Exploring co-creation labs: creative convergence at work

This paper reports on research into co-creation labs as a tool for exploring environmental communication. Co-creation labs are novel spaces for experimentation, social learning, and trans-disciplinary as well as cross-sectoral collaboration for sustainability transformations. This paper examines the approach taken by researchers to theorising, via a repurposing of the 2×2 scenario matrix, a series of “labs” that represent diverse spaces in which to explore co-creative convergence through transformative learning processes. In addition, examples from work done to date are offered to illustrate progress in implementing these labs and testing the strengths and weaknesses of these co-creative spaces.


Introduction
The concept of the "lab" is popular today. 1 It is a direct analogy with the laboratory of scientific imagination offering a space for social and cultural experimentation in which knowledge, ideas and even products are developed and tested by those engaged with the purpose of the lab.The co-creation lab is one example of this move to reframe labs as sites of inquiry, exploration, and innovation.This research views labs as creative spaces in which participants can, through a range of contexts, rethink approaches to the environment to mainstream a broader and more flexible understanding of environmental communication in research, policy, and practice.Communication, we argue, is communal and dynamic.This aligns with Nisbet (2009, 41) who observed that "communication is not simply a translation of facts-it is a negotiation of meaning".Meaning is understood as contextual.For example, what is meaningful to a shaman is not so to an organic chemist.Understood this way, knowledge is porous, punctuated with openings and closures according to context and the traditions of inquiry that generate meaningful understanding.
In constructing co-creation labs 2 to explore this insight, we sought to look at various contexts ranging from the intimate to the public.This paper describes how the authors approached this task first by theorising the field and then describing where the research is to date.To understand context as nested across scales we turned to the classic futures tool, the 2 Â 2 scenario matrix (Ogilvy and Schwartz 2004, 10) and then implemented a range of co-creation labs that engage with what Ray Ison and his colleagues identify as "second-order 'modalities' of dialogue."They describe such modalities as "those forms of conversation in which there is a reciprocal 'turning together' as in some dances" (Ison et al. 2011, 3979).This metaphor suggests that creativity is generated in/through dance.Our choice of the term "co-creation lab" seeks to capture this open and layered "dancing" systemic process.
Our approach follows the two-step map provided by Ison (2017) in his work on effective systemic inquiry where we move from "inventing a different way of organising how things are done" via the repurposing of the 2 Â 2 Scenario Matrix as the 2 Â 2 Thematic Matrix (see below), which in turn triggers new thinking and action aimed at "breaking out of the apartheid of the emotions that exist in most organisations [and contexts]" (Ison 2017, 251).
Such inventiveness is not catalysed by a quest for outcomes, but rather a curiosity about the openings and closures afforded by specific lab contexts.As each context is unique, we need to frame the knowledge production as contingent upon the particular individuals involved.In this, the process, and our thinking about the process, is what can be shared in a paper such as this as "research findings."We acknowledge that this shift in research focus calls for an acceptance that our research is eliciting what we think of as "research-wisdom."Such wisdom is described by Ramirez et al. (2019) as "a sort of knowledge that goes beyond the ordinary.It might be used in response to extraordinary challenges, or to provide special knowledge of the future, or it could even be a sort of reflection on some aspect of the human predicament including knowledge itself" (Ramirez et al. 2019, 73).For us this means sensitivity to process and acceptance of paradox.This is a kind of "soft" knowing.
The co-creation lab, we argue, offers a pathway to generating knowledge that "goes beyond the ordinary."We acknowledge that environmental communication is fraught and characterised by dissent, disagreement and entrenched politics of knowledge.So any knowledge to be useful is likely to be partial, even humble yet going some way to building bridges between various stakeholders.Labs have the potential to foster unique conversations that engage in the work of thinking through assumptions, exploring possibilities and testing transformative behaviours and action without the expectation that the final result will fix or resolve the issue(s) under examination (Polk 2015;Puerari et al. 2018).Whilst this paper describes some of the specific working of the co-creation labs, the insights generated pertain more to our theorising of the labs than the labs themselves.

