Abstract
Fiction has long been part of architectural studio work; students create spectacles and chimeras at various spatial and temporal scales. Audiences suspend a degree of disbelief to imagine how these proposals may be built or welcomed by their inhabitants. Yet, can we go further in accentuating fiction so we are futuring rather than replicating alternative forms of the status quo? Through narrative strategies, architecture can foster multispecies empathy. In the spring of 2024, my students imagined multispecies communities set in the year 2050. Each student team designed landscape infrastructure that would enable human and more-than-human cohabitation, as well as developed fictional characters and plots alongside their spatial interventions. Students also transplanted reviewers to a particular time and place, such as a community engagement meeting or a festival volunteer orientation, as a form of immersive worldbuilding during final reviews. Design demands of us new rituals, narratives, and norms to envision multispecies worlds. Three narrative strategies, in particular, may be potent: Firstly, “being witness to,” either through first-person accounts or testimonios, a genre of writing particularly resonant for Latin American women, can yield transformative effects; secondly, immersive performance can invite and prompt destabilization of the “self,” a catalyst for empathetic connections; and thirdly, Figma, a user experience (UX) design software, can be leveraged to create digitally interactive realms scaling beyond the bounded time and place of studio. These three narrative or storytelling devices, via the text, body, and digital, elucidate potential strategies to repair relationships between human and more-than-human kin.
Presenters
Sarah BolivarAssistant Professor, Landscape Architecture, University of Tennessee, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—Thinking, Learning, Doing: Plural Ways of Design
KEYWORDS
Narrative, Multispecies, Fiction, Worldbuilding, Biodiversity, Storytelling, Landscape, Architecture
