Design a Possible Future

Design fiction serves a rhetorical purpose within public discourses around the future, and creates a safe space for engaging with frightening or depressing futures, thus placing it as an effective tool for creating a new idea of ‘home’ (Tanenbaum et al. 2016).

We conducted workshops that allow people to imagine and create a climate future based on the card game ‘The Thing from the Future'. We invited participants to create their own design fiction of an uncertain climate future.

We facilitated these design fiction workshops with 6 groups over the course of 3 workshops. Initially, we ran a practice workshop with our cohort, we then partnered with The Remakery Brixton to run 2 public workshops. Additionally, we ran 2 group workshops in Kyoto, Japan.

01

We began each workshop asking ‘What does ‘home’ mean to you?’. This worked well to open up conversations and encourage collaboration. Additionally, it gave us clear insights into how participants considered ‘home’. Participants’ answers were not focused on the physical, but on emotions, behaviours and human interactions.

02

The second part of the workshop was centred around “The thing from the future” game, designed by Stuart Candy. The game allows participants to imagine and develop possible future scenarios, serving as a tool to understand futures, and how to potentially deal with them.

03

At the end of the workshops we invited each group to present and discuss their design fictions. Finally, we asked ‘How has the concept of ‘home’ changed?’ and ‘How does your imagined future make you feel?’.

04

Utilising these design fictions as a research tool to begin to think about what the future might look like - we saw its benefits in engaging communities in their future. Home as continuity and predictability is, however, equally about the future. The future is what shapes our habitual ways of feeling and thinking, and our expectations” (Connor and Marshall, 2016: 7). Design Fiction allows us to imagine this future, to provide us with a sense of control. This led to our main research question:

05

How might we increase human resilience to prepare communities for an uncertain climate future?