The proposed presentation draws on my AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD with Portsmouth Natural History Museum, weaving conceptual framing with practice-based reflection to explore how mischief and more-than-human design can inform participatory and co-design practices. Mischief is framed here as ritualised playful disruption: time-bound, collectively held, and shaped by place, materials, and more-than-human relations. 

Drawing on the carnivalesque, the magic circle, folk festivals, and liminality, I suggest that folk customs and ritual games operate as ‘social technologies’, creating bounded play-spaces where alternative roles, inverted norms, and ‘productive trouble’ become generative conditions for collective story-making and imagining futures. These play-spaces support meaning-making through embodied, situated participation, a concern I explore through museum-based co-design with natural history collections.  

I ground this through a research-through-design case study developing ‘Interventions of Mischief’ with museum staff and community participants, including playful facilitation tools such as the Masks of Mischief archetype cards and six-modes-of-attention dice. I introduce my attunement-led methodology, which foregrounds site, seasonality, atmosphere, and more-than-human relations as forces that shape how mischief is held, and what forms of participation become possible. In my work, mischief functions as a method for opening dialogue around difficult themes, including climate crisis, extinction, and colonial histories, while allowing multiple, sometimes conflicting, futures to coexist.  

The presentation shares a transferable facilitation framework for designing participatory experiences that are situated, inclusive, and ethically held, with relevance for museums and for wider creative, community, and arts-and-health contexts.