Speculating and intervening in Nordic Technological Wellbeing Imaginaries

The notion of caring for own citizens is at the basis of the Nordic welfare state. However, shifting power relations, new forms of public private partnerships, rapid emergence of technologies, and novel forms of service provision are transforming how states, communities and caregivers plan and improve
living conditions of the population. These challenges thus require new forms of participation to ensure that emerging technologies are designed and adopted to support citizens in an equitable way.

This network intends to explore how collaborative design via Fabulation (Haraway, 2013) can be used to imagine and extend care practices in the Nordic context, encouraging broader forms of participation in society, building stronger connections among citizens, and ultimately fostering more resilient futures. Fabulation is part of a new approach using storytelling in design futuring, borrowed from STS and feminist technoscience, oriented towards alternative forms of critical and radical world-making. However, the use of fabulation in design futuring, while having enormous potential in being able to bridge the aforementioned challenges of participation, is currently tentative and understudied. How should or could fabulation be deployed within collaborative design in the context of emerging technologies to imagine new forms of caring?

We propose the creation of a new network, built on participants with established good working relations as well as new early-career members. Through the organization of three hybrid workshops, we will produce fabulations that act as possible trajectories for Nordic care futures, along the way developing a toolkit for fabulating that can travel–reflections on how Fabulation works, what it is good for, and strategies and tactics for developing meaningful shared futures. Our first workshop “Concepts” (Umeå, May 22-23, 2023) will be focused on conceptual work around fabulations. The second workshop “Approaches” (Oslo, October 30-31, 2023) will depart from the conceptual grounding to map current and potential methods for applying Fabulation. Finally, in our third workshop
“Interventions” (Copenhagen, May 20-21, 2024) we will reflect on the potential of fabulating as a method for making change. Finally, we will produce themes and agendas for future collaboration, drawing together experiences from participants at different stages in their careers and deriving a kit of
best practices for designing new kinds of resilient Nordic futures.