Nordic Fabulation Network

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 Science and Technology Studies 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?

Through the organization of three workshops, we produce dfabulations that act as possible trajectories for Nordic care futures, and developed a toolkit and a book for fabulating compiling reflections on how Fabulation works, what it is good for, and strategies and tactics for developing meaningful shared futures.

Links

The project's home page

Acknowledgements

This is a NordForsk-funded NOS-HS Exploratory Workshop series, titled “Nordic Fabulation Network” (project number 133226).

Publications

Network, N. F. (2025). Fabulating together. https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-249231

Juul Søndergaard, M. L., Campo Woytuk, N., Howell, N., Tsaknaki, V., Helms, K., Jenkins, T., & Sanches, P. (2023). Fabulation as an Approach for Design Futuring: Designing Interactive Systems Conference. Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ’23). https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596097

Jenkins, T., Søndergaard, M. L. J., Sanches, P., Tsaknaki, V., Campo Woytuk, N., Howell, N., Boer, L., Tucker, J. E., & Helms, K. (2023). Fabulating Futures for Flourishing and Vibrant Worlds: The 10th Nordic Design Research Society Conference.

Fabulating Biodata Futures for Living and Knowing Together | Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. (u.å.). Hämtad 13 maj 2026, från https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3532106.3533477