Ray Cats For Trees invites people to consider how the ways we conceptualize the future can inform design work done today. By presenting written speculative artistic designs for objects intended to communicate with posthuman ecological societies in probable far-futures, and seeing how people respond to them, the project intends to produce understandings on the subjects of designing sustainably for uncertain futures and radical ecological thinking. What is meant by that is the notion that what is considered Humanity, as a hegemonic class rather than a collaborator in a wider world ecosystem is disrupted.

Ray Cats For Trees, as a result of the subject of its method, also explores what “communication” means in a more speculative context. The goal of traditional archive and nuclear semiotics projects, both of which are major influences are ostensibly intended for one-way communication towards the future, however the goal of speculative design is necessarily to produce understanding for the present. What can be said to comprise communication? Everything that affects the world can be said to be communicating on some level so long as there’s something to perceive it. Designing for the future and ecologically means considering effect what the actions we take today will have on the future, and doing so in a manner that doesn’t suppose that the other-than-human world isn’t worth speaking to. In imagining us talking to a hypothetical future, the subjects of that hypothetical future speak to us through their imagining.

These written designs are so far, all that exists of the project – a planned hypermedia poetic inquiry into feedback from the designs to synthesize and reconstitute the findings from the project, presenting it in an artistic manner is planned but not yet in development.