Liquid Dependencies: What does a decentralised caring society look like?
Liquid Dependencies 'What does a decentralised caring society look like? ' is a role-playing game for 10 players in which they build long-term, mutual, caring relationships. In the course of the game, the players are assigned characters to bring alive with their own experiences. Over the course of an afternoon, the players will spend 20 to 30 years of life together and cope with a series of personal and social events. What kind of society will these players create?
Cross-border/international
Netherlands
Germany
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Other
{Empty}
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As an individual in partnership with other persons
First name: Aiwen Last name: Yin Gender: Female Nationality: China Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: MAURITSPLAATS 142 Town: Rotterdam Postal code: 3012CD Country: Netherlands Direct Tel:+31 6 84224508 E-mail:studioaiwen@gmail.com
Liquid Dependencies: ´What does a decentralised, caring society look like?’ (2021-) is a Live Action Role Playing game (hereafter LARP) that explores the answers to that question. In Liquid Dependencies, players become members of ReUnion, a society whose socio-economic system is built to facilitate and support long-term, mutually caring relationships. During a 4-5 hour game session, players spend 20-30 years of in-game life together, forming mutual aid relationships as they deal with individual and societal changes, work, ageing, and community building. As the players experience an alternative care system through play, they gain insight into solidarity and care in an embodied way and practise care work and collectivity as they become a community.
Liquid Dependencies is a gamified version of ReUnion, a socio-economic system initiated by designer Yin Aiwen. ReUnion considers interpersonal relationships as the base unit, instead of individuals or imagined communities created by given narratives, to create a commons-oriented approach for socio-economic organisation. While the resource of care continues to be rendered in crisis, it is also a form of labour that we do every day, one that demands qualitative effort within trusted relationships. We take care as our driving force and complicate the perceived boundaries of productive and reproductive labour.
Liquid Dependencies has now been presented in many countries, with over 40 sessions and 300 participants, serving as an educational tool to support people in creating strong social safety nets, community building and intergenerational solidarity. We are now working on strengthening and broadening this community with a continued public program, the creation of an online database allowing people to create their own game, and collaboration with municipalities.
decentralised-care
live action role play
game design
ageing society
community building
In a session of Liquid Dependencies, participants form relationships in a society that is guided by the socio-economic system ReUnion, which focuses on relationships that are traditionally not supported by social institutions, such as marriage, employment, blood relations, or direct, quid-pro-quo service exchange. This mode of forming relationships is designed to support people in building sustainable social ecologies. The model focuses first of all on one’s self-care relationship, encouraging people to first closely examine and maintain their own well-being, while reaching out to those around them for support. The types of relationships that are supported in the system must be long-term and mutual. This cultivates long-term care exchanges that do not need to be immediately rewarded, that can endure the atomization of society, gig economies that limit free time, and the outsourcing of care. In Liquid Dependencies, people learn about the possibilities of alternative care systems by experiencing one, allowing the ways in which we care for each other to be re-considered and re-configured over time. This encourages being flexible and receptive to change, which is inevitable in life, and encourages more understanding of whether or not relations have a long temporal life.
Over the course of our sessions, we have created a multidisciplinary educational toolkit that supports people in fostering enduring interpersonal relationships based on decentralised care and mutual aid. The program works to mitigate the global care crisis and repair the social fabric in the post-COVID era. Our approach of ‘Decentralised care’ means a non-monolithic definition of committed relationships, as long as one fulfils the concept of the ‘long term’, ‘mutual’ and ‘caring’. With this principle, we can reach the essence of reliable, committed relationships, and find a more grounded, genuine way of caring about each other and growing old together.
The form of the LARP allows people to experience a speculative socio-economic system in an embodied way. Throughout a game session, a group of players meet each other and the hosts of the game, and spend an afternoon figuring out how to live together in this simulation of a society that is structured in order to support non-traditional, decentralised caring relationships. The game unfolds as alternating rounds of in-game ‘life’ and discussion rounds. The game rounds which represent 5 years of life in the society, players mingle, get to know each other, enter into caring relationships and make decisions about their lives. In the discussion rounds, each player shares the events of the past five years, any hopes or difficulties, allowing them to touch base with each other and to offer support or to make plans as a group in the coming round. The way in which the players enter the game appeals to the imagination and sense of enjoyment - they select a character card that gives them their age, occupation and general well being, and are invited to extrapolate, fleshing the character out from their own life experience. The character cards are designed to reflect a classic pyramidal structure, with occupations that are particular to the culture that the game is being played in - each game location has its own cultural translation. In this way, players might get a character that is entirely different from themselves. This gives players a different perspective on their own society. The localised game design also allows players to make connections between their life and the simulated life they experience through Liquid Dependencies, providing a safe and fun way to experience the pleasures and difficulties of an alternative care system. They come away with a new, deepened perspective on the place of care in their realities, while learning about possible solutions and becoming empowered to implement decentralised care methodologies in everyday life.
