Exploring co-creative embodiment and foresight practices

In 2022, just a few months before the release of ChatGPT, a colleague and I held a co-creative foresight workshop that envisioned future learning spaces, one of which was an AI-powered learning garden. This technologically enhanced nature-integrated space merged personalized learning journeys with commons-based principles. In this learning garden, students would plant seeds that would grow alongside themselves, symbolizing their educational journey while fostering a sense of responsibility for the environment. Equipped with AI structuring learning processes and access to global coaches that offer deep personalized insight, the garden students would navigate individualized learning experiences and commons-based collaborative projects. This speculative setting would encourage students to explore their interests, engage deeply with nature, and cultivate both individual and collective responsibility, resulting in an inclusive, inspiring, and transformative educational experience.

The speculative AI-powered learning garden is one of the outcomes of the workshop “Reflecting and Reimagining Hybrid Learning Environments,” which brought together students, educators, and administrators to play the Classroom of the Future game. This playful method was conceived to co-imagine and co-design speculative future learning environments, and a detailed account of the project, the game, and the workshop outcomes can be found online here¹.

In my work, I employ future studies and foresight methods together with others to explore evolving human-technology relations in terms of agentiality, materiality, embodiment, and knowledge construction. Emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), as well as virtual and augmented reality, represent a shift in experiential media and are novel mediators of human experience and practice. Rather than understanding these technologies as mere objects or tools separate from, or extending human perception, they actively co-shape human-world relations and knowledge construction. Foresight methods allow us to scrutinize human-technology relations by looking beyond current events toward potential futures. However, these practices can also contribute to bringing forth these futures. The Presencing Institute, for example, offers tools and methods that bring forth aspirational futures while supporting systemic transformation. Additionally, some tools by the Presencing Institute employ embodied practices “to dissolve limiting concepts, to communicate directly, to access intuition, and to make visible both current realities, and the deeper–often invisible–leverage points for creating profound change.”

Intrigued by this description and embodied collaborative practices in general, I became interested in the 4-D Mapping method documented in the book “The Social Presencing Theater.” My driving question in exploring this method was how embodied practices contribute to co-creative foresight for emerging technologies in higher education.

In this article, I discuss the workshop I conceived for the School of Commons Assembly 2025 and my experience employing the 4-D Mapping method. The aim of the workshop and 4-D Mapping exercise is to develop an aspirational vision for how Germany’s higher education system may transform its integration of generative AI in the learning environment.

What is 4-D Mapping by the Presencing Institute?

The Presencing Institute describes 4-D Mapping as “making visible the current reality in a social system, such as a school system, and revealing how embodied sensing and knowing can lead to fresh outcomes.” Participants in 4-D Mapping embody interest groups or stakeholders in the system they investigate, and reveal how change emerges through movement. Each interest group influences the other directly or indirectly and in varying degrees in this complex system. Therefore, the 4-D Mapping method enables us to uncover the layers of interdependence in a system that are not always immediately apparent because of the complexities associated with governance, power, allocations of resources, and other forces and factors.

How was the workshop employing the 4-D Mapping method structured?

The 60-minute workshop, which dealt with the current challenges of integrating generative AI technologies and didactic practices into higher education in Germany, was structured in three parts:

Grounding meditation and introduction to case study 4-D Mapping exercise

Reflection

After a grounding meditation, I told the story of how Germany’s higher education institutions have been working to integrate generative AI technologies, such as ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion, into their technical repertoire, learning design, and institutional processes. The presented case, which you can listen to below, speaks of various actors that play a role in co-shaping the success and challenges of this process. The actors or interest groups are:

• AI-working-groups at universities, who are responsible for rolling out the technical and didactic workflows for employing generative AI in higher education)
• Educators
• Students
• Industry
• Government policy, which protects users through privacy laws
• Foundations & NGOs, who are supporting digital innovation in higher education
• Digital divide, which is an abstract representation of people who have low or no access to digital resources and are, therefore, underprivileged
• Planet and sustainable practices

In addition to the roles above, one participant could also embody the aspirational outcome of this system: the acquisition of future skills. Future skills are a concept from educational psychology referring to competencies that enable individuals to solve complex problems for an uncertain and rapidly changing future. Therefore, the goal of the workshop was to create an aspirational vision of how Germany’s higher education institutions could transform their integration of generative AI into Germany’s learning environments.

The following is a recording of the case presented at the workshop:

After presenting the case, the workshop participants each chose to embody one of the above-mentioned roles in the 4-D Mapping exercise, e.g., Student, Educator, or AI-Working-Group. They began the exercise by inhabiting a space and body position that resonated with their respective roles. Collectively, they formed a sculpture or representation of the system as it is today, birthing the challenges and results that we learned from the case study.

Next, the participants received the instruction to “stay in the body while being aware of the whole; let go of thinking; let go of planning; let go of any expectations or ideas about the outcome; allow the movement to arise from an embodied presence, awareness of the whole space until movement naturally subsides and you intuitively settle into a second shape².” As the participants moved through space their journey became a sort of spontaneous dance traveling from Sculpture 1 to 2.

Finally, the participants reflected on their experience of the movements and how the dynamically arising interactions made them feel.

What were the observations and reflections of the 4-D Mapping exercise?

