Participatory Futuring Through Performance and Augmented Reality

This paper will discuss Uninvited Guests’ Future Places Toolkit (2020), an Augmented Reality engagement activity for planning consultation and neighbourhood visioning. Future Places Toolkit (FPT) enables people to see speculative ideas they generate together visualised immediately around them, overlaid onto existing buildings in a site undergoing redevelopment. Through this case study I will consider how performance, interactive science-fiction storytelling and AR can support communities to imagine preferable futures for their places and explore their affective relations to these. Darko Suvin (1979) describes the ‘cognitive estrangement’ of science fiction, which can defamiliarise our observed environment in ways that function dialectically. Similarly, in Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, Dunne and Raby (2013) propose that speculative design and sci-fi scenarios are ‘aids for critical reflection’ (p.4) on the present and on the impact decisions we take today have on future probabilities. In Future Places Toolkit there is a gap between physical/ social reality and the AR layer/co-designed fiction, such that participants measure life “as it is” in their place against how it could be (Zygmunt Bauman 2002). It is in between the reality of the neighbourhood now, “as is”, and the utopian “as if” of their alternate AR futures that critical comparison can take place. Drawing on findings from engaging communities in Knowle West, Bristol and as part of Birmingham’s Neighbourhood Futures Festival, this paper will explore whether AR and located science-fiction storytelling can help ‘people participate more actively as citizen[s]’ in co-creating ‘more socially constructive imaginary futures’ for their neighbourhoods (Dunne and Raby, p.5). Can immersive and interactive means of participatory futuring enable more representative people to narrate themselves into times to come and see themselves represented in their own co-created scenarios? Does this increase a community’s capability to imagine otherwise, to envision alternative imaginaries, build the capacity to anticipate, and take agency in shaping their places/futures? Using live 3D drawing and spatial audio, Future Places Toolkit materialises virtual possibilities for places and enables participants to explore them physically, in an embodied way. In the context of Zip-Scene, I will address whether these immersive approaches make futures for places more tangible, give a better sense of what they could be like to live in, and support participants to explore their affective/emotional relationships to possible futures for their neighbourhood.