Context:

2050—An Energetic Odyssey is a future vision of a large-scale renewable energy transition in the North Sea, which aims to meet 90% of the North Sea countries’ energy needs in 2050. It takes the form of an immersive installation, featuring an animated map projected onto a low platform. This moving topography beyond human scale, invites audiences to gather around. Starting in the year 2016, a narrator describes a detailed plan to install 25,000 10MW wind turbines into the North Sea. As the animation plays, the audience sees the map changing every year, as each stage of the transition is completed. The narrator fills in concrete details of the vision, touching on the economics, logistics and ecology of the project.

“When we wake up, will this scenario survive the pressure of the day to day policy dilemmas? We have good reasons to think it can. The interactive production of this installation in the cultural domain, forged a coalition of key actors. It is the result of an intense collaboration between designers and scientists, and a consortium with expert input.” – 2050—An Energetic Odyssey

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

2050 – An Energetic Odyssey was commissioned by the International Architecture Biennial of Rotterdam (IABR) for their 2016 festival. Reflecting their dual role as researchers and cultural producers, they have created the IABR-Ateliers platform for trans-disciplinary investigation. Ateliers are multi-year processes of research and development that orient towards existing global challenges in the built environment. They bring together researchers, policy-makers, industrial and environmental partners. However, the process remains in the cultural domain, allowing alternative priorities and relationships to emerge. The Energetic Odyssey took inspiration from existing efforts to create an offshore grid in the North Sea. An important outcome of the process was renewed relationships between offshore builders, wind turbine producers, ports, utilities companies, environmental organisations and Ministries in the Netherlands. Since the Netherlands held the EU Presidency that year, the installation was also shown to EU leaders and officials.

Transformative creative practice:

Maarten Hajer, the co-designer of the project (with Dirk Sijmons) has described the Energetic Odyssey as a technique of futuring – a dramatic staging of one possible vision of the North Sea’s future. Hajer and his colleague Peter Pelzer, argue that the physical materialisation of future visions can provide ways to attract a range of different groups. For audiences, seeing a future ‘brought to life’ through visual, aural and olfactory cues can engage emotional processes that provide different prompts for decision-making (than information alone). Rich, multi-layered future visions are sites for individual and collective meaning-making and can also contribute to more diffuse social imaginaries of what is possible or desirable. In these ways, creative practices can help to disrupt established patterns of environmental politics and offer some alternatives.   

Learn more:

Visit: https://iabr.nl/nl/projectatelier/Atelier2050

Read an interview with the lead designers: https://scenariojournal.com/article/2050-an-energetic-odyssey/

Hajer, M. A., & Pelzer P. (2018) 2050—An Energetic Odyssey: Understanding “Techniques of Futuring” in the Transition towards Renewable Energy. Energy Research & Social Science 44, 222–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.01.013.

Project credits:

2050–An Energetic Odyssey was produced by IABR in collaboration with the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Van Oord, Shell, TenneT, Zeeland Seaports, European Climate Foundation, Natuur & Milieu, RWE, Port of Rotterdam Authority and Port of Amsterdam.

Concept by Maarten Hajer and Dirk Sijmons (lead designer). Research by design and animation by H+N+S Landscape Architects, Ecofys and Tungsten Pro.

“Get better stories, get stories that are positive – get stories that feature things that people really believe bring about change” Seeds co-founder Elena Bennett

The Seeds of Good Anthropocenes project gathers real-world initiatives that benefit environments and enhance human well-being. The project aims firstly to collect hopeful stories that demonstrate change is possible, and secondly to provide new materials for the development of future scenarios for environmental governance. Scenarios are stories about how the future might unfold, often used by governing bodies to take decisions in the present. Using elements from real-life change processes to create scenarios is a way to add grounded, positive action into these future visions.

