Symphony of Symbiosis, Social Imaginaries
My name is Natalia Dovhalionok, and I am a Creative Researcher and Speculative Designer, as well as an aspiring educator. Based between London and Vienna, I practise creative ideation techniques to explore alternative ways of living. I specialise in communicating complex ideas, interactions, spaces, and future experiences. With every project, I strive to foster a commitment to more-than-human environmental empathy.
As a designer, my post-disciplinary skill set has been built through collaborations with renowned creative studios such as Superflux, where I explored the future of ambient technologies and addressed themes of extraction and exploitation within the technosphere. I also bring corporate experiences from working on international smart city development projects, envisioning future experiences, challenging the linear thinking associated with innovation adoption.
As an educator, I have engaged with MA Expanded Practice students at Goldsmiths, University of London. My aim is to critically challenge and reimagine our interactions with landscapes, spaces, architectures, and topographies.
I am working on a social imaginaries project titled Symphony of Symbiosis. This ever-expanding narrative grows through open-ended participant engagement. Collectively, we co-create in a series of mixed-media workshops, resulting in participatory ownership of a nuanced future vision set in the year 2030 and beyond, and guided by a focus on interspecies communications and more-than-human experiences. Symphony of Symbiosis is a fictional world that expands with each session, akin to a rooting tree, underpinned by each participant's engagement. I am aiming to map this intercultural perceived network of ideas, in the attempt to empower pluriversal ideas for the future.
The topic for each session is determined by the participants' backgrounds, their unique cultural experiences and knowledge, as well as their hopes and dreams. Topics can range from character development, spatial design and nuanced environmental landscapes to new species, technological speculation, or cultural insights. By bridging radical imagination with an open-ended approach to narrative, I am aiming to establish visions for new institutions, urban concepts, structures, and visions of techno-environmental symbiosis, that will be part of open access platform.
The structure of the workshop is in constantly evolving, from traditional Miro board co-participation to in-real-life gamification approaches. Currently, my workshops incorporate traditional futures world-building techniques at their core. I am to create a gamified experience that draws participants away from their devices and takes us on an in-real-life experiential journey.
At the moment, the world is documented through emotive narrative, and AI-enhanced imagery. I plan to explore outcomes by creating of physical artefacts and digital experiences that would explore the diegetic prototypes of the narrative in the real world.