TEAM
Giselly Mejia, Casandra Esteve, Christine Balcer
MY ROLE
Co-Designer
KEYWORDS
DESIGN RESEARCH, FACILITATION, DESIGN FICTION, EXPERIENTIAL FUTURES, SPECULATIVE DESIGN, RAPID PROTOTYPING, VISUAL STORYTELLING
ABOUT
Tomorrows is a collaborative masters thesis that uses participatory workshops, the creation of physical artifacts, and embodied role play to explore visions of the future outside of capitalism. We were influenced by economic systems such as degrowth and circular economy, speculative imagination, and living within planetary boundaries. This project emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration as a method to imagine preferable futures where we are living within planetary boundaries, encouraging the belief that other worlds are in fact possible.
PROCESS
Our team circled around a quote often attributed to Mark Fischer - “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” We felt stumped trying to imagine a future with alternative economic systems, and began experimenting with methods that could help us increase our imaginative capacities. We began by prototyping speculative objects that would evoke the futures we were imagining, based on signals found in our present day. These objects helped us materialize in-depth research about alternative economic systems in a novel way.
OUTCOMES
This internal prototyping evolved into an iterative series of making events which culminated in an interdisciplinary workshop held at the Brooklyn Museum as part of their educational programming within their sustainability pillar. We hosted versions of this workshop with a total of 55 participants across 4 events that ended up with 30 objects and their stories.
Tomorrows centers its methodology around creating an environment of play where participants feel open to experimentation, learning through making, using artifacts as a method for storytelling, and finding ways of collaborating that reflected their personal strengths. One participant commented: “I’m actually really inspired by the fact that, you know, a roomful of us in a couple of hours can come up with some ideas. They’re totally far-fetched, but at the same time, they’re not so far-fetched. So there is a future, and it didn’t take us very long to figure out a couple of ideas that we could make.”
LEARNINGS
Interdisciplinary collaboration is a key to generating powerful insights. This notion became extremely clear through the course of this project, both through our own collaboration as designers and in the results of our workshop. Having space for our team to lean into their strengths and professional backgrounds strengthened the outcomes of our work. Participants reflected that being able to talk with a group with various experiences and knowledge helped them generate more robust ideas.
In our quest to understand how to stimulate imagination to imagine futures beyond the confines of capitalism, we continued to come up against our initial struggle with imagining futures outside of our current systems. However, we found frameworks and methods that helped us immensely like the Experiential Futures ladder, as well as engraining play, rapid prototyping, and experimenting with alternative materials into our processes.