Constructing convergence
Convergence acts as a metaphor for the co-creation lab.Our goal is to curate a set of relational spaces that move across scales from the public to the intimate.In such spaces, knowledge becomes open and partial.It is a negotiated realm that leverages its provisional state in order to allow for mutual learning to occur, especially in areas that are contested and challenging.Convergence therefore works with the tensions of divergence as issues of communication challenge us to navigate difficulties and disagreements.Those who engage in a co-creation lab, and the publics they represent (Facer 2020), could be strangers or colleagues who have worked together for years.What draws participants together are matters of concern.Each participant brings something unique in terms of life experience, aspiration, knowledge, and communication style.Convergence thus speaks to our collaboration at a moment in time when certain issues work to pull us apart.Thus, pursuing a convergent imagining, we are curious and wonder: Could a conversation create its own momentum?Could separate suddenly become conglomerate with a greater mission?(Lanham 2021) The co-creation labs are sites to explore such convergence, leveraging the inherent tensions at work in the communication process, and offer tentative responses to such questions.We deem such encounters potentially productive as we explore communication beyond the dominant transactional knowledge transfer that has characterised the dissemination of scientific knowledge to date.The need to communicate in innovative ways has long been recognised as necessary for effective and rigorous responses to matters that will affect us all (Folke et al. 2005;Newig et al. 2013;McGreavy et al. 2015;Kahlor and Stout 2010;National Academy of Sciences 2014;Brossard and Lewenstein 2009).
We draw on theorising that focuses on gathering publics around matters of concern to elaborate on our methodological foundations (Latour 2004;Simons and Masschelein 2009).The idea of convening publics is a conception of the role of public universities, where publics are "understood as plural and dynamic; as being summoned into being; as gatherings of people, things, objects and ideas convened around a matter of concern" (Facer 2020, 21).Matters of concern elude simple solutions and create conditions for deliberation amongst multiple actors (Simons and Masschelein 2009).Applied to research practices, convening publics moves away from unearthing matters of fact towards collaborative research between universities and communities (Facer 2020).In addition, it is important to acknowledge the scales at which such gathering occurs.For instance, a gathering can be formal or informal, drawing large numbers of people into dialogue or much less grand, with intimate encounters that are no less significant as sites of engagement.Thus, we theorise convergence across scales as a significant dimension in our own research activities.
We situate the co-creation lab within this broader conversation about the role of research and academics in sustainability transformations and how "the public" participates in co-creating socially relevant knowledge.Who and what is assembled and how collaboration takes place is what this paper seeks to elaborate on in the context of the co-creation lab and our attempts to explore environmental communication.

Repurposing the 232 scenario matrix
Of course, there are many models out there to choose from (Bradbury 2015).As we, the authors, thought about "convergence across scales" of action, we decided on a set of themes around which co-creation might emerge.These themes emerged from our repurposing of the 2 Â 2 scenario matrix (Ogilvy and Schwartz 2004, 10) to structure our interest to capture a range of diverse spaces in which to situate the "lab."In this research, the spaces defined by the matrix are living spaces (not scenarios) in which we enact co-creative convergence according to our identification of themes that offer us a set of lenses (to be described below) to frame the nature of the inquiry.As such, we are not generating scenarios per se but rather using this technique to evoke ideas.The 2 Â 2 scenario matrix is a simple yet powerful tool for inquiring into how we structure our understanding of a context (Curry and Schultz 2009).It is delightfully flexible and generates a creative mindset when dealing with complex issues.It works across two axes as in Figure 1, 2Â2 Scenario Matrix, which set up the conditions for our thinking.
In our desire to generate labs that offer different spaces for co-creation, we decided on linked but opposite sets of concepts.The opposites are used to generate contrast and do not reflect our commitment to dualism as an epistemology.For the X axis, we chose, again following the work of Ison (2008, 147ff), "Systematic" as one point and "System" as its counterpoint.The systematic points towards order and processes that can be defined with some degree of clarity whilst systems are living, fluid and more open to contradictions and a higher degree of chaos.For the Y axis, we took "Ecological" as one point and "Social" as the other.The ecological acknowledges both the creative ecosystems generated by humans in dialogue, whilst also acknowledging the very direct presence of nature, natural processes and individual non-human agents (such as carbon) in communication with the human world (Morton 2017; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017).The social, in turn, acknowledges the spaces and the social actors active in, and the construction of meaning from the impersonal to the intimate.Using these axial binaries, we asked ourselves what kind of thematic context, defined by these parameters, would each quadrant elicit?What kind of co-creative experience would reflect these parameters?The result is shown in Figure 2, 2Â2 Thematic  Matrix.While we create binaries in this matrix, the porosity of these boundaries becomes evident as we characterise each quadrant below and we acknowledge the overlapping nature of the quadrants.

