We wanted to work with people from different backgrounds and explore how things could be otherwise. To work across boundaries, between disciplines, cultures and species to grapple with the complexities of our time. Our intent was – and still is – to grow new worlds in the cracks of the old with those who are brave (and/or foolish), motivated, and committed enough to try.

Before FoAM, some of us worked as artists in residence in scientific research institutes, others as scientists and technologists in art and design studios. Too often artists were expected to merely ‘prettify’ scientific results, while scientists were usually treated as technicians with no creative input.

By founding FoAM, we wanted everyone involved as creative creatures capable of making a difference – whether generalists or specialists, artists, engineers, designers, scientists, administrators, gardeners, business owners, boat builders or whatever other vocation they chose, with multiple perspectives, worldviews and ways of living.

Grow Your Own Worlds

We see art and design as starting points for developing transdisciplinary experiments, where we can seed ideas and alternatives, prototype them, experiment with them, discuss them, and create experiences using the whole human sensorium.

When we started working as FoAM in the early 2000s, our focus was on experience design within immersive, mixed reality environments. Around 2005, the focus shifted, becoming simultaneously more speculative and more explicitly environmental. Our approach evolved to include creating tools, techniques and situations that enable others to grow their own worlds, through experiments with futuring, facilitation, coaching and residencies. Over time these methods, frameworks and experiences have tended to become more fluid and informal, yet always working with changing relationships between those involved.

Like foam, the substance, FoAM continues to shapeshift, depending on internal and external conditions acting on its bubbles.

The Institute for Experiments with Business

We are very interested in seeing what happens when speculative ideas become manifest as embodied experiences. We don’t see these situations as predictions, but rather invocations or provocations to be explored. Embodied cognition, using all our faculties (thinking, feeling, smelling, tasting, seeing, singing, listening, etc.) can provide a deeper, more engaged exploration of the “what if” questions than thinking or talking alone.

With Borrowed Scenery, we started with a story – the dissolution of borders between reality and fiction, mysticism and technology, nature and culture.

It is a story that wants to become reality; a story about an alternate reality (past, future or parallel) where plants are a central aspect of human society.  We were curious to see how the story would take on a life of its own, in physical and alternate reality narratives, a series of workshops, walks, food events, concerts and performances, wherever plants and humans interacted. We ‘borrowed scenery’ from parks, windowsills, markets, rooftops, and ditches of Ghent in Belgium and challenged people to re-imagine their urban environment as somewhere to encourage reciprocal multispecies entanglements.

Borrowed Scenery can be seen as a proposition which encourages us to see urban plant life with fresh eyes and re-imagine our cities as places of sinuous interaction between humans and plants: where plants don’t just provide us with food and materials but become neighbours, teachers, and gateways to the planetary ‘Other’.

Borrowed Scenery: in which gardens, landscapes, stories and songs entwine into an Alternate Reality where plants are a central aspect of human society.

A few of experiential futures favourites from our friends and colleagues:

Turnton by Time’s Up

The Vault of Life by Superflux

The Thing from the Future by Situation Lab

As for our own own speculative design experiments:

Prehearsals & pre-enactments

Food Futures

Dust & Shadow

Futures of Doing Nothing

In our work we emphasise the importance of agency – being able to influence, adapt and learn from external circumstances and internal motivations.

The verb ‘futuring’ is a way to express this responsive and pro-active attitude. A verb flows, a noun fixes. We don’t believe that futures can spring into existence fully formed, rather that they are woven together from the present, from every individual action, every collective engagement, however obvious or insignificant, they grow from deep, interconnected roots of past actions, inaction and absence.

We hope to encourage people to actively shape their futures, to “future” for themselves, rather than passively consume someone else’s idea of “The Future”.

Futuring means different things to different people, but always involves the constant balancing act between vision and adaptation, hope and despair, the possible and actual.

Futuring can make living with contingencies a more navigable process. While it cannot predict the future, it can reveal some possible paths. Then, you have to walk the paths yourself.

When working with curious people on transdisciplinary projects, constraints can provide a way to sharpen the focus, to avoid getting lost down rabbit holes of interestingness. Each team member has their own backgrounds and intentions that pull things in different directions, often with different motivations.

This tension can be extremely creative, yet just as easily become counter-productive, the boundlessness can become it’s own barrier. This is especially true in long, complex projects.

Suitable constraints can help guide even the most divergent of us towards a common goal. Finding suitable constraints becomes part of the creative process, part of the design, part of the work.

It depends on the people involved and the context we find ourselves in. While our projects are usually meant to be more inspiring than didactic, there are some lessons we have learnt along the way.

First of all, start wherever you are. Look, listen, feel, and be kind; notice what unfolds. Like the first permaculture principle: “observe, then interact”. Focus on effectiveness rather than efficiency. Be yourself and be with others.

Life, life-support and the afterlives of (im)possible worlds

Humility isn’t anything new – it’s been part of many cultures and traditions, for millennia.

Even in contemporary culture that rewards extroverted arrogance, it is still present in many latent forms. It shimmers in occasional silences, in awe-inspiring experiences, in honest mistakes, or unexpected acts of kindness and forgiveness.