Through body posture, movement, and spatiality, the workshop participants created two sculptures that visualized the complex relationships of stakeholders involved in the process of integrating generative AI in higher education in Germany. First, participants interpreted the case study’s current reality (Sculpture 1) as a circle surrounding the Student and Digital Divide, closest to the floor (see image 1 for reference). These two interest groups appeared to required assistance and that the Planet, Educator, NGOs, and AI-Working-Group seemed willing to offer support by facing (sometimes in almost heroic postures) the Student and Digital Divide. At the same, time the Government, Industry, and Future Skills also surrounded the Student and Digital Divide; however, they had less engaged body positions as if to reveal that they were preoccupied.

Prompted to stay in their bodies while allowing movement to happen intuitively and without an outcome in mind, I was surprised at the dance that erupted first slowly and then with more energy. The Digital Divide was rolling farther and farther to the system’s edges, while the AI-Working-Group was following with their arms stretched out in different directions. The embodied Student rose from the floor and engaged with almost every participant until kneeling again close to the AI-Working-Group and Digital Divide. The circle that had formed in Sculpture 1 was reinterpreted repeatedly until a new, tighter circle emerged.

When the movement and energy had subsided the Sculpture 2 that emerged brought participants to form a circle around the AI-Working-Group, who were kneeling on the floor with their hands stretched out (see image 2 for reference). Student, Digital Divide, Government, Industry, NGOs, Educators, and Future Skills surrounded the AI-Working-Group with varying attention and body posture. The Planet, on the other hand, had disappeared into the periphery of the system and space. The Student met the AI-Working-Group at eye-level while the Digital Divide was facing the floor. The NGOs, Government, and Industry held stoic, protective positions around the AI-Working-Group but had their gaze and sometimes torso towards the Future Skills.

Reflecting on the movements and spontaneous interactions, participants shared their experiences of the dynamic space that represented the complex system, which supports the integration of generative AI in higher education in Germany. For example, the person embodying the Student voiced that they felt they were being pushed and pulled in different directions. They wanted to be closer to Industry and Future Skills, which felt impossible to achieve. Respectively, the experience of the Future Skills was that they also felt pushed or influenced by the Industry, who had felt overcome by an energetic dance while trying to connect with others who weren’t able to match their speed and vitality. In fact, one reflection stated that the energy and speed of the Industry had felt demanding and tiring. Only the Educator could connect with the Industry as they were trying to gain knowledge to pass on to others. The Digital Divide described feeling disconnected, which felt positive and freeing. In contrast, the Planet, who also felt disconnected, voiced concern that they seemed separate from the system and if that meant that technological innovation in higher education would disregard the urgency of sustainable practices in the future?

Concluding Thoughts

Reflecting on the experience of using the 4-D Mapping method, as well as the question that emerged from the process, ‘whether sustainable practices would have less urgency in future?’, I realized that in my design of the workshop and presentation of the case study, I had (1) underestimated the fascinating and dynamic movements that the 4-D Mapping exercise would bring forth and (2) I had underrepresented the environmental impact of AI technologies in my case study, thereby drawing participants’ attention and interactions to all the other challenges in the system and accidentally away from the Planet. If I were to host the workshop again, I would amend the case study to provide more facts and figures on current sustainable practices and the implications of generative AI. Additionally, I would not just record the Sculptures 1 and 2 as beginning and end points of the exercise, but the complete movement and dynamic interactions that shape the transition from Sculpture 1 to 2.

The movements that formed the evolution from Sculpture 1 to 2 seem especially pertinent if I remind myself that the Presencing Institute describes 4-D Mapping as a method that “makes visible both the structure and quality of the stuck system³.” At the same time, the exercise is also intended to reveal a “source of creativity and the potential for moving toward healthy and innovative possibilities⁴.” However, I struggle to see this outcome of the workshop. The second sculpture showed the different interest groups moving closer to each other, which could be interpreted as a wish for closer collaboration. At the same time, there is an increased emphasis on the Future Skills by the Government, Industry, and NGOs coupled with the statement by the Future Skills that they “feel tired;” this appears pretty telling. Do we maybe place too much importance on these skills and ask students and higher education institutions to perform in ways they’re not able or prepared for?

I appreciate that the 4-D Mapping exercise raised this and other questions, as well as led to an engaged and critical reflection of the presented case study. Coupled with methods, such as worldbuilding, to visualize and document future scenarios, 4-D Mapping could serve as an introduction to a system and invite discussion and empathy for interest groups before co-creating a future world.

If you are interested in joining such a workshop where we employ foresight methods to think about the future of human-technology relations, please feel free to reach out at mrafehi[at]gmail.com. My colleague Rinah Regina Wuzella and I are hosting several online and in-person workshops, where we invite you to co-imagine and co-create future bodies and future realities.

References

Arawana Hayashi, Social Presencing Theater: The Art of Making a True Move, vol. 1 (Presencing Institute, 2021).

Maria Kyrou and Mariam Rafehi, “Speculative Co-Design of Future Learning Environments,” InKüLe, n.d., 10, https://doi.org/10.25624/kuenste-2198.

Presencing Presencing Institute, “Social Presencing Theater,” u-school for Transformation by Presencing Institute, accessed March 24, 2025, https://www.u-school.org/spt.