Understanding the thematic spaces via a verb
Whilst acknowledging the subjective nature of this interpretive approach, the application of the 2 Â 2 Matrix has proved conceptually most useful as we constructed the following four co-creation labs.Working clockwise from the top right quadrant, we saw that the intersection of the Systematic with the Social was well suited to serious games, which is a well-established and structured yet flexible approach to fostering joint understandings about wicked issues (Do, Powell, and Bachelder 2020;Powell et al. 2021).The theme here is Structure, suggesting structured engagement with a wicked context (namely carbon farming).This theme provides the logic and motivation for a co-creation lab that explores environmental communication in a structured environment.It acknowledges that communication is not always easy.It can be annoying and confronting.This lab allows the surfacing of such tensions whilst the structure enables participants to experience a degree of safety as they work through disagreements.
Following this, the two axis points, Social and System suggested a more intimate space from which to operationalise a lab.This quadrant evokes conversation and shared meaning making in safe, informal spaces.Here, researchers sit with stakeholders in their space of greatest comfort.Our chosen verb for this theme is Cluster.To cluster is common to systems thinking but used more as an algorithm (Baraldi and Blonda 1999;Lance and Williams 1967).For us, we are thinking of human algorithms that generate meaning through conversation 3 .Safe intimate spaces open up a new way of understanding co-creative process and possibility.The co-creative learning that occurs in such spaces, as Feldman notes, "allows for the sharing of knowledge and the growth of understanding … through meaning making processes" (1999,126).In such informal conversational spaces, participants engage as co-researchers in reflection, testing of ideas, voicing of fears and also hopes.Co-creation becomes a shared experience in which meanings and insights remain partial and communication shapes around common and uncommon encounters with the daily lives of those engaged in this lab.
Moving on to the lower left quadrant, we have a space defined by System and Ecology.This space provides us with the opportunity to explore the theorising linked to new materialism (Connolly 2013) and speculative ethics (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) in situ.This is a highly innovative "lab" in which researchers and stakeholders walk in fields, forests, gardens and even urban spaces, sense the ecological and more than human conditions, which are also understood as communicative actors in the exploration of environmental communication (Morton 2017).Working with a relational kincentric ontology, this quadrant situates the co-creation lab in the midst of things which invoke, as Puig de la Bellacasa puts it "embodied, embedded relations in closeness with concrete conditions" (2017, 95).The theme for this quadrant is Immerse.This lab immerses the researchers and stakeholders in a more-than-human environment in order to open up new lines of communicative praxis.
Finally, in the upper left quadrant we situate a lab in a setting defined by the systematic and the ecological.These parameters suggested to us an open space of dialogue structured around a key provocation.Here the verb is "Gather" as participants in this lab gather to discuss, explore and contest futures around the sensitive question of death and body disposal.Our thinking here is informed by Nora Bateson's (2016) work on warm data, 4 along with the systematic application of a set of futures tools such as the Futures Triangle and Causal Layered Analysis as described by Sohail Inayatullah (2008) and Slaughter and Bussey (2005).This lab takes an open but systematic approach to a key environmental issue (body disposal) and invites participants to gather and explore "the delicate interdependencies of life" (Bateson 2016, 139).This process of using the 2 Â 2 Thematic Matrix has generated a way of conceptualising our co-creation labs.These labs are generating useful material that enables us to see the strengths, and also the weaknesses, of each lab context.In fact, sensitivity to context is a key element in the co-creation lab process.Figure 3 captures the kind of engagements we are curating within each lab.

Ordering our convergent understandings
This research understands "convergent imagining" as a curated set of experiences.
