Designing Multispecies Futures Through Speculative Fiction and Interactive Narratives

This chapter delves into the intersection of speculative fiction and interactive digital narratives (IDNs) to explore human-plant-computer interaction (HPCI) futures. It presents a design-research pipeline that translates themes from speculative fiction into interactive artefacts, focusing on multispecies ethics and ecological storytelling. The study analyzes ten books, films, and television series where plants play central roles, identifying recurring patterns in representation, interaction types, functional roles, and themes. These findings inform the ideation and prototyping of interactive concepts, culminating in an augmented tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) that combines VR immersion with AR plant interaction to explore ethical dilemmas and symbiotic futures. The chapter highlights the potential of speculative fiction to surface ethical dilemmas and provoke 'what-if' thinking, while IDN design processes are extended to integrate ecological and multispecies perspectives. The prototype, 'The Whispering Greenhouse,' serves as a proof of concept, demonstrating how thematic insights from speculative fiction can be systematically translated into interactive narratives through the HPCI framework. The study concludes by emphasizing the broader cultural relevance of multispecies interactive narratives and their potential to foster ecological empathy and counter plant blindness.