Fabulous creatures: Elegant swarms and parametric politics

What is it to form a collective? How do we collect ourselves into something irreducible to the sum of its individuals? What might the role of individual agency tell us about contemporary design agency? This paper thinks through these questions via the concept of 'creaturing'. Rather than referring to specific biological or imagined entities, here `creaturing¿ refers to a sense of lived particularity; a way to think about the vitality of collectives and individual roles within them. The paper analyses a particular arena of contemporary design discourse in which 'creaturely' tendencies are explicitly embedded, and recent claims that this arena can be described as a new style called `Parametricism¿. It is argued that while `Parametricism¿ implicitly promotes collectivity as a defining feature of design composition, its hegemonic refinement closes down its own potential for generating collective vitality. The paper points towards creaturely moments of mutation within the field in which a degree of messy unruliness is leaping into view, and suggests that these flickers of creaturely life could help guide our collectivity toward more lively prospects.