There is no "one-size fits all."Rather there are contexts and processes that convene publics which probe, explore and imagine responses to societal problems.These labs are spaces where we see that co-creative imagination can be harnessed in ways that may generate new forms of response-ability (Haraway 2016) and sense-ability (Krzywoszynska 2019).Labs are not just about generating responses, but also exploring obstacles and challenges to action and new ways of being.Communication can be stressful, confronting and to be honest we are not very good at it.As the research unfolds, we are using the four lenses outlined above: structuring, clustering, gathering, and immersing, to explore the communicative potential of co-creation labs.To order our thinking and practice, we see these processes at work in our co-creative labs as orders that release convergent understandings whilst allowing for the divergent.Convergence is not about supressing difference; it is about bringing together multiple and often contrary views to see what such cognitive dissonance triggers in creative pursuit of understanding (Do, Powell, and Bachelder 2020).Whilst each lab is essentially unique, the conceptual underpinning of themes allows us to draw broader, though partial, conclusions from them.In this, we engage in a process of "hermeneutic reconstruction" (Paulus, Woodside, and Ziegler 2008, 235), which balances our interests and ambitions as researchers with the larger goal of fostering new understandings for researchers and participants.Thus, structuring offers the order of serious gaming in which parameters are set and various stakeholders are brought together to explore the dynamics of the carbon farming landscape as a multitude of interconnected issues, actors, and relationships.Clustering takes the informal safe space as its starting point.The lab in this context is intimate, homely, and non-judgemental.As researchers we cluster with participants in a quest for shared meaning.Our clustering is both physical and also conceptual, in which insights, struggles, fears and hopes are shared and worked over discursively.Immersing extends the concept of the lab to emphasise the more-than-human contexts in which environmental communication is embedded (Morton 2017;Kohn 2013).In this context, the co-creative takes the open space of a farmer's field, a garden or a city street to sound out a shared meaning, a communicative praxis from which the new might emerge.Finally, gathering offers another shared and intimate space in which dialogue occurs in a conversational atmosphere where participants not only share their experiences but are also offered new insights that will critically engage with their experience and expectations.In this way, the lab creates a space for "bypassing normal frames of reference and opening up dialogues that would otherwise not be possible" (Aragn and Castillo-Burguete 2015, 2).
We would argue that all quadrants, in fact, interact with one another.For instance, we cannot deny the reality that the more-than-human world has a stake in all quadrants even though we focus on it in only one.The distinction is artificial, though useful.The process of engaging in co-creation labs therefore allows for certain kinds of social learning to occur.Harnessing such openness often surfaces deep tensions which both researchers and participants need to work with.To learn new things, we often need to unlearn other things.This point is made with powerful clarity by Alasuutari and Andreotti: Unlearning is about reconsidering and reassessing those positions that were previously thought to be both normal and self-evident … .Unlearning can help us identify and rearrange the allocation of modern desires that place modern subjects at the centre of the world, such as the desire for seamless progress in linear time that guarantees our "futurity", the desire for agency grounded on innocent protagonism (e.g.feeling, looking and doing "good") and the desire for comprehensive knowledge that can secure our certainties, comforts and control.(Alasuutari and Andreotti 2015)

Applying the themes
So far, we have outlined how we theorised our co-creation lab spaces.In this, we followed Ison's injunction to be inventive.To stimulate our own inventiveness, we repurposed the classic futures tool, the 2 Â 2 scenario matrix as a thematic matrix.Each quadrant offers a theme that acts as a lens for investigating environmental communication.A lens of this kind allows us "to see [our] stories differently" (Krawec 2022, 14).Each lens offers a context for Ison et al.'s "second order modalities" which we understand as the human, partial, open and evolving elements of systems in dialogue (Ison et al. 2011, 3979).To put these lenses to work we designed and are in the process of implementing four iterative labs. 5 Lab 1: Structure -Serious Game Design: Carbon Farming Lab 2: Cluster -Conversations about Carbon Farming Lab 3: Immerse -Embodied experience and narratives in "nature" about Carbon Farming Lab 4: Gather -Facilitated exploration on the Futures of Death and Body Disposal In the following sections, we offer a structured account of work done to date.In each case, we detail the objectives of the lab, the form they take, offer a brief description of the lab process with the tools and methods used.We also define opportunities of the lab processwhat action or reflection or change could the lab support?Finally, we note the barriers and limitations of the lab processwhat hinders this type of lab and what specifically is difficult with the form it has taken in our research process?
