ANNA LATHROP

Worldbuilding: faraoyść: building alternative worlds through joy

How might we activate participant’s situated imaginings by co-imagining objects from alternative futures/realities?

PROJECT DETAILS:

Timeline: 1.5 years

Tags: Research + Project Management, Participatory Design, New Research Methods, Speculative Object Creation

Methods:

• In-Depth Interviews

• Subject Matter Expert Interviews

• Co-Creative Workshops

Project Overview:

The focus of my research at Parsons School of Design was developing co-designed methods for worldbuilding and imagination through joy. With my team, we created the word "Faraoyść" - which describes the sense of liberated joy when an oppressive system appears to be coming to an end.

We created a series of workshops designed to evoke Faraoyść and worked with a number of communities. Our most recent work was with a group of Negligence Refugees from Lebanon, who created speculative objects and names as a way to worldbuild an Alternative Lebanon. By creating these objects, participants started to ask questions about their Situated Imaginings - which are the frameworks that make up our imaginations. They realized their imaginations had been constrained by their experiences, and that they needed liberated joy - Faraoyść - to think of new tactics and strategies in order to change their given circumstances.

This work has been presented at the 2020 UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit, PRIMER 2021 Conference, ADX 2020, and the PIVOT 2021 Conference. It will be published in a forthcoming publication of Foresight.