Co-Speculating Business Sustainability across Ontological Difference

• In Event: Re-thinking And Experimenting With Participatory Research Practices And Design Through The Speculative And Ontological Turn - II: Methods and Practices

Abstract

This paper explores the potentials of co-speculation for creating effective data infrastructures to address business sustainability. It is based on a developing research project in Denmark to design, create and populate a database which will track corporate sustainability efforts. The paper provides an initial analysis of sustainability efforts in the Danish corporate sector, informed by the perspectives of the ontological turn, to suggest that it’s understanding of climate change differs ontologically from that of many other actors in the climate field (such as researchers, activists, politicians, etc). The paper argues that given the importance of corporations in contributing to the ongoing climate crises, creating a successful data infrastructure detailing their sustainability efforts is crucial to efforts to research their (lack of) transition and create popular pressure on them to increase their pace, yet requires their participation to be most effective. To bridge the ontological difference between actors and facilitate such participation, the paper suggests experimentation with co-speculation. Concretely, the paper suggests and explores the creation of several workshops to facilitate the co-speculative design of the data infrastructure itself, as a means to turn business sustainability into a matter of concern shared by different kinds of actors. Co-speculation here means, following Donna Haraway, engaging materially in speculative fabulation of the concrete form, content, metrics and means of access of the proposed data infrastructure itself. It also means the creation of relations between actors through collaborative speculation on different possibilities and futures.

Author

• Michael Hockenhull, IT University of Copenhagen