A voice recording on householding, situated in an urban kitchen in an almost 100 year old shared house, exploring and performing agency and smartness in a more-than-human ecosystem. 

This short text reports on a a reflection activity as part of a pedagogical endeavour with the Henrik Steffens Masterclasses in winter 22024. More specifically, it reports on embodied string figures that closed a session on  »Thinking: The fiction, the human-environment relationship«, where students and teachers passed on yarn while voicing how progress is haunting us in transportation, sewage, food provisioning, media, consumption and studies. While holding the yarn and sharing lived life we could all feel the fibrous interdependence between the self and the ecosystemic. 

Seasonal designing that includes experiments on householding means exploring an economic model that prioritises mutuality, relationality and radical interdependence (see for example Gibson-Graham and Miller 2015, Raven et al 2021, Wall Kimmerer 2024, Kember 2024, Raven et al 2025).

This chapter gives account of householding in, with and beyond a Tiny House on Wheels as a felt experience that spirals from the local to the planetary along these movements: on an individual level (all of the examples), organizational level (entrepreneurs), community level (outdoor co-working space), municipal level (participatory budgeting), and planetary level (all of them and beyond).

These examples share the urge to seek opportunities in what is at hand and by looking for what more is possible. We have taken householding through seasonal designing to be a performative worlding-approach that does not assume singularly bounded, essentialist entities, but rather one with a commitment to solidarity across species, spaces, and times.

Design briefs can be expressions of needs articulated not only by educators but also by external actors and society more broadly. Briefs are where societal needs, expectations, wishes and desires meet the internal, local and situated logic of design and design education. In this workshop, we aim to make an inventory of past and current design briefs and start to reimagine them by moving beyond the taken-forgranted starting point of continued growth. We are led by the overarching question: what could a design brief become when it is actively intended to shift away from notions of design as formulated in traditions of continuous financial growth and problem-solving connected to extractivism and lost life opportunities? 

This contribution explores community engagement through the collaborative practice ‘Twilight Learnings – Seasonal experiments in the Tiny House on Wheels (THoW)’. In this article, we show that a reflective community can start to emerge through sharing experiences and knowledges in a confined space that is simultaneously connected to society in a fractal scaling (O’Brien et al. 2023) way. Some of the participants grew so fond of reflecting together on hope, allies, uncertainties, pain and frustrations, that they continued to build the community by articulating themselves through follow-up interviews and through writing together in different ways.

We document hidden and ‘marginal’ stages of a research process allowing longer timeframes so that practitioners and scholars can write together in a slow science (Stengers 2018) approach. This article mainly explores three aspects of community engagement: 1) reporting on community-based research and practice and reflective experiences in a workshop in the THoW; 2) reflecting on collective writing processes through performative writing 3) meta-reflecting on scaling and performativity. In other words, this article contributes to how knowledge production and world-making can go together through community engagement that extends into writing.

You are now stepping into something that can be held within a Tiny House on Wheels (THoW). At the same time, it surpasses the walls of the THoW and extends into planetary realms. Simultaneously you are stepping into the world of the artistic research project Holding Surplus House and its kins.

You are holding a publication that shares experimental examples of ways of knowing and learning that take seasonality seriously. This means turning away from controlled premises for experimenting and learning. This also means working in designerly ways of iterating and responding to local circumstances.

As part of the Tiny House on Wheels (THoW) project, Mending by Design explores a seasonal approach to repair and redesign through the collective harvesting of barley grass roots for use as window blinds. The harvest revealed a fragile root system, prompting discussions about the need to support the remaining structure. Other talks offered ways to contrast hyperconsumerism by emphasizing stewardship and relational design and linking seasonal mending to Earth's natural rhythms. Donna Maione, a designer and researcher, advocates for reparative practices across various scales, aiming for sustainable transformations and collective engagement with our materials and environment.

In this fabulation we used fabulating as a method of slow science as it applies to the university as a learning environment, by taking up the university as a “legacy technology” for intergenerational learning. The contribution relates to a ritual circle at the IT University of Copenhagen, at a gathering on "interventions" organised by the Nordic Fabulation Network. 

The ecological crises we face are fed by a disconnect from interspecies interdependencies and misguided human-exceptionalism (the belief we are somehow distinct from nature). Given that design may contribute to our worsening socio-ecological conditions, this is seen as a pivotal moment to question and expand Participatory Design’s traditional tenets, such as those grounded in democracy, rights, fairness, inclusion and empowerment, to consider what a different philosophical starting point and commitment to more-than-human Participatory Design might bring.

This chapter explores the different traditions underpinning existing Participatory Design work oriented towards sustainability. We show the beginnings of a Participatory Design drawn from an appreciation of the innately interdependent and entangled nature of the world, called here the more-than-human. Two lineages of Participatory Design scholarship are traced: Sustainability (with branches in Modernist and rights-based thinking) and Entanglement (with branches in care-based and co-ontological being). The chapter presents three cases to ground our explorations and bring to light how human-nature separations in systems, structures, values and mindsets inadvertently condition our practice. Our cases ground the theories and paradigms identified in the four branches and show how commitments play out and evolve through practice. This allows us to critically examine existing tenets of Participatory Design and reinterpret the visions that these hold to explore what more-than-human relationality might entail. Our discussion reveals the tensions, politics, paradoxes and difficulties in turning towards more-than-human relationalities and in working across and between worldviews. The chapter closes with the questions that the ambitions of more-than-human Participatory Design pose for our practice. At best, we hope they present a means to tread more gently and responsibly on the earth we share.

Ett podd-samtal om radikal omsorg och möjliga framtider som bygger på texter i ett temanummer om framtider utgivet av Fronesis. Gestaltad livsmiljö, stadsutveckling, hushållande och feministisk ekonomi kopplas till levbarhet för människor och mer-än-människor.