About the project

There are increasing calls from the global climate change research community for new strategies for translating knowledge into action. Unfortunately, the Climate Change research communities seem to be alone in really understanding the magnitude of the problem and how the windows of opportunity to address the issue are closing in before our very eyes. C-SAN Futures addressed designerly strategies for scaling up climate change approaches in South Africa and Norway. It’s part of a network collaboration between the CDR at AHO and the Faculty of Informatics and Design at Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT).

Consequently, whatever focus one takes in the complex Climate Change issue, probably the most crucial challenge today is to translate the still incomplete knowledge we have about our Climate System into actions that already today can make a difference in a more sustainable direction.

In order to succeed 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 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 be ‘back casted’ as ‘discursive elements’ and subsequently underpin more vivid and creative public discourses.