One of Liquid Dependencies’ key objectives is to make an alternative system of care and mutual aid culture more widely accessible. We want the game to become a tool that can be used publicly without the presence of its initial creators - something that can be used in many different groups and places. One of the main blocks to accessibility is time and location. We have been contacted by many interested players who because of location or working conditions, for instance shift work or full time employment, find it hard to join in sessions. To address this we have been working on a data-base and gamebook which would allow players to access the game and to make their own version. Currently, the financial and structural support we have received has meant that the game has been played during specific, shorter-term time periods and in locations where we have been able to receive art or cultural funding, which also has influenced the breadth of our audience. Hosting a data-base online would also allow for more participants to play it, and to address broader accessibility needs: for instance for visually impaired users, a screen reader would allow them to access it independently through their devices. Rather than attempting to create a blanket, general type of accessibility where all users' needs cannot be anticipated, particularly if these are not issues faced by our team members, the data-base would be open and editable by those who have played the game, adapting to their experience. We do not charge fees to play the game and have no plan to make it a paid service in the future, this would be a barrier to its use. Given the community-driven nature of our work, we would like to make room for more community contributions and diversify our funding sources to make our work more sustainable. Our mission works toward an inclusive, caring society, and financial reasons shouldn’t be a blockage to that.
Liquid Dependencies provides an immersive, collaborative world-building experience that helps people to realise the urgency of repairing the status quo, and that opens up social spaces in which people can discuss the possibilities of supporting each other outside of traditional kinships. It puts people in contact with each other, both through the hours of playing and learning together in the game sessions, but also through more long-term community building. After the game sessions, the players often wish to stay in touch with each other, supported by follow-up reflection sessions and more informal social moments. Many players have also chosen to subsequently become hosts in following sessions, learning about the game, its philosophy and the system that it is based on in a more in-depth way. A worldwide community of players & hosts has grown following the sessions: Liquid Dependencies requires 3-6 hosts to work cooperatively; in this way, learning the game and hosting together functions as an embodied rehearsal for a decentralised society. Many host communities also transition to a mutual-aid community, most notably following our more long term run of Liquid Dependencies in the context of the Shanghai Biennale.
The game creates a renewed re-valuing of informal care work and encourages people to reconsider its place in their daily lives: as a long-term investment that needs to be sustained, through committed, intergenerational community building, rather than being driven by a quid-pro-quo way of thinking that can be difficult to see beyond. We are currently working to build a database of experiences where users can ‘at a glance’ see how our proposal for decentralised care has worked in different locales, bringing to light the nuances of sociality and care cultured across countries, seeing how societies work now, and how they could work or what issues could arise.
The early research stages were supported by Creative Industries Funds NL and Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, who offered support for a series of experimental workshops exploring alternative welfare systems for Amsterdam communities that were organised outside of the nuclear family structure.
Yin Aiwen developed the overall system in 2020, resulting in a socio-economic system: ReUnion Network. ReUnion consisted of an App interface, a civic policy framework and a translocal economy model, these were launched at the annual festival for art and digital culture Transmediale in 2020.
Following the support from AFK, research began in Amsterdam but was subsequently delayed due to the onset of the pandemic. In the meantime, YIN began collaboration with researcher Zoe ZHAO and educator Yiren ZHAO. The Shanghai Biennale invited ReUnion Network to participate in their 2021 program. Research in Shanghai was conducted with Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society, an autonomous community, working closely with the Shanghai Biennale since 2015, and it’s been part of a wider network of autonomous communities in China. The development of the project in the context of the Shanghai Biennale was also further supported by Creative Industries Funds NL’s internationalisation grant.
Following Yin Aiwen being awarded the INFORM prize for conceptual design, Liquid Dependencies was presented in Europe at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, Helsinki Drift Festival and the Van Abbe Museum, and Shedhalle Zurich. In 2022, the full Dutch localised version of Liquid Dependencies was commissioned by TAAK & Commons Network. The game has also been played as part of the Dutch Art Institute, the University of Kassel and Design Academy Eindhoven’s curricula. An activity program based on Liquid Dependencies in collaboration with Casco Art Institute & Gemeente Utrecht is in development for 2023.