Lab 1: Structure: Developing a Carbon Farming Game Objective: In the upper right quadrant, we have the structured serious game labs.Here the co-creation lab focuses on game co-design via a series of iterative sessions on carbon farming.Our research focus is on transformation in agricultural systems, the shift towards carbon farming and regenerative agriculture.Form: We have had two online focus group meetings and two in-person co-design workshops with carbon farming stakeholders in Sweden (e.g.farmers, policy makers, soil scientists, companies, NGOs, certification organisations).In addition, we have had one game playtesting with a group of agrology students in Finland.Opportunities: The game co-design process offers the opportunity to illuminate the different assumptions and values motivating different choices, to shed light on potential conflicts of interests and tensions connected to multiple goals and demands in agricultural transformation (e.g.climate change mitigation and adaptation, food security, economic viability, biodiversity … ); and to explore, test and play out different constellations of practices that can promote synergies and adapt to bio-physical, political, economic, and socio-cultural shocks (uncertainties).Furthermore, it helps to build recognition for multiple perspectives and enhance empathy among diverse stakeholders.Barriers and limitations: The game co-design process is time-consuming and dependent on voluntary participation and engagement of stakeholders over a long period of time.Furthermore, it is challenging to track and assess the impact of such an approach.Few farmers have been part of the game co-design process to date.In addition, the game co-design process requires a long and continuous process of engagement and interaction, which means higher time commitment from stakeholders and can cause stakeholder fatigue.Description: The co-design process was structured around a simple game prototype that invited conversations around opportunities and challenges in building sustainable agricultural systems, with the aim of creating legitimacy for different perspectives and ways of knowing that complement the traditional scientific understanding of soil health and regenerative farming practices.This process deliberately interwove the act of playing, imagining, deliberating, and testing different ideas and strategies to allow for new insights to emerge.Rich pictures and inspiration cards were tools used to complement the game prototyping.
Lab 2: Cluster -Conversations about Carbon Farming Objective: In the bottom right-hand quadrant, we have informal conversations in intimate settings, such as around the kitchen table.Our focus is on gathering multiple stories of transitions in agriculture.Form: These conversations take place in the homes of farmers who are piloting carbon farming methods on their fields.These conversations are part of the annual check-in with the organisation hosting these pilot projects.Two researchers from our research team have joined these visits, posing their own questions during the conversations.Opportunities: Building relationships among stakeholders, learning from local context and directly from those active in that context.Barriers and limitations: Changes in farmers' fields happen on many different time scales, with some changes having more immediate, visible impact and other potential changes needing years to be detectable.Thus, conversations should also continue over the long term to allow for this joint meaning-making to emerge.Maintaining such a long-term relationship is challenging in the project-driven society.Description: During these conversations, there is a set of questions brought by the hosting organisation, but conversation is informal and allowed to go on tangents.Objective: In the lower left quadrant, we seek to broaden our understanding of labs and co-creation in general.Our research focus is on the diverse ways that we understand "what is going on" in soils.Form: Walking into carbon farming pilot fields using shovel, measuring tape, metal cylinder, a litre of water, a hammer, and a large sheet of plastic as tools to have a look at what is going on in the soil at that moment.Members of the organisation hosting the pilots led farmers and researchers through the steps of digging a hole, checking water infiltration, counting worm holes, checking root nodes, dropping soil clumps, rolling the soil in one's hand, and smelling the soil.These all offered vantage points from which to engage with the effects of different carbon farming methods and the health of the soil.

Opportunities
Broadening the repertoire of knowledge used to make sense of soils and opening up for communicating innovative approaches of mitigating climate change and supporting soil health using experiential approaches.Barriers and limitations: Stakeholders rely on quantifiable data to understand if the methods used in different fields are "going in the right direction."However, it is often difficult to obtain this data easily, inexpensively, and reliably.The reliance on quantifiable data in modern culture decreases the legitimacy of experiential knowledge.Changes in farmers' fields happen on many different time scales, with some changes having more immediate, visible impact and other potential changes needing years to be detectable.Thus, tests should also continue over the long-term to allow for this joint meaning-making to emerge.Description: These steps are simple and cheap and can offer some clues into understanding soils that are accessible for all farmers.These steps are not necessarily new to farmers; doing it together with the hosting organisation opened up for conversation in-situ.As researchers, we are interested in our interaction and relationship with the more-than-human in this conversation.

