On June third, the Green Office Impact Day kicked off, filled with a multitude of activities, stands, and exchanges of knowledge. The Laudato Si’-institute was invited to organise a ‘knowledge bite’ during lunch hour. During this activity, we were able to tell people about the institute and our values.
Inspired by the roleplaying game, organized for the Laudato Si’-institute by Teun te Bulte in February, we designed an activity in which the participants were able to view the world from a different role than they were used to. We wanted to let people practice taking on a different worldview by asking themselves questions about how things that we all encounter are experienced differently by different beings. More specifically, we asked people to look at the spatial layout of campus from the perspective of a non-human animal that roams the campus.
Our campus is designed in a logical way for humans. The doors and paved pathways are convenient, aesthetically pleasing and (mostly) easy to navigate. The campus is made to be accessible. For humans, at least. But campus is not only inhabited by humans. The world looks completely different from between blades of grass or the branches of the trees. Because we sometimes tend to forget that we share this space with these other beings that are being influenced by our decisions and that have to find their way around and through our structures, we wanted to make a small exercise to be more conscious of how other beings navigate our campus.
In order to do so, we divided our participants in groups, and we gave each group an animal that lives on campus to study. We asked them to imagine themselves not as the entire species, but as one individual creature from this species. In a playful way, the participants made characters of the animals with names, backstories and preferences. Through the eyes of Kees the Frog, Azura the Damselfly, and Pippi the Pipistrelle, our players roamed the campus with their attention on the things their animal would focus on, find helpful, or be scared by. What problems would they encounter and what would they change if we were to ask them? In doing so, we tried to let go of attempting to create a realistic image, since the opinion of a frog on the spatial layout of campus may be very limited. Our goal is to assume a non-human perspective on your surroundings to expand your worldview.
After roaming around on campus, we gathered everyone back together to discuss everyone’s findings. As representatives of the animals they had been assigned, the groups presented how they had experienced the layout of campus. There turned out to be many overlapping or conflicting wishes for the facilities in the area. The streetlights that helped the bat hunt were for instance very inconvenient for the damselfly. However, the traffic seemed to be a big problem for everyone, and hiding spots and higher grass was generally preferable too. We kept track of these connections with different colours of yarn that we spun out as lines in the circle between the animal representatives, so at the very end we had created a visual overview of the interconnectedness of the animals. We hope that the players were able to experience other perspectives on the Radboud campus and are inspired to tread outside of the paved pathways.