Social imaginaries as a lens on co-designing environmental sustainability

Social imaginaries are a way of envisioning how people maintain society, and of understanding what is valued within that society. In this project, we worked with children on environmentally sustainable solutions for the future using co-design, a common methodology in child-computer interaction. We apply a social imaginary lens to five co-design case studies, from different geographic regions around the world, to describe and analyze variations in design practices as well as in design artifacts, and examine the ways in which children demonstrated a shared understanding of a pro-social world. The primary contribution of this paper is an illustration of the use of social imaginaries for interpreting and organising co-design around environmental sustainability. • The primary contribution of this paper is an illustration of the use of social imaginaries for interpreting and organising co-design around environmental sustainability. • Children’s emergent social imaginaries shaped the artifacts they created, suggesting that more deliberate crafting of social imaginaries during participatory design could result in better outcomes for children and the proposal of more grounded, realistic solutions. • Observations from co-design case studies through the lens of Social Imaginaries led to identified themes of: emotional connectedness, social values and binary perspectives, connectedness and shared goals, blended experience, and empowerment. • Social imaginaries to address world-issues such as sustainability should include lenses from world-wide perspectives. In this article, we share five case-studies from different geographic regions. • Based on our experience, we believe that purposefully leveraging social imaginaries in co-design with children can: strengthen emotional connection, ground fantastical ideas, enhance facilitator’ capacity to scaffold reflection and creativity, and foster the development of shared visions of change.