Discussion
Mapping out zones of environmental communication using the 2 Â 2 matrix has enabled the research to identify and explore both formal and informal sites of negotiation.Tensions abound in this work as we seek uniformity (a recognisable and useful research output) across diverse, even contradictory, settings.As the work unfolds, we find that the word "communication" itself takes on different forms according to context.That should be no surprise, but it does pose challenges to research.Raymond Williams in his classic Keywords made it clear that the word "communication" worked across a sliding scale between a hard transmit and a gentle share (1985,72).Importantly he anchors the word communicate in the root "common."And yet we are finding the uncommon in communication too.This uncommon is rooted in the active negotiation of meaning involved in communication; this is its co-creative dimension.We are forced, as a result, to explore what bell hooks terms "the language of intimacy" (Hooks and Mesa-Bains 2006, 47) and Lab 4: Gather -A Series of Facilitated Discussions on the Futures of Death and Body Disposal Objective: In the upper left quadrant, we explore the sensitive issue of body disposal.Our research focus is on the relationship of tradition to transformation.Form: We have had three labs to date.These have been facilitated by a professional futurist who uses futures tools and facilitation strategies to guide the attendees through a series of steps designed to: 1.Share experiences and assumptions about death; 2. Provide information about emerging alternatives to traditional body disposal; and 3. Map perceptions of the state of play of body disposal and death practices.Three diverse sites were chosen for the labs: 1) A local museum and Christian community; 2) An aged care provider which offers workshop spaces to community groups; 3) A community arts space.

Opportunities:
Show casing emerging new technologies and highlighting the heavy environmental footprint of cremation and burial.Developing knowledge and a shared language around alternative body disposal practices that are relatively cheap, respectful, and relational embracing the natural processes of death.Further, exploring possibilities for new rituals to emerge.

Barriers and limitations:
Taboos around discussing death and body disposal.Lack of knowledge and also reliance on (passivity in the face of) an invisible "system" to aid in keeping death at bay.The informal nature of the lab has no direct impact on either laws or the industries that manage body disposal.Needs time to build trust and a shared language.Not tested with industry as none came.Description: Whilst the process was structured and led by the facilitator, the actual unfolding of each session was very much participant-led and open-ended with the result that each session was a unique encounter producing a range of outcomes.Tools and methods used were icebreakers using the App Mentimeter and an opening activity where participants were asked to create a word cloud.Participants were also asked to write their own epitaph for a headstone.Futures Triangle (Inayatullah 2008) and Four Quadrant Model (Slaughter and Bussey 2005) were also used.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) calls "the grammar of animacy".Meaning itself is internalised through common experience, as Merleau-Ponty put it: "it is in the world that we communicate" (1968,11) and it is through experiencing the world that our values and assumptions are shaped.It is also through sharing the world that we have the possibility to arrive at some shared appreciation of it (O'Donohue 1997, 64).Rather than transmitting or translating knowledge, communication is thus making collective meaning across difference (Emmett and Nye 2017).Our labs therefore seek to situate such insights, as paradoxical as they seem, within an intelligible field as delineated by the 2 Â 2 matrix.At one level, this is a crude attempt, but we are finding a rich set of insights emerging.
In Lab 1: Structure we are seeing the benefits of curated game structure in organising experiences that enable participants to reflect on and assess the drivers shaping the carbon farming landscape.Diverse stakeholders with quite different experiences of the world and, as a result, quite different values and concerns can share, deliberate and cocreate, in a safe space, models that do not just signify the forces at work in the carbon farming world but also the values, assumptions and uncertainties that inform these forces.Using a co-created game to do this also acknowledges the social dimension of knowledge creation.This work builds on earlier work by some of us on serious games as tools for engaging with wicked issues (Do, Powell, and Bachelder 2020) and is continuing to affirm the strengths of this approach.
This social and structured co-creation lab contrasts with the intimate space of Lab 2: Cluster where a very different form of communication occurs.The researchers here focus on personal experience, identified challenges, wisdom gained through lived experience, and also the affective processes involved in deep listening, narrative ethnography and the subjective ('t Hart 2023; Paulus, Woodside, and Ziegler 2008;Bliss and Fowler 2021).It seeks to peer into these micro-worlds and understand how communication at the soft end of Williams' continuum described above is shaping environmental communication.Deep listening is as important as the sharing, as we "cluster" in this process forming what Bliss and Fowler (2021) have called "beloved communities" focusing on matters of concern.The researcher is participant in the intimacy of this research along with the farmers and representatives of the non-profit organisation (the organisation hosting the carbon farming pilots).'t Hart (2021, 1) has argued that deep listening "involves creating an emotional connection with the participant so that the interviewer is able to hear multiple layers of meaning and context".We are seeking to understand the role of intimate conversation in environmental communication as it is out of micro-engagements that meaning and knowledge emerge into communities of practice and resistance.As Paulus, Woodside, and Ziegler (2008) note, this involves "paying attention" to what emerges as the research unfolds.We acknowledge that this research is not "clean" but deeply collaborative, involving the research team, farmers, and the non-profit organisation."Paying attention" is provisional but very human, and this, in itself, is an important insight.
