Co-Constructing Multispecies Futures
About & cite
A Card Deck and Interactive Tool for embodied worldbuilding through performance and play.
Build and tell speculative scenes, then enter them through roleplay, movement, sensing, and rehearsal. What happens returns to reflection, writing, and another encounter. The tools support this shared practice with people, animals, plants, materials, machines, and places.
Development citation · v0.1.2
Cite the toolkit.
Use this interim, title-first reference for the 2026 development edition. The formal creator list is being confirmed; the reference will be updated when archival metadata is settled.
Record the exact tool version and keep the numbered HTML download you used. For the Card Deck, also identify the PDF edition or filename. The current online tool can change; the version history and downloads identify preserved editions.
No archival DOI has been assigned here. When a Zenodo release is published, use its version DOI to identify that exact archive. The forthcoming chapter has a separate reference below.
Open the project repository ↗The framework: imagine, rehearse, reflect.
A group may begin by talking, drawing, or imagining at a table, then enter the scene through a role, a movement, or a relation. What happens in rehearsal returns to discussion, sketches, and writing. Those changes then shape the next embodied encounter. This is an iterative practice, with the body's senses and constraints contributing to what can be known and made.
EncounteringMeet another being or force in a scene. It might be voiced by a person, embodied by a machine, or approached through an object or situation.
Moving withMove with a body, system, city, or landscape. Follow its rhythms and notice where its rules and constraints shape what you can do.
Becoming-withLet a relation change how you sense and move. Taking up another position, scale, or perceptual constraint is one way to begin.
These approaches overlap. Becoming-with follows Haraway's relational account (2008, 2016): the participant remains themselves while the relation changes what they notice. Another being's perspective can only be approached partially. Attend to its capacities, needs, and limits, including what it resists or cannot do.
Adapt participation through attention, orientation, gesture, scale, and constraint to suit the bodies present. Agree how authorship and creative decisions will be shared. Make room to mark the end, reflect together, and choose what to carry forward or set down. A rehearsal can become a story, artwork, prototype, or technology; it can also remain a gesture, question, or unresolved experience.
The deck's lineage.
The chapter explicitly identifies two foundations for the Co-Constructing Multispecies Futures Card Deck and Interactive Tool:
- Candy, S., & Watson, J. (2014). The thing from the future [Card game]. Situation Lab.
- Smith, A. E., Leadabrand, M., Lichtman, D., Bendix, S., PytlikZillig, L. M., & McQuillan, J. (in press). Rehearsing realities: A dramaturgy for co-creating preferable futures. TDR/The Drama Review.
A wider performance and design practice
The chapter locates the wider practice in performance, dance and somatic practice, walking scores, speculative design, spatial storytelling, playable theater, and immersive practice. It connects with thing ethnography, multispecies imagining, empathic modelling, and embodiment exchanges. These neighboring practices inform ways of approaching more-than-human worlds without claiming to fully inhabit another's experience.
These lineages provide methodological context. The authors of a cited framework, the authors of this chapter, and the creators of a particular toolkit or workshop activity remain distinct credit lists. Read the toolkit credits.
Context for becoming-with: Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Forthcoming book chapter · Not yet public
Performing the What-If: Embodied Worldbuilding with More-than-Human Intelligences, from Roleplay to Emerging Technologies
The chapter offers an artist-led account of the practice behind these shared tools. It is forthcoming in Strategic Handbook of Worldbuilding (Routledge) and is not yet publicly available.
Smith, A. E., & McQuillan, J. (forthcoming). Performing the What-If: Embodied Worldbuilding with More-than-Human Intelligences, from Roleplay to Emerging Technologies. In Strategic Handbook of Worldbuilding. Routledge.
This is a provisional reference. Editors, publication year, page range, DOI, and a public chapter link remain unspecified. The page provides a short overview; the unpublished manuscript is not included in the toolkit downloads.
When describing a workshop or activity with these tools, record the Interactive Tool version or the Card Deck PDF edition used. The chapter explains the practice; a versioned tool snapshot identifies the materials you worked with.
Workshop and development history · Tool versions · Repository: paper and tools