Intentional Estates Agency takes the form of a real estate brochure that guides participants through a questionnaire about how they might live together. Questions pose value-based dilemmas across four areas: Environment, Labor, Mobility and Technology. Participants first arrive at an area of concern, then follow further questions toward one of sixteen portfolios.

The portfolios draw on examples from historical, contemporary and speculative intentional communities and social experiments around the world. Some offer possible models; others serve as counterexamples. Their differences are part of the exercise, asking participants to consider the tensions and trade-offs within a particular way of living.

The familiar language of property marketing becomes a means to explore degrowth. The portfolios foreground collective sharing, communal measures of value and resource management, shifting attention toward the relationships and commitments that sustain a community. A participant’s route through the brochure makes the values behind these choices available for reflection.

Presented at the 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennale, the project uses the questionnaire as an invitation to examine everyday assumptions about growth and value, and to consider how design might support other forms of collective life.