Conference Agenda

Citizen science and citizen data are widely used to engage with anthropogenic effects such as pollution and species loss. However, their focus on data gathering and objectivization can result in dispassionate learning. Futures scaffolding offers an alternative design approach that reimagines how environmental knowledge can be generated, experienced, and materialized. Positioned within co-speculative design, this practice uses design methods to make visible what data represents and to cultivate ocean futures. This paper mobilizes a workshop kit called Monsters of Marine Debris (MMD) as an object of design to illustrate futures scaffolding. MMD makes data a source of futures-making rather than a goal of community engagement. Participants engage in embedded, embodied, and emergent processes that spark entangled, more-than-human thinking about anthropocentric marine debris (AMD). By applying futures scaffolding, MMD reframes citizen data as a generative design material that supports relational, affective, and imaginative engagements with environmental futures.