Design and climate change

The underpinning rationale of the C-SAN Futures project is that we believe that social, political, economic and global concerns today tend to be more of a real bottleneck than pure individual and technical solutions.

In order to succeed in addressing climate change matters one cannot only focus on the understanding of the Climate System, per se, but technological and scientific research also needs to be followed up by corresponding investments in order to achieve a better understanding on how new technologies and changed behavior can become accepted and implemented in our societies.

This implies that we have to swiftly develop new relevant knowledge and methodologies about change itself. This is where design – concerned with both potential and actual change – adds a critical, and potentially fruitful addition to current discourses of climate change. The C-SAN-Futures project therefore intends to utilize approaches developed within the design profession to develop new strategies and methods that can facilitate public discourses about plausible future alternatives.

The project will focus on how ‘we’ would like ‘the futures’ to be, rather than strictly forecasting how it most likely will become. One typical outcome will consist of comprehensible scenarios that can underpin more vivid and creative public discourses. The underpinning rationale is that we believe that social, political, economic and global concerns today tend to be more of a real bottleneck than pure individual and technical solutions are.