The Parliament of Species

A website for enabling citizens to co-create policies that relate with the expansion of antimicrobial resistance while embodiying non humans to advocate for them.

The parliament of species is a platform designed as a result of a collaboration with several stakeholders being specialists in Antibiotic Resistance.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global issue that threatens the effective prevention and treatment of infections cause by bacteria, parasites, viruses and fungi. (World Health Organisation)

Background

Beyond the human gaze

We focused on the impacts of AMR beyond the interests of humankind’s wellbeing/survival. We identified during our theoretical research that humans would be far from the only ones to suffer from the development of antibiotic resistance, while they (we) are the ones contributing greatly to the spread of resistant bacteria.
Our goal was to promote and engage other humans on the topic of AMR, while fostering matters for other species’ wellbeing. This shift of view point on the topic is also a way to see this anxiogenious future as a potential for humans to give more space and agency to other species’ interests.

On this page, a citizen who chose to represent the entity 'Fauna' has the task to assess a policy previously proposed by another participant who was representing the interests of 'Homo Sapiens'. On the next page, the task will be to propose another policy, representing better the interests of fauna and other species.

Engaging humans into the critical thinking of policies

The website (now offline) used to propose an alternative democratic structure of policymaking. The goal of the website is to engage citizens in imagining the future of AMR by co-creating future policies. These policies were collected on the digital platform, as an archive of different citizen perspectives, values, and knowledge regarding AMR and the future.
The policy-making process was conceived at various steps of the project with participants from various background (mainly young international people living in Sweden). We also relied on our stakeholder’s knowledge on the topic to frame the pedagogical aspects of the website by conducting interviews and digital workshops with them. From this collaboration we could present on the website six initial ‘projections’, which are potential future situations that will be encountered in the future because of the development of AMR.

This project especially aimed to challenge power-relations underlying expertise and therefore the capacity of citizens to feel confident about their knowledge for expressing their opinion on a complex topic. We also aimed to place non-humans as citizens in this project, by giving them the status of stakeholders in our project, but also by researching ways of making non-humans heard in a policy-making process driven by citizens.

More theoretical details can be found in this paper we wrote for the NORDES21 conference.

Gallery of the process

Physical prototyping of a game and play-testing

The platform was initially thought as a game. This a a first prototype of a board on which we play-tested different versions of the policy-making experience. The challenge was to get the players to get enough understanding of AMR, without giving too much information at once. The game was collaborative, this is when the idea came that the resistant bacteria would be an independant enemy that the players would have to fight against by collaborating together.

The general idea for the collaboration of citizens is inspired from the game exquisite corpses, which we tested as a very lo-fi version of our platform. With one projection into the future citizens can propose various policies, while being inspired by each others.

Design of a paper version of the platform and test with participants