Where arrogance builds walls, humility opens doors.

Probably every project we work on, and every person we work with is a reminder that being humble creates a wider space of possibility.

Dust & Shadow is one project in particular, where we worked in a vast desert landscape, in a culture quite at odds with our ethics and aesthetics. The project was part of a transdisciplinary research program at the Arizona State University focused on environmental issues specific to the North-American Southwest.

Approaching this context as humble and appreciative guests allowed us to learn more about the places and cultures, and also about ourselves and our engagement with difference.

Dust & Shadow: As rocks behave like fluids

A study room, physical and alternate reality narrative, nested in the consensus reality of a university library.

FoAM’s work is quite broad, diverse, and often resists being boxed into a specific category. We sometimes describe FoAM as a lab for speculative cultures, working across different scales.

The ‘five cultures’ was one of our early attempts to explain the different areas we’re interested in. Zero culture is about being present in moments of pure experience, temporarily setting aside any cultural baggage. Micro culture is about matter – the material substrates a culture is grounded in, like earth, fabrics, food, plants, hardware. Multi culture is about relationships between humans, looking at participatory processes, exchange, techno-social systems and infrastructures. Macro culture focuses on the wider environment a culture cultivates and exists in. Meta culture looks at philosophical, panpsychic, and aesthetic frameworks that underly our behaviours.

More recently we have begun describing our preoccupations as five thematic routes. The Green route meanders along multispecies entanglements. A Crystal route navigates through uncertainty. The Silver route invites us to re-imagine technologies. The Terracotta route reminds us that hosting and hospitality are critical survival skills. And on the wabi-sabi route we see how to weather transience, tending to the things unfinished, overlooked, and impermanent.

Sometimes quick-and-dirty prototyping is what’s needed to move a design process forward. Rapid iteration and learning from cheap mistakes. This is particularly valuable when there is a tendency to overthink things, or when stuck in stale approaches or behaviours.

Other times, the design process benefits when slowed down – to be able to observe effects in a wider environment, for example. An early design might need time to hibernate, be left dormant for a while before becoming more fully developed. Or, it might look like one thing, like a chrysalis, and with patience, might evolve into something quite different.

Some things need time to unfold, others benefit from being developed at a buzzing, adrenaline fuelled pace. When giving birth, being absorbed in the process, attuning to the rhythms of the situation suggests when to be patient and when it’s time to push.

Rather than speaking to everyone all the time, we tend to engage with smaller groups of people over longer periods of time, trying to focus on meaningful change. With Certainty Ltd. for example, we work with individuals, families and collectives to envision, analyse and prototype scenarios for their own lives. Over many sessions across months, or years, we rely on a range of speculative design tools to help people re-imagine and experiment with how their lives might develop.

Innovation: taking risks or making risks?

We have worked with physical narratives, responsive environments, prehearsals and pre-enactments to encourage embodied experiences of possible futures. The term physical narrative was coined as part of a project with Time’s Up, where we explored how possible future scenarios could be experienced as immersive installations. The spaces, objects and media that people encounter contain elements of a story that is pieced together through their actions and interactions.

Considering that installations are built on a one-to-one scale of rooms, labs, or bars, the participants’ bodily experience of them is similar to how they experience the present. When media respond to their actions, they can observe the effect they have on the environment in real time and space – at a human scale. A small movement can cause a sonic ripple to reverberate another part of the environment. Solitary and collective exploration can uncover and re-create different parts of the story, encouraging the participants to create their own scenarios along the way, fostering an engaged, pro-active experience of futures unfolding.

Technology itself does not cause these problems, as a species developing technologies (extensions to the organism) is part of who we are. Language, shelter, electricity or satellites. Any technologies bear the imprint of their design, their social context, and the purpose to which they are put. It’s the people with power to create and wield contemporary technologies that we’re weary of. Who is holding the knife, what are their intentions? Are we creating technologies for liberation and solidarity, or exploitation, fear and repression?

Working with technology can be as much about eliciting qualities of care, the careful work of repair and maintenance for example. In our experience, tending to complex interactive systems (including the people who develop them and the materials they’re made of) can often be akin to gardening; no one is ever fully in control, yet influence is everywhere, and each layered action – by human and technological agents alike – has potential to cultivate growth, mutation or collapse.

We assume that humans aren’t separate from “nature”. We are part of the natural world, so we’re part of nature’s competence too. Yet that doesn’t mean that individually, or even as a species we can avoid danger, difficultly or the responsibility of always and everywhere.

Accepting our vulnerability and mortality, adapting, learning to ‘be with’ whatever happens are some of the capacities we think are necessary for living together on our shared planet, while it still remains habitable.

Start with noticing and attuning. Listen carefully. Re-enchant the present. Skirt the adjacent possible. Grow your own worlds.

Attuning to the Earth as a living instrument, audience and composition

We’re currently working on FoAM’s Anarchive, a series of publications that gather stories from across the FoAM network to surface things with (re)generative potential, to sustain and inspire us as we shift to another phase of our work and life. What this next phase will look like isn’t clear yet, but we will likely continue to seek out the luminous and the liminal, amid human and beyond human worlds.

Keep in touch if you’re curious where we’ll end up!