Full Description
Systems Play: Art, Design and the Future of Humankind explores how contemporary artists and designers are reimagining the world in an age defined by complexity, uncertainty, and systemic interdependence. The book argues that the most compelling creative practices today engage in systems play, strategies that work with emergent patterns, multiplicity, and interconnection to make large-scale systems more legible and more open to change.
It offers an engaging look at how systems play and speculative design can illuminate social challenges and support collective action for the good of humans, animals, and plants. Idea-driven rather than practical, it presents a rich set of multidisciplinary examples that will inspire researchers and artists alike.
Through richly illustrated case studies across fields such as speculative design, immersive installation, and interactive media, it examines how creative work can: expand human perception beyond biological limits; challenge anthropocentric assumptions; reconceive personhood as relational and distributed; rethink family, community, and care as dynamic systems; and reframe our experience of time. Each chapter situates these practices within broader cultural, technological, and ecological contexts, showing how they resist reductive narratives and open space for alternative futures.
Blending critical theory with accessible storytelling, Systems Play positions experimental art and design as more than cultural commentary, providing intellectual and practical blueprints for navigating complexity. It is both a survey of emergent creative approaches and a call to take their insights seriously as tools for reimagining our shared, uncertain world.
Contents
Introduction: The Idea of a World
1. Change
Rethinking Progress
Recalculating Power
Progress as Return
Multiplicity and Uncertainty
Flickering Narratives
2. Access
Organs of Perception
Nomadic Perspectives
The Salience Filter
End Users
3. Personhood
Mapping the Human
Journeying without a Self
Personhood is Everywhere
Seeing Other People
4. Family
Not the Family Tree
The Resistant Family
Matters of Childcare
Posthuman (Pro)Creative Services
Pragmatism and Corazónar
5. Community
Rituals of Recalibration
Collective Immersion
Finite Terraforming
Recipes for Communal Worlds
6. Time
The Shape of Time
Making Time
Time-Islands
Fractal Time
End Times
Imaginable Time
Concluding Thoughts: What We May Become
Bibliography
Index