Seeking out transformative practice:

“Anthropocene means a world that is dominated by people… how do you have that, and have it be good? It’s jarring to people – but that’s what I want” Elena Bennett

Human influence on the planet is now so great that it has led to the declaration of a new geological age – the Anthropocene. The title of the project – Seeds of Good Anthropocenes – proved to be a creative provocation. The team used crowdsourcing to identify inspiring initiatives that they call ‘seeds’, reaching out to other UN networks, peers and members of the public via social media platforms. The project seeks out transformative practice across all domains (not just creative practice).

The cases were then written up and logged in an interactive repository on the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes website, providing a resource for researchers, practitioners and policymakers. The project team also hosted place-based workshops in North America, Europe and southern Africa that gathered seed initiatives and used them to create new scenarios using participatory exercises.

“We need a world where there’s a two-way relationship [between humans and nature] and it’s reciprocal… maybe we can learn from some of what our Indigenous partners have been doing for hundreds and thousands of years – this isn’t a static thing… it’s a relationship” Elena Bennett

The seedbank now contains over 500 stories. Most of them address the relationship between people and nature, in ways that were often surprising to the researchers involved.  

“A lot of the seeds that we collected… they would start intending to be a project about ‘natural’ things like gardening or restoring – some way that they were trying to improve the environment. When they got to the end they found that “oh we also changed the social system – we made connections among ourselves and it made all these other things possible, we thought we were just building this garden”….It grounded my feeling that transformation has both social and ecological components to it and really made me see those are really intertwined, more even than I would have said before.” Elena Bennett

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

Six distinctive types of seeds have been identified so far, including: social-ecological approaches to food growing, enhancing wellbeing in urban environments, fostering novel approaches to learning and education, processes for equitable decision-making and social movements for just futures (Bennett et al. 2016). But beyond the content of the seeds themselves, Bennett notes how important socio-economic conditions were in even allowing seeds to come into being. Situations where people worked fewer hours in employment meant that they had more time to give to their communities.

“If you’re trying to bring about a different world, what are the drivers, what are the variables that matter? I think that it at least for me it unearthed some different things that I hadn’t seen in scenario building before. The ones that seem to show up a lot are how people conceive of work and time…we’d see people working in ways that they had more time to give to their communities and that just seemed to change everything.” Elena Bennett

On learning and evaluation:

The team made use of smaller pots of funding to develop the project in a range of directions, learning and reflecting iteratively (rather than using formal processes). The case seed collection has contributed to diverse outputs including talks, events, theses, reports and articles. Indeed, the crowdsourcing and participatory scenarios methods have become known more widely as the ‘seeds approach’.    

Learn more:

Visit https://goodanthropocenes.net/

Watch the Repositories event on the CreaTures YouTube channel, featuring Garry Peterson talking about the Seedbank as a repository of transformative cases.

Project credits:

The project team includes Elena Bennett, Garry Peterson, Reinette Biggs, Laura Pereira, Joost Vervoort, Rika Preiser, Timon McPhearson, Albert Norström, Stephen Carpenter, Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, Per Olsson, Tanja Hichert, Martin Solan, Victor Galaz, Kimberley Nicholas, Frank Biermann, Myanna Lahsen, Gaia Vince, Erle Ellis, Manjana Milkoreit, Jianchu Xu, Berta Martin López.

This project is made possible through funding from the Future Earth FTI program, PECS, ecoSERVICES, and SIDA.

Nominator:

“The Seeds project involves working with people who are doing creative things in the present – transformative activities from all kinds of places around the world to imagine pathways towards a better future. It is just an incredibly inspiring thing to work on” – Joost Vervoort

Context:

Design researcher Kirsi Hakio worked with the custodians of Elisaari island in Finland to develop a set of ‘awareness-based’ service design methods that help people to tune in to their inner worlds and think of themselves as connected to wider ecosystems. Elisaari island sits off the coast of Helsinki and is accessible to the public for recreation from May to October. Although it is owned by the city, it is managed by an entrepreneurial couple, who run nature-based tourism services there including a café, boating services and camping facilities. Hakio was interested in working with these custodians to develop new services. However, she soon found that traditional service design methods couldn’t adequately account for the island’s main stakeholder: nature. She began exploring new techniques to connect with Elisaari’s human and non-human stakeholders.

