Digital Experience Theatre: A Speculative Co-Design Approach for Sustainable Interspecies Design View Digital Media

Workshop Presentation
Paula Reaes Pinto,  Antonio Gorgel Pinto  

This workshop addresses the ongoing unsustainability in the relationship between design and material culture, where products and services often lack ecological and socio-cultural insights within a global-local context. It introduces the Digital Experience Theatre (DXT), an ideation tool inspired by Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), which frames users of unsustainable designs as oppressed individuals navigating choices driven by commercial interests rather than meaningful contributions to human and more-than-human communities. The DXT serves as both a teaching method and ideation tool, guiding participants through a speculative co-design process to better understand design problems and foster innovative solutions prioritising sustainable, interspecies principles. The workshop will begin with a brief explanation of the theories behind the DXT, including Image Theatre (a TO variant), concepts of dystopia and micro-utopia, speculative co-design methodologies, and the use of text-to-image AI for generating speculative imagery. The workshop divides participants into groups of 5 to 10, with two conductor-designers and the rest as antagonist-designers. The process starts by identifying a problem related to ecological threats or community needs and progresses through nine steps, deepening dystopian ideas via dialogue and AI-generated imagery. The goal is to propose speculative solutions to the identified problem. Participants should bring laptops. The DXT tool can be explored further at https://dxt.cargo.site/.