The socio-economic system on which Liquid Dependencies is based, ReUnion Network, has been in development since 2017. Between then and Liquid Dependencies’ launch in 2021 at the Shanghai Biennale, many collaborators have been involved in the conception and maturation of the project. The project is initiated and directed by Yin Aiwen, practising designer, artist, theorist, strategist and project developer. ReUnion Network was developed in collaboration with a researcher in cultural analysis and ethics of care, Genevieve Costello, Art and Economies professor and business developer Mi You,
The playable version of ReUnion, Liquid Dependencies was developed by Yin Aiwen, researcher Zoe ZHAO and educator Yiren ZHAO, who form the collective Liquid Dependencies Theory. During research into alternative communities in Shanghai, a natural collaboration with the Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society emerged. Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society is an artist-initiated, resident-run autonomous community located in a working-class neighbourhood called Dinghaiqiao in Shanghai, where Yin lived and conducted research for several months. As we developed localised versions of the game, we collaborated with sociologists, activists, psychologists and educators to improve the game design and to translate it both linguistically and culturally. The game is also dependent on the host and player community which is varied, bringing together designers, care-workers, academics, researchers in many different fields. As the game grows and the audience broadens, the contributions are written into the game and recorded after each game session. In this sense the game is constantly evolving to reflect those that are playing it. We keep a record of each session in the form of residential reports which allows us to reflect on each game session, compare the cultural differences and consolidate our research, as we work to build our data-base.
Our project was initiated from artistic curiosity ‘What would a decentralised caring society look like?’. From this starting point we were able to use the space of art and design as a way to be able to be more speculative and radical with our approach, all the while using the rigour of system design to develop a thoroughly tested system. This allowed us to respond to a complex, multi-layered yet urgent problem, with a complex, multi-layered socio-economic system. However as the system needs to be accessible and possible to understand for it to be useful, we turned to Live Action Role play. Designing a game became our way of addressing the complexity of our proposal: allowing people to ‘live’ the system rather than passively learning about it. Liquid Dependencies also puts players in contact with others which is crucial to the proposal itself, it is not something to be read about but something to be experienced together. We worked to create a game that would be appealing and effective in attracting a broad audience and that would support intergenerational communication - although it is derived from particular branches of research and feminist theories, these roots are absent from the aesthetics and communication of the game - it is for everyone. As more sessions of Liquid Dependencies continued, we solidified it as a pedagogical tool for teaching people about care that is adaptable and can be implemented in many different places, but also as a tool for building community and building culture. Liquid Dependencies can have meaningful applications in many sectors, especially those that are predominantly related to formal and informal social reproduction that includes healthcare, welfare, childcare, local and translocal cooperative economies, alternative domestic relationships, mutual-aid as alternative social organisation and creating solidarity and circular economies: the activities that secure and cultivate the continuity of daily and generational life.
Our initiative can and already has been replicated: the game structure and rules exist and can be played almost anywhere. We are working to make this framework accessible for anyone to print out their own cards, produce their own props - or for instance to play it on screen for accessibility. An online version is also being considered, however being in person does add to the immersive experience.
The work of replication involves adapting the game to the local culture and language, yet the question of culture could be taken more broadly and the game could be modified to appeal to specific social groups, for instance, that are in particular need of a social safety net. Since its inauguration at the Shanghai Biennale, Liquid Dependencies has had over 40 sessions and 300 + participants, in Amsterdam, Helsinki, Leipzig and more. It has most frequently been held as a public educational program in cultural institutions, art venues and galleries, however in the past year, it has also been played as part of educational curricula at the Dutch Art Institute, the University of Kassel and the Design Activity Eindhoven. A large part of our current work involves the creation of an online database and a guidebook to allow participants in any location and with differing resources to have access to instructions on how to set up their own sessions, as well as to the now worldwide community of people who have played the game, and their feedback on the experience. We have been working to make Liquid Dependencies a commonly owned endeavour, which can be played outside of specific time frames, locations and the presence of its creators. We want it to become a tool for people to build their own social safety nets, mitigating lack of long-term care in everyday life.
