Visiting De Pastorie: A reflective and speculative exploration of more-than-human storytelling in participatory design research

Abstract

The Participatory Design (PD) research project De Pastorie focuses on the transition from a rectory to a living lab for participatory circular design, exploring how communities can reimagine their environment during the transition of the large-scale Noord-Zuid Limburg (NZL) infrastructural project in Flanders, Belgium. During this road transition, the planned demolition of buildings and gardens raised urgent questions among actors involved: How can communities and their environments coexist in the face of fragmentation? This exploratory paper explores how De Pastorie contributed to dialogue and reconciliation in an environment and community disrupted by the development of project NZL by narrating the practices of human and more-than-human co-creation through the perspective of De Pastorie as a more-than-human narrator. Inspired by Arendt & Beiner's [2] notion of ‘visiting’ and Haraway's [6] call for ‘staying with the trouble’, the paper explores how more-than-human storytelling as a methodological approach within PD can serve as a reflective and speculative tool to narrate processes of co-creation and co-existence in socio-environmental transitions.