Design future Reflection
“The next few decades are expected to be among the
most transformative the energy sector has ever seen and the energy industry is at the forefront of this process”— Energy systems: A view from 2035
Behind the “switch”
Warmth, water, light, each of us depend on energy. Every day we expect them to function normally and help us live and work in many ways. However, behind we turning of these switches every day, a revolution is quietly unfolding. “The energy industry is transitioning to the future system.” Not only the energy UK, or other energy institutions, even us who are studying in school, everyone is imagining an exciting future.
In this course, we become a partner with Southwark, and we will work with Southwark to explore and describe the preferable future based on reality.
What are we discussing when we are talking about the future?
When I have not yet been exposed to speculative design, I heard design future, the first scene in my mind is a scene from science fiction movies such as flying cars, bionic robots, and so on. In Lara’s introduction, we learned that speculative design is not like science fiction, nor is it made up of subjective scientific ideas and whims. We need to make forward-looking and creative assumptions based on the current situation of society, cultural and political trends, and the environment, with a dynamic understanding of reality and the future. At the same time, we need to note that we do not directly describe the ideal solution for human beings, but can help people develop multiple imaginations.
The phenomenon mentioned by Dunn&Raby in the book 《Speculative Everything》: “Modern people no longer dream”.
They mentioned that the environment in which modern people live is full of pollution to factories, natural counterattacks, a high level of consumer consciousness of capitalism, and the inadaptability of technology. Most modern people are afraid, fearful, and powerless to face the future. When changing and even facing these big issues, too much consultation and rapid industrialization have made human beings no longer dream about the future, and people have become negative and depressed. Therefore, speculative design is not preaching that science and technology will lead to the destruction of mankind, the design of doomsday declaration, but trying to awaken everyone’s mind, encouraging people to start dreaming and imaging the possible future of each parallel space-time.
In addition to speculative design, Lara and Marion also introduced us to horizon scanning and story machine. By reading the brief before the class, we learned that Southwark and even the whole UK are encouraging the use of clean energy in policy, highly utilize idle space to develop viable green resource development. And the development of a green new deal not only focuses on the hard targets of environmental protection but also helps residents make sustainable choices more easily, thereby bringing about a change in thinking. Not only that, but Southwark also puts green education for the next generation in an important position. Based on our understanding of the social background, culture, and current policies, our team discussed with Laura Leahy, we brainstormed rough prototyping — “your sustainable home” and our vision for a preferred future through the story machine.
In the concept of this prototype, we hope to visualize the energy data used in your daily life through the monitoring of energy use in the home, so that citizens can intuitively feel their energy consumption. In addition, conduct a ranking among the community to run for “green champion”. We hope that through social supervision, we can stimulate people to make more sustainable choices.
From this prototype, we made some scenarios for the preferable future:
1.Civic duty to live more sustainably
2.All houses have to have a sustainability monitor installed
3.Blocks of flats can see how well other people are doing, and there is a scoreboard
4.This can lead to judgment of others’ behaviours
5.Council uses 90% green energy
Our prototype was affirmed by Lara in the first brief report. She hopes that we can continue to go deeper, and asked a few questions to help us think. For example: Who has the power? What happens if council house residents don’t have money to upgrade? How might this influencer behaviour change? etc. However, in the follow-up discussion, we ignored the in-depth thinking about this prototype, and instead focused on green education for the next generation. On the one hand, we believe that educating young people is something that benefits three generations: it can affect parents and neighbors, and young people will also become parents of the next generation. On the other hand, we also believe that educating young people is full of challenges. First of all, we are unable to determine who is our key stakeholder. Second, because of relevant laws, it is difficult for us to get in touch with local youth directly. This made our team hesitate to finalize the final direction and cost a lot of time.
Thanks to Marion’s tutorial and the joining of our new member Luyi, we took a step back, zoomed out, and thought from a systematic perspective：How can we create a creative future for the council that is in line with the current situation? In the end, we chose energy consumption as our direction. We assumed that in the future citizens have a higher ability to monitor energy consumption. Energy conservation and emission reduction will become part of the daily lives of future citizens, which is a basic obligation.
In the next few weeks, we will continue to refine our prototype and conduct tests and iterative updates.
TBC ☺
