight is slowly in the making.Fig. 7. Producing marzipan, which only comprises two ingredients (almonds and honey), requires a lot of physical labour to become an actual workable paste.The participants take turns in doing the manual work of turning the handle.taste, consistency and appearance.
One group incorporates the unexpected and perhaps undesired outcome of their attempts to make apple punch in their altered recipe, called 'Malmöini' referring to the drink 'Bellini'.In trying to manage the apple press, the result turns out to be more like apple puree than apple juice.The somewhat failed outcome raises questions regarding how to proceed: to redesign the apple press or to embrace this accidental recipe.
Other participants read the instructions and focus on producing the appetisers; however, they neglect the final brief of remaking the recipes.Still others highlight the importance and preciousness of physical presence and togetherness through making and performing their altered recipe, 'Hug/Die Delight', with the instruction to have body heat contact, such as through hugging, between at least two persons for 90 s.
In the experience of making the delights with manual labour through sweat and laughter, questions of stickiness are raised among both the participants and us: What do we do with our hands glued to the future?It is mentioned that we collectively taste the introduced dilemmas of pollination and storying.Are we even making a story machine that is educational and working with  L. Jönsson et al. performative predictions and speculations where uncertainties of new kinds arise?As recipes and experiences are shared, we are also asked: What are you doing with our crazy recipes?Our immediate answer is that we might turn some of the input into thickeners and add them to the existing ones.We also think we might try out some of the recipes ourselves.At the back of our minds is the possibility of organising a new session with adjusted invitations.

Stories of un/made futures as an anticipatory practice
One of the main threads weaving through the caring design experiment articulated above is storytelling, or 'storying' (Haraway, 2016b).Perhaps most famous for her speculative fictions, Le Guin was among the first to publish books in the genre now known as feminist science fiction.Following Haraway (2016b), stories of fiction and nature-cultural facts need room for conflict and messy tales that can be used for retelling and reseeding narratives rather than just telling them.Accordingly, it is in such experimental practice of opening up stories, in the daring to create and to fabulate, we find possibilities of doing otherwise, for rediscovering engagements for more-than-human worlds.In other words, the conditions for sharing stories should be experimented with, rather than owned by storytellers, academic or otherwise.In Haraway's own words concerning Le Guin's writing, we need stories that are big enough, "situated stories that can collect up what's needed here, so that it can be given.In an Ursula Le Guin's way of talking about it, a shelf that can hold a little water or a few seeds that which can somehow be collected and offered and taken.That's the kind of storying we need to be doing" (2016b, 22:52).
To us, the description of the shelf is similar to the staging of the split table filled with different ingredients that can be collected, offered and taken to thicken the recipes, the present-and thereby also to open up for imagining many kinds of futures.Le Guin's shelf became actualised into a table filled with Appetisers for Un/Made Futures; the seeds became thickeners, resulting in a buffet containing different thick presents that allow optimistic, gloomy, tech-fixed futures to be articulated as uncertain narratives.The thickeners are tangible; they can be picked up, shared and used for retelling new narratives.As shown, this is evident in how some of the participants altered the recipes to suggest other possibilities.In this case, a suggestion to replace almonds with sunflowers might at first seem like a mundane gesture, but is a suggestion of a situated reseeding of narratives that has been offered and taken.And while trying out, or prototyping, 'storying' new narratives, we can see glimpses of opposition in seeing new business opportunities for developing crops that can handle more extreme weather or life without pollinators.Or by suggesting acts that are more focused on caring and providing for pollinators than for us humans.The recipes can thus be thought of as big enough stories that can be collected, offered and taken.As they are taken up, they are constantly renegotiated, altered and adjusted to the situation at hand.If taken on response-ably, they can also intervene in still-possible futures of pollination.
However, another important thread has been to introduce more embodied and material engagements to acknowledge more than human dimensions in anticipation.This was done in an attempt to increase the entanglements and connections among human bodies, animal bodies, ecosystems and technologies by paying attention to the different descriptions and carefully sourced ingredients.This was further done through the actual act of eating.Each singular ingredient, or thickener, that makes up the table is presented through three-dimensional objects.As a collection gathered on the table, many of the thickeners conflict with one another.A tech-drone with an accompanying description of the recent innovation is placed alongside a bee hotel aimed at hosting wild pollinators in the city.Hence, imaginaries of hopes of fixing pollination without living pollinators are positioned as equal to hopes of continuing to live together.This surfaces very different versions and imagined futures of how to handle ecosystems that are out of sync.
In hindsight and in our reflections, we thought that although the event focused on something that was hands-on and connected to the everyday, it did not get us as close to the act of pollination as we wanted to be.We heard from the participants that the event was like embodied eco-literature-like experiencing a story with ones' whole body.And that's good, but in the focus on the fruits and successful materials connected to plant-pollinator relationships, we missed out on the actual act of pollination and how tricky it is.We were, perhaps, too human-centred, and the embodied stories were perhaps too rich, sweet and sticky to allow for the imagining of un/ made futures of plant-pollinator-human relations.

