The Wild Probes: Towards a Collection of Hybrid Tools for Situated, Caring & Playful Co-design within the Forest

Abstract

The Wild Probes (WPs) are a set of hybrid tools for designers and researchers to facilitate multi-stakeholder co-design engagements within the forest. They support situated forestry future-making by helping the participants of a co-design process pay attention to, reflect on, ideate around, and document their forestry experiences in ways that can inspire contextually grounded forest-related ideation. Here we present the design and early use of the first iteration of the WPs. The WPs extend existing tools available to designers by adapting their underlying mechanisms to the idiosyncratic character of the forest. We designed them building on recent research on the methodological underpinnings of (co-)designing for and from the forest. The WPs run on affordable, widely accessible electronics and can easily be built with basic DIY skills and equipment. We thus invite others to replicate, enhance, and repurpose them. Overall, here we contribute a first step towards creating a collection of tools to support co-design that is situated in the forest. We hope other designers will find our proposals useful and contribute to growing the collection by creating new WPs of their own.