“Mainly it’s inhabited by the non-humans, the animals the plants, the nature – they really own the place, and then people come part-time in the year.” – Kirsi Hakio

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

Hakio is interested in the inner dimensions of sustainability: our personal modes of sense and meaning-making that we each carry around with us, which deeply influence our everyday choices.

“Our inner world really animates our actions…our inner conditioning and mental models and the worldviews that we have – even though we may not notice it, they effect how we behave, how we make decisions how we encounter others – humans and non-humans” – Kirsi Hakio

Hakio created a series of co-design workshops that brought together stakeholders from Elisaari to help them to recognise and share these unspoken assumptions. At the first workshop she trialled awareness-based exercises that asked participants to become present and observe what was happening inside their minds and bodies. This was followed by dramaturgical exercises where participants used their bodies to take on different roles and to act out scenarios for future services, which enabled participants to visualise and share their own inner lives and orientations with the group.

Transformative creative practices:

The second set of workshops took place on Elisaari island and focussed on generating empathic connections to the non-human stakeholders. A series of walking meditations helped participants to connect more deeply to the place. Hakio also asked participants to assume the role of animals, trees, historical figures and nature spirits from Elisaari. She then interviewed the participants in character using classic service design questions, asking someone acting as a deer or a rock how they would ensure repeat customers. All of these activities were designed to give participants the experience of being deeply connected to a wider ecosystem of which they were one part of a larger whole: an experience of the ‘ecological self’ (Bragg, 1996). 

“Participants see themselves as part of this interconnected worldview… and I think in that state they want to start changing their behaviour… they are having experiences that are very difficult to explain to others maybe of connectedness and of connecting to the place.” – Kirsi Hakio

However Hakio notes that the challenge in sustaining these motivations beyond the workshop experience.

“when participants enter home it’s really difficult to maintain because the environment is completely different… It’s really difficult to turn those experiences into actions… I see how the custodians of the island are living in that kind of state all the time. So I’m not sure if we’re supposed to be in that bubble for a longer time – because usually we don’t have time and resources – or if we need to build our communities differently.” – Kirsi Hakio   

In the later phase of the Elisaari project Hakio worked with the island’s custodians to develop co-design techniques for the orientation of new employees. These helped the group to co-create shared values that subsequently went on to influence the working culture of the island. Awareness-based approaches provide ways to intervene in the interactions between people and place, by opening up space to articulate different mental models and bring alternative worldviews into being. Hakio’s work challenges us to think about how awareness-based methods might be used beyond service design to prompt cultural and social change. What might we need to change about our material and social worlds for people to act as their ecological selves all the time? 

Nominator:

“We were walking through the forest in different roles. I walked with someone who was a sheep…I had to think through the nature materials and how we could bring that into the catering….it was more or less play around with the idea, but it was such a change maker to my, my thinking is, I’ll never forget.” – Tuuli Mattelmäki

Project credits:

Funded by Aalto/Department of Design.

Learn more:

Hakio, K. (2021). The New Paradigm Is Already Here: The Practicing of Prototypes of Future through Vertical Alignment. Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, 1(2), 73-94. https://doi.org/10.47061/jabsc.v1i2.939

Hakio, K., & Mattelmäki, T. (2019). Future skills of design for sustainability: An awareness-based co-creation approach. Sustainability, 11(19), 5247. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11195247

Citizen Sense was selected because of its experimental focus on air pollution as an environmental phenomenon and focus of community concern, rather than as a clearly defined ‘problem’ that could be ‘solved’ through the application of technology. Citizen Sense practitioners and researchers have sought to understand the specific ways that citizens were – and were not – able to mobilise citizen data within air quality campaigns. Here, research and design are mutually supportive outcomes of the ongoing project.

“How do sensors and the environmental processes they trace influence relations and responsibilities toward environments?” – Citizen Sense

“This project continues to produce deep insights into the politics of citizen-generated environmental data, where sensing technologies are just one set of relations in a complex ecosystem”

LARA