Extending this work into Lab 3: Immerse our research engages with the more-thanhuman world.This is a challenging methodological space in which deep listening takes on a new dimension.Inspired by the insights of Kimmerer we seek to elicit inklings into another form of relationship in which conversation moves beyond the language of the everyday and the language of science and economic advantagewe seek to engage a "grammar of animacy."To stand in a field, to immerse ourselves in the natural, to recognise that we are in relationship is not simply a romantic gesture to something forever beyond our comprehension.Rather it is a form of research that is inviting communication within living and layered systems of being.Where this is taking us, we are unsure but it is leading to a range of insights around ethics, extended communication, embodiment and deep listening.This form of co-creation involves a new relational consciousness which we are exploring.Kimmerer (2017, 133) sums this up beautifully when she observes: Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one.
In Lab 4: Gather we return to a more conventional research setting.Here the focus is on Death Futures in which the research explores communication that involves the interplay of information, taboo and aspiration.This research takes the form of semistructured conversations that are futures focused.Traditional futures tools such as the Futures Triangle (Inayatullah 2008), the Four Quadrant Model (Slaughter and Bussey 2005) and Causal Layered Analysis (Inayatullah et al. 2022) are utilised to unpack assumptions and explore possibilities.The context is a gathering of people who selfselect, though it is the intention to also engage industry partners as the process unfolds.Taking the form of a World Caf e 6 the communication is generative, supportive and open.Participants are introduced to powerful concepts such as "Deep Time" (Wilkinson 2005) and "Ancestors of the Future" (Krznaric 2020).The focus of each session is on alternatives to traditional body disposal in which co-creativity is fostered through exercises that promote an anticipatory imagination (Bussey, Song, and Hsieh 2017).Insights arising from this lab include reflection on the use of specific futures tools themselves, which are proving very effective in generating trust and personal investment in exploring alternatives.As with Lab 1: Structure this lab is also playful, yet this playfulness is not focused on a structured output such as a game, but rather a sense of excitement and at times even mischief.This latter is summed up in the exercise Write Your Own Epitaph for a gravestone.The following epitaphs are drawn from this exercise and touch on pathos and humour.
See me in the trees, rivers, and oceans.Visit me, laugh with me, be in awe with me! Raw, fresh and caring.Singing hymns to love never dead.A refugee from commercialisation.Never a forgotten soul, they said!Good luck everybody!Lived to the fullest and made the world a better place.

Conclusion
This paper reports on how the popular notion of the lab has been used to explore cocreative knowledge.In theorising a set of distinct and contrasting "labs" we turned to the futures tool the 2 Â 2 Scenario Matrix and repurposed it to generate a 2 Â 2 Thematic Matrix.This matrix helps us describe contexts in which environmental communication occurs under specific conditions.Though we are far from reaching conclusions, we can state that the process itself has been highly informative with each site, Structure, Cluster, Immerse and Gather, offering unique insights into the co-creative process.Our approach to theorising is indebted to the work of Ray Ison (2017) and his colleagues on systemic inquiry and acknowledges that a range of publics (Facer 2020) are needed to converge around matters of care and concern.
As the research unfolds, we are coming to appreciate the role of scale in shaping knowledge co-production.We are also learning to pay attention to the intimate and immersive labs that involve private spaces and the animacy of nature as "beloved", communities (Bliss and Fowler 2021) with the potential to deepen environmental communication.Such sites complement and contrast with the equally important labs where convening publics converge in more systematic and structured settings.The social learning involved on the part of researchers and our collaborators is rich, the methods both emergent and tried and true are finding meaningful application and throwing much needed light on what it takes to engage in transformative co-creation.
These conversations have the aim of learning from farmers about how the growing season has gone, what has worked, what has been challenging, what they need, and what they think the hosting organisation could do to support them better.
Lab 3: Immerse -Embodied Experience and Narratives about Carbon Farming