Climate Vision 2050: Green is the New Black
Artwork by BCG
Today travel with me to 2050 in an immersive auditory experience. You're about to listen to a world of imagination but not fantasy.
CLIMATE VISION 2050
What is it?
Climate Vision 2050 is a podcast taping into the practice of speculative design. Through a compelling human narrative and evocative audio, each episode transports listeners into fashion, agriculture, fishing, shipping, urbanism in 2050.
Created by BCG, a global consulting agency committed to climate and sustainability action, I am excited to share with you the episode I contributed to for Climate Vision 2050:
Green is the New Black.
Join me in 2050. I am a fashion designer who studied systems thinking, a requirement at all fashion schools. Today every garment… I'll stop here, as I am not the only protagonist in this future. You’ll have to listen to the experiential piece to find out more.
My role for the Green is the New Black episode was to:
- - - > Provide insights during an in depth questionnaire, which informed the scenario.
- - - > During a 1 hour interview weave these future insights inside a dynamic narration of my future self and context. Collapse them into an altered future, a lived experience where I speak as if I were the same age as I am today, but in 2050.
From listening to the final outcome yesterday, I was transported and hope you will too. Let me know how the experience was for you here!
Listen here:
Credits:
Narrator Mutinta Banda played by Atibo Onen.
Model Emiko Ikeda played by Ukiko Fujiwara.
BCG Sustainable fashion expert Catharina Martinez-Pardo.
Podcast production by Lower Street.
Special thanks to Erin MacIndoe Sproule.
WHY SPECULATIVE DESIGN & EXPERIENTIAL FUTURE SCENARIO BUILDING MATTER?
To make the future matter.
The discipline of speculative design makes the future more urgent, more concrete, more relevant. And therefore we are more likely to make ethical choices.
The “what if” questions that arise from speculative scenarios open up debate and discussion about the kind of future people want or do not want to live in. In a complex and fast changing world, we need to embed imagining futures at the very core of how we forecast the future(s).
"Speculative design is a creative process that produces boundary-pushing prototypes and design systems for the future.” Design researcher Tina Gorjanc
Far from fantasy, speculative design tries to imagine what life would be like without the current limitations of today, but it retains the link between the present and an imaginary future.
“By speculating more, at all levels of society, and exploring alternative scenarios, reality will become more malleable and although the future cannot be predicted, we can help set in place today factors that will increase the probability of more desirable futures happening.” Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Maks Valenčič editor of Šum, a contemporary art and theory-fiction journal, talks about:
'The necessity of governance futurism and embrace the need for smart visual culture' in Infrastructure as Critique.
In the same issue, writer Pierce Myers brings an added context to cultural production and as such, prototyping futures that break away from linear predictions.
"Smart visual culture follows the template of taking good ideas and wrapping them in evocative aesthetics. It’s the only way to break ideas into the main circuits of evolving culture. With the risks imposed by our climate predicament, everyone needs to look deeper into the realities of adaptation, and visual cultural production seems to be shedding its old husks and taking a look at tomorrow’s foreign infrastructure hiding just beneath the mask."
Finally, to quote futurist and designer Stuart Candy, who coined the term experiential futures. This notion is intertwined with the motivations of speculative design:
Experiential futures refers to a set of approaches to make alternative futures present. The juxtaposition of ‘experience’ and ‘future’ is a deliberate contradiction: the here and now, the impressions of senses and mind, 1:1 scale reality as we experience it moment to moment; all this set against an inherently abstract notion of the to-come, by definition absent, forever at a temporal remove."
You can find out more about speculative design in my article here for Trend Atelier.
| By Geraldine Wharry