A COURSE TO EXPLORE TOMORROW'S SUSTAINABLE FUTURES
The global climate crisis is a constant reminder that our planet is a closed, limited system, and that we are currently living far beyond its boundaries. What would our world look like if we actually respected and lived within our planetary boundaries? How would we organize our homes, communities, cities, and nations? To which extent can companies and brands trigger positive action and inspire changes in lifestyle, consumption and ways of working to enable the ecological transition around the world?
To understand the current and future environmental challenges, Design Fiction approach helps understanding and shaping multiple possible futures in order
to design tomorrow’s products, services and business models in a constantly changing world. As part of this program, students have the opportunity to work in contact with futurists and designers in order to explore, experiment and create desirable futures, in the context of future-oriented design projects.
BATCH #1: FUTURING OCEANS
How can we consume smarter and protect our most precious resource? Water is the source of life. Yet, this inestimable treasure is being polluted by the way we consume. The first edition of this program is aimed at designing future scenarios related to uncertain outcome: biodiversity, marine science and technology, the possible collapse of ice sheets, the formation of deep-sea dead zones as a result of onshore pollution, etc.
As an example, Design fiction “Nova Atlantida” explores new horizons in the world of the underwater living. Sea-levels rose to unlivable heights and forced air breathersand land creatures to change their ways of life forever. Scientists and industrials joined forces and created a world that would allow the human species to prosper, rather than drown. This Alliance went to extreme lengths to reverse climate change and restore a habitable planet that had not been seen since before the age of industrialization.
BATCH #2: ROLE OF THE MEDIA IN ACHIEVING A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY
The movie Don’t Look Up used the metaphor of an impending, Earth-obliterating comet to satirize the ideological denial of climate change that pervades much of public discourses and medias. For this second edition, students explored the role that the media can play in contributing to a sustainable society and confronted themselves with high-level international experts who shed light on this issue with complementary angles: IPCC Experts, journalists, futurists, anthropologists, designers, etc.
As an example, Design Fiction “Social Zen” questions the rise of exo-anxiety that comes from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change through the lens of social medias and the associated concern for one’s future and that of next generations.
LEADING EXPERTS TO CRAFT NEW IMAGINARIES FOR SUSTAINABILITY
The course was developed by Aurélien Acquier, Valentina Carbone (Professors @ESCP Business School), and Martin Lauquin, co-founder of the collective “Making tomorrow” and Creative Strategist at Onepoint. To address sustainability challenges through the Design Fiction perspective, ten lecturers and experts were involved to provide students with an ability to engage with diverse temporalities and perceptions at different scales (individual, organisational and societal); to research, understand and synthesise insights from diverse disciplines; to be critical about unquestioned assumptions; to detect key ethical and cultural dimensions of our era and society; to be constructive by using various media to convey and stimulate longer-term visions of the future, and to be able to raise questions for today models and behaviour.
