Design fiction, culture and climate change. Weaving together personas, collaboration and fabulous futures

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges to contemporary lifestyles and future living. We offer a design humanities view on shaping personas to address perspective, narrative and voice through two artifacts: a tiger fish and a nuclear powered narwhal. We ask: How can personas be employed narratively and rhetorically to motivate collaborative meaning making about climate change by different participants in diverse cultural and physical contexts? We draw on two three year projects in southern Africa and the north west European arctic. Two personas are conveyed in a multispecies design fiction ethnography. We connect physical locations and informational resources with modes of co-design and performative enactment in a southern travelling design education studio and a northern nomadic transdisciplinary research team. We weave together our experiences of working through the two personas, fictively and conjecturally to suggest ways of engaging in ‘futures literacies’ via design fiction.