Introduction
Image: Woman lying in a field with a white horse, surrounded by plants. Courtesy of Sympoiesis.What:
Multi-species imagination seeks to heal our experienced separation from other species. Through multi-species imagination, participants can tap into their empathic response-ability and co-create systems and practices that care about the well-being and agency of all species. We can draw upon the intelligence of nature from 3.5 billion years of R&D.
Why:
Animals and plant life are often casualties of our human inventions and designs, rather than co-creators that benefit from them. This has resulted in large-scale biodiversity loss. This workshop — which includes two tools, encourages participants to take on the perspective of another species, feel what it’s like to be “other”, and speak on behalf of it. It seeks to catalyse a perception shift, away from the separation from nature and human exceptionalism towards interbeing — living and working with other species in the interest of all. We hope that such a perception shift will contribute to your story, systems, and product innovation that build towards thriving and radically inclusive futures.
For whom:
This tool is for everyone. We hope these tools will inspire you to become an experience designer for your own community — whether that’s your workplace, your organization, your local community, or at a stakeholder meeting. Depending on the space, you can invite participants to move into an inquiry session focused on your specific questions or objectives of the gathering.
Tool: Workshop design guide for multispecies imagination
Duration: ~ 30 mins - 4 hours
Contributor: Sympoiesis is the experience and design lab based in Berlin, on a mission to develop our collective response-ability to metabolise loss and regenerate living systems. Co-founded by Niels Devisscher and Rūta Žemčugovaitė.
On This Page
Introduction
The Tool
Part 1: Multi-species Meditation
Part 2: Group Enquiry
The Tool
The tool guides you in designing your own guided multispecies meditation and facilitating a deeper group inquiry.
We offer an example script that you can follow, as well as a recorded audio meditation that you can play in your facilitated spaces.
Part 1
The meditation will allow you and your audience to disengage from a singular human perspective. It invites the participant to leave behind their human body and enter the body of another species — whether it’s a plant, animal, fungi, bacteria, mineral, or a larger ecosystem.
Part 2
After the meditation follows an inquiry in smaller groups of 3-4 persons. Participants will stay in the non-human forms. We advise asking your participants to remain in the more-than-human-being perception and bring that newly gained perspective into other planned activities for your group (such as decision-making or a design session).
This tool is particularly useful if you want to involve a larger group in the process of decision-making and enable communities and teams to represent more-than-human stakeholders, in order to invite other species to inform our decisions and take their best interest.
When to use
This is a highly versatile tool. You can use it in these instances, but not limited to:
Before a design sprint;
To enable more-than-human stakeholder participation;
To enhance creative empathy and imagination in your team;
When in need of new collaboration methods.
Part 1. Multi-Species Meditation
Context
Every place and context can inform us about the design and goal of the meditation. It can also create a more intimate experience of the place, as we engage our imagination of the species and landscape of that ecosystem, city, or bioregion. Regeneration is rooted in place, and we believe that desirable futures depend on a deep, relational engagement with local species.
Before you begin (optional):
Map out the species that are residing in the area you are working with. What ecosystems, native, and exotic plants/animals/fungi live here?
Writing the meditation
Writing a meditation script is a deeply creative process.
Imagine that you are writing a script for a dream that the dreamer will remember for a very long time.
The dream will intuitively make sense because there will be a sequence of actions and an end result that will create a heightened emotion. This is a process of live storytelling—each participant will embark on their own transformation, yet everyone will be experiencing it collectively.
Every part of the meditation is significant, and should not be overlooked or rushed.
We suggest following your intuition during the design process. You know your participants best — both in their level of comfort and their openness to experience.
Having a well-defined arc of meditation will bring depth to your participants’ experience. You can use the structure we have written for you - download the PDF below.
Alternatively, you can play this multi-species meditation recording (10 min) to your audience.
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Settle into your position, and make any movement needed to make yourself feel a bit more comfortable. Close your eyes, take a deep breath in, into your belly, and just release.
Slowly imagine a warm, soft light, pouring down through the top of your head, through your spine, into your body, like liquid warm honey.
Allow this light to move through your body, making it feel lighter. Feel this light flow down through your neck, and into your chest and shoulders, into your arms and hands and palms, into your torso, and into your legs, moving through your knees, and into your feet.
Let this light unlock any stagnation or resistance that you’ve been carrying throughout the day. And allow yourself to relax a bit deeper into this moment.
With this glowing light body, enter a lush and thriving meadow.
Notice all the wilderness of flowers, the tall grasses, and the insects swarming around. Feel this ecosystem breathe you in, and breathe you out.
How does it feel like to be breathed by the ecosystem?
In the distance, notice a rising fog on the edge of the meadow. Allow your curiosity to take you there.
Suddenly, from afar, you notice a being that is waiting for you in the fog. Perhaps it is an animal, terrestrial, or aquatic. A plant, a fungi, a microorganism, or even a mineral.
What is this being? Does it surprise you that it’s there? As you move deeper into the fog, and towards this being, you notice how your whole body starts slowly disintegrating the closer you move towards this being, the more of your body turns into the fog you are in.
Every part of your human body slowly dissolves into invisible light particles, and you become the fog.
Now that your whole body is dissolved, see how this being, this creature, is slowly and deeply breathing you in. Every breath of this being draws you closer and closer to it. And eventually, this being fully breathes you in, into its body.
Let yourself get familiar with how it feels like to be in this body, this unknown body.
Take a few deep breaths to fully spread yourself into every corner of this being.
What does it feel like? Are you light or heavy? How do you move in this new body, if you do at all? Where is your ecosystem that you thrive in?
Follow a path home.
Who are other beings around you?
How do you grieve?
How do you feel joy?
How do you relate to time?
Allow yourself to explore this new body, and this new world that you belong to.
Whenever you are ready, slowly move your new body and take another deep breath in.
And in your own time, start coming back to the space that you are in. And when you open your eyes, please remain in this new identity of this being.
Part 2 - Group Enquiry
The group inquiry is meant to deepen a more-than-human experience.
Important: Before starting, ask your participants to remain in the perception of their more-than-human being and bring that newly gained perspective into their small groups. Encourage them to speak from the first-person in “I” statements, rather than third-person “it” statements, when answering questions asked by their teammates.
Divide your participants into groups of 3-4 depending on the size of the group.
Each “being” will be interviewed by their group members about their lifeworld. We have provided the questions below. Feel free to print them out and add your additional questions. Each person will have around 7 minutes to share as another being, from their first-person perspective.
Once everyone has taken turns, participants can return to the big group and share their experience — what they discovered about other beings, what they found difficult, and new insights they have gained. In the big group, the facilitator can then weave the experience into a more pragmatic discussion, reflecting on how the insights can shape conversations around e.g. organisational systems and structures design, or product and service design — tapping into collective imagination and multi-species perspectives.
You can download the group questions for printing:-