Conclusion
Looking back at the event, we now ask ourselves to what extent the enactments of appetisers for un/made futures managed to thicken the present, and to what extent the thickening of the present also allowed for a thickening of futures.How can we understand the thickening of the present as a form of anticipatory practice?
Accounting for the effects of these designed activities can be achieved in part through the written recipes and images taken from this particular evening.Additionally, some valuable reflections were also given to us in more informal and casual conversations, both during and after the events.As mentioned, some of the participants described the event to us as a kind of materialised infographic, embodied eco-literature or climate fiction.These responses emphasised both the narrative and materials and the experienceable character of the event.It seemed as if we had managed to make issues and matters experientially available in line with democratic (Binder et al., 2015) and caring design experiments (Lindström and Ståhl, 2019).
Noticeably, the Appetisers for Un/Made Futures event was engaging, sweaty, loud, tasty and sticky.It brought laughter, reflection and movement and was thought-provoking.In that sense, it had effects that were both wanted and unwanted.For example, although we had checked and cared for allergies, it turned out that the sheer presence of honey forced a pollen-allergic to leave.Other participants commented that the richness of the materials we brought to the table was a lot to digest.At times, it seemed like the thickness of the recipes, ingredients and thickeners at the table were too sticky to proceed.While there were multiple attempts to tell the story differently and to propose other ways of anticipating, preparing for or intervening in the future, it seemed like it would require more than a two-hour workshop to explore the ethical implications of these alternatives more carefully.After all, we had spent substantial time, research and care in composing the recipes that were used during the event.It also seemed like the act of preparing food together and tasting the sweet, sticky appetisers was more engaging than writing down new recipes.This implies that the transferability of the labour and experience in the workshop did not quite stretch into imagining thick futures.Perhaps the present became so thick that the future and how to intervene in it were-again-referred to others or at other times.
One of the more important insights is perhaps not the failure to engage the participants in imagining thick futures.Rather, it might point out that as much as the futures of plant-pollinator-human relations are uncertain, we can never fully know what traces and impacts our event will have.In hindsight, we would suggest that experiencing disappointment, failure and lack of solutions is part of thickening the present and moving beyond polarised responses of game over and tech-fix.
As an addendum, we would like to return to the question of what we would do with the so-called crazy recipes.The particular recipes that came out of the above-described event have not been tested; nor have they travelled further.However, as design researchers, we responded to some of the challenges and insights sketched out above with a new iteration of the event.The new iteration gathered a smaller group of people.To better prepare the participants for what would come, they all received materials (in the form of recipes) in advance.We also asked each participant to bring one or more ingredients that could be used to alter the recipes that we had put together.In this way, the event could, much like a thick present, expand and reach beyond the confinement of the workshop and attach to the participants' ongoing entanglement in issues of pollination.We regard this as a way of fostering response-ability in the ongoing plant-pollinator-humans relations.The story goes on.

Funding sources
The project is funded byThe Swedish Research Council.

Fig. 8 .
Fig. 8.To make the Apple Punch, apples need to be peeled and pressed, requiring both brute force and collaborative effort to turn the handle.

Fig. 9 .
Fig. 9.Some of the sweet, messy stickiness of the ingredients of Marzipan Delight stuck on a participant's hand.

Fig. 10 .
Fig. 10.The forming and shaping of the Marzipan Delight generates discussions concerned with some possible replacement ingredients for almonds.

Fig. 11 .
Fig. 11.Recipe sheet on which participants are invited to write down the imagined and altered versions of the appetisers."Recipes are altered and developed over time to accommodate changing circumstances, for example, as preparation for loss, as an enactment of hope, as an articulation of good enough, to make sacrifices or to participate in restoration or rewilding.We ask you to share an altered version of the recipe you are following.It can be from the past, a present elsewhere, an imagined future".(excerpt from recipe sheet).

Fig. 12 .
Fig.12.By adding a dash of lacto-fermented honey to the apple juice, the end of the session is marked and generates cheers for uncertain futures.