Care: Environment-centred

The ‘Unintended Consequences’ team focused on researching a future world centred around environment and care, under the theme of symbiosis.

Despite our focus being “environment”, both symbiosis and care necessarily involve two actors, and are an expression of the dynamic between them. This dynamic is at the core of our future world speculation.

Our final output takes the shape of a discursive card game, designed to simulate the interdependencies between people and environment (as represented by the players).

The goal of the game is to create a mutually beneficial world, but the prompts contained within it make reaching this goal near impossible. This is not to insinuate that a symbiotic world isn’t possible, but rather a way of illustrating to players how difficult this might be, and prompt reflection on what sacrifices we might or might not be willing to make to create such a world.

We can see this card game being used as a teaching tool to introduce the concepts of symbiosis, interdependence, negotiation and trade-offs in sustainability.