From 2017-20, we have used speculative design as a method to explore possible resolutions for the contemporary crisis of care. Starting the development of ReUnion Network, to imagine a desirable near future, we used tactical media as a strategy to portray this future through an omnipresent visual language, developing the prototypical ReUnion App. Through this research and development, we found an entry point to take advantage of the boundless imagination and bridge it to an actionable proposal for the current crisis. The use of LARP is a well-supported method for experimentation and testing large scale ideas, but it also led to the creation of an educational toolkit and learning community. We offer a participatory, hands-on practice as a research method. After 40+ sessions of Liquid Dependencies, LARP has proven itself to be a highly successful medium through which to distil a complex and radical socio-economic proposal. Liquid Dependencies is an experience that educates and supports participants in strengthening or building their own long-term informal care relationships. Liquid Dependencies is designed to resemble the social structure and culture in which it is being played. This allows players to understand a radical socio-economic model, in the context of their everyday experience, and makes it easier for it to work effectively as a learning experience, by making the connection between the simulated in-game experience of the system, and the ways in which it can actually be implemented in their day to day lives.Liquid Dependencies serves both to test the design of the system, allowing for continual improvement and for players to experience it over a short time space. We can thus observe how it changes players’ way of perceiving relationships and organising their lives, recording data from each session, through which we can troubleshoot, and get feedback. The project is becoming increasingly open source and collectivised, as more hosts and players join worldwide.
We live in a time of global care crisis. COVID-19 brutally exposed the tears in our social fabric & safety nets. Cultures of hyper-individualism reward competition & self-exploitation, rendering collaboration and making-kin extremely difficult. Many people have moved away from their immediate family for education, work, or other reasons over which they may have little control. Traditional informal care providers such as immediate family & traditional kin become insufficient for people’s everyday care. Instead, people increasingly rely on those they encounter in their immediate lives. However, these relationships are harder to maintain, often subsumed by the increasing cost of living & low wage employment, which makes committing time and energy to them difficult, especially in the long-term. Meanwhile, older populations are left behind in expanding metropolises with impermanent populations, or ghost towns created by populations leaving to seek work. Care becomes a commodity, often offered by people of lower income or from poorer countries, who must sell their time to care for other people's loved ones rather than their own. While the demand is high, the low-wages of care labour lead to under-recognition of care workers & the value of care, making it extremely difficult to invite a more diverse pool of people to join the work, even though care is universally needed & should be given and received by everyone. The crisis is a Mobius strip: on one side is the lack of developed caring, mutual-aid culture, & on the other, the lack of economic and institutional support to cultivate it. In return, the underdevelopment of actionable mutual care in the cultural imagination makes it hard to invest in a socio-economic infrastructure: people cannot envision it working, beyond the speculative & theoretical. Care is the fundamental resource needed to sustain our society, yet it is in systematic scarcity. As a response, we offer a creative, systematic approach to repair this issue.
Since its launch at the Shanghai Biennale in 2021, Liquid Dependencies has been played in China, The Netherlands, Germany, Finland and Switzerland, as part of public education partnerships with art institutions , curriculum partnerships with higher education art institutions (University of Kassel, Dutch Art Institute and Design Academy Eindhoven). Over 400 participants have played the game, learned about decentralised care, and joined the now worldwide host and player community.
Currently, Liquid Dependencies has largely been implemented in the context of art and design institutions, both as public presentations and as part of educational curricula. Using these spaces has allowed for particular freedom in the experimentation and development of the project, however, our proposal is ultimately designed to be a functioning, actionable and holistic proposal for a new system of care. We have been working to form a nonprofit organisation that facilitates a relationship between local municipalities and local cooperatives in order to bring our methodologies and research to a broader audience. To this end, we established Stichting NextKin, a foundation overseen by four board members supporting and furthering our efforts. For 2023 we have been working to develop a longer-term public education program that includes sessions on Liquid Dependencies, accompanied by co-learning sessions and public discussions. The first run of the program is set to take place in Utrecht in the spring in collaboration with Casco Art Institute and the Municipality of Utrecht. Alongside this, the creation of our online data-base and game book will allow people to access the game and our research, and to play their own sessions in new locations and on their own terms.
Liquid Dependencies responds to each competence of the European competence framework. It embodies sustainability values by supporting people in creating a long term mutual aid culture that is accessible to all, dependent on one to one relationships rather than pre-established relationships or imagined communities. In this way all individuals can be supported fairly, focusing on the relationship of one person to another rather than on their position within a larger group.
It encourages people to reflect on and contextualise the systems of care that are in place currently, proposing an alternative that they are able to safely experience through play, and allowing them to make comparisons with the systems of care in their daily lives. It encourages participants to think critically about their position within these systems and empowers them to implement this thinking. It supports community building and strengthening mutual aid culture in the collective imagination. Through the game, people develop their sense of self which in turn helps them take action as part of a collective.
The form of the role play allows players to experiment in a safe way with the possibilities offered by a future care system, where they can encounter pitfalls and advantages and explore solutions.
