‘Living-with’ Transformative Change: Exploring Affective Entanglements When Working Towards More Just and Sustainable Futures

Abstract

As the multiple challenges of our times become more tangible, so do the affective entanglements with them. Emotions shape how transformative changes are perceived, experienced, and acted upon, yet many of us have been conditioned to especially avoid, escape, or seek rescue especially emotions of discomfort or darkness. While affective entanglements in relation to transformative change are increasingly acknowledged, we often still lack concrete and tangible 'how to' practices to live with them. In this paper, we explore how design research can offer tangible invitations for reflective-affective practices through developing and engaging with a ‘cultural probe’. Using an autoethnographic approach that positions all authors as co-researchers, we examine how cultural probes can support engagements with affective entanglements in transformative changes. Our engagement with the cultural probe revealed a fundamental paradox: we need practices that help us to live-with, stay and work with discomfort and darkness, yet the very act of creating and engaging with such practices can reproduce the conditions that prevent us from doing so. The cultural probe is offered not as a model to be standardized and replicated, but as an imperfect tool to be critically played with, adapted, refused, and transformed – an invitation to cultivate the emotional capacities transformations require, while remaining attentive to how affective conditioning shapes our attempts to do this work.