Building on the workshops/kick-off this autumn, the MA Fashion and Society students ventured on a dedicated project to explore fashion’s role in imagining sustainable futures.
How can we use design to imagine sustainable futures?
What is the role of fashion within that?
Because if we can’t imagine sustainable futures, then how can then begin to build them?
The dominant imaginaries become so infused into our societies and become invisible, we take them for granted. Who gains and who does not from these dominant futures?
Then followed presentations and group tasks by IMAGINE researchers Marie Hebrok and James Lowley.
Exam – oral presentation
On the morning of the 23rd of March, the 5 MA students presented their projects to external sensors and some of the IMAGINE team.
Kinga Zablocka & Eva Celine Lynau: Hyper-productive sharing
The projects grappled with materiality as well as cultural meaning in the future, examining the current issues that the fashion industry is facing.
Maria Kupen With: Precious Plastic
You can read more about the student work in our upcoming project gallery.
IMAGINE researcher, James Lowley presented at the GreenMet seminar “The role of narratives for sustainability” on Friday the 17th of February 2023. The seminar was a collaboration with the Henrik Steffens Professorate at the Europa-Institut, University of Hamburg and the GreenMet group at Oslo Metropolitan University. GreenMet is a self-organised group of researchers, academics and students at Oslo Metropolitan University. They organise bi-annual seminars on different sustainability themes.
This seminar presented work from both students and researchers in an open, hybrid seminar.
The first presenter, Dr Dörte Linke’s presentation “Imagination and force of actions – the role of fiction within ecological discourse”, underlines that humans have to create narratives to orient themselves but that the ecological discourse is a large and specific narrative in itself about humanity that has ruined nature and a vulnerable planet. This not only has ontological implications but also structural.
Each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or introduces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise. Such exercise enhances collective thinking and movement in complexity. Each time I trace a tangle and add a few threads that at first seemed whimsical but turned out to be essential to the fabric, I get a bit straighter that staying with the trouble of complex worlding is the name of the game of living and dying well together on terra, in Terrapolis.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making kin in the Chthulucene, 2016, p. 29
Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Charlotte Weitze, and Josefine Klougart, Linke reminds us how we live in and with our narrative and that how they are performed and lived by us can and should be changed.
Tempelhofer Feld is a closed airfield in Berlin. Since its closure in 2008, it has been open to the public, for cycling, skating, etc., and multicultural concepts and gatherings. It also provides protection for several species and is protected by referendum – a politically determined assemblage.
Following, the four students from Hamburg University, Jacqueline Peterhans, Ramona Tyler, Sara Vaders and Tabea Ylä-Outinen, presented “Humanistic Ecology and the carrier bag theory”.
Teufelsberg got its name from its origin – made up of 70 million tons of (contaminated) war waste – the devil mountain is now home to wild boars and other species. Its old spy tower and buildings provide more dynamic living conditions.
Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of “making kin”, Orsola Le Guin’s carrier bag theory (the carrier bag of fiction and natural history) and Tsing’s concepts of assemblage (ecological community, open-ended gatherings between multispecies) and coordination (the unintentional coordination that develops patterns in assemblages), the students presented case studies of four places in Germany where the narratives of human and nature interacting is breaking with the habitual idea of humanity as a destructor, where human action has given room for something new, a new interaction between species.
Spreepark, the famous abandoned amusement park, left to be taken back by nature after its closure in 2001. The park provides room for particular biological niches and a mixture of exotic and local species among the remains of human activity.
Beelitzer Heilstätten has been a clinic, bathhouse, army hospital and sanatorium, used last by the Red Army during WW2. Its construction displaced the natural environment but now the building provides cover and support as nature reclaims it.
Last, but not least, James Lowley’s presentation “Provotypes & Mediations: Engagement in, through and with Speculative Design”, challenged the narrative of design as problem-solving, both through examples of how it changes, and has always changed cultural practice, and how it can be used to ask questions.
Cultural practices are diminished or replaced when heat becomes a radiator.
Albert Borgmann’s Device Paradigm discusses the loss of cultural practice and multisensory rituals connected to the use of devices. They are seen as just a means to an end, and other effects are ignored, namely that through actions we shape the world and it shapes us. To challenge this, speculative design creates means to provoke, i.e., provotypes: “ethnographically rooted, technically working, robust artefacts that deliberately challenge stakeholder conceptions”.
The prime objective of speculative design is to force an aspect of the future into the present so that it demands a response
Tonkinwise, How We Intend To Future, 2014.
By making futures imaginable, tangible, we potentially make them possible. Asking questions such as:
What happens if humans adapt to ecological circumstances rather than the opposite?
The student work to the right asked the question: What if global warming and increased CO2 lead to plants growing extremely large?
The Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory hosted Anticipation 2022 (anticipationconference.org), the 4th International Conference on Anticipation 16th-18th November 2022 at the Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, and a virtual conference on 4th November 2022. It set out to explore
how ideas of the future inform action in the present. With an emphasis on just futures, we seek contributions that explore equity and fairness and question who imagines futures and with which impacts. We invite researchers, scholars and practitioners engaging with anticipation and anticipatory practices to come together to deepen their understanding and create productive new connections.
IMAGINE was represented with two papers at the virtual conference.
Marie Hebrok, Nenad Pavel and James Lowley presented the paper “Speculative critical design as a means for interrogating imaginaries of sustainable futures” discussing the challenges of developing a master’s level course in speculative critical design approaches (SCD) at the Department of Product Design at Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), in the context of the research project IMAGINE.
Dan Welch and Dan Lockton presented the paper “Towards a Conceptual Framework for Contested Imaginaries of Sustainability” presenting the conceptual foundations of IMAGINE, informing understandings of the performative—and counter-performative—nature of anticipatory thought in processes of contestation between cultural imaginaries of sustainable futures.
Wednesday 16th November, James Lowley led the student workshop “Provotypes and mediations” for the MA Product Design – Design in Complexity students at OsloMet.
The workshop is both a part of his PhD research and the MAPD5000 Technology and Design subject, a 6-week subject running till mid-December, that kicked off the week before. In the course, the students are tasked with making imaginaries of sustainability tangible to create reflection and discussion.
The goal of the workshop was to work on performative and mediative aspects of speculative design.
For the workshop, the students were asked to bring food items and based on this, to imagine future eating utensils.
Below are some of the outcomes of the workshop.
James is a PhD. Candidate at the Design, Culture and Sustainability Research Group at the Department of Product Design at the Faculty of Technology, Art and Design at OsloMet. His PhD project is called: Senses of Coherence: Future Perspectives on Design, Technology and Everyday Eating
The aim of the project is to bring together perspectives from Salutogenesis and Philosophy of Technology to explore Engagement in, through, and with Speculative Design. A Postphenomenological lens can position human-food relationships as instances of Technological Mediation; a transactional dynamic occurring through actions and experiences. In this theoretical landscape, designed artefacts are key determinants of sustainability outcomes by shaping ways of being and becoming in the present, and this has implications for the cultural practices they seek to support and replace, as well as the types and conditions of health they participate in creating.
You can see some of James’ previous work, called E.A.T (Edited Aesthetics of Taste), here (doga.no).
On the 7th-8th of November, WP3 DESIGN, led by Dr. Dan Lockton & Dr. Nenad Pavel, organised a 2-day kick-off seminar for the student course designed by IMAGINE researchers for OsloMet students.
Day 1 included information and introductory sessions about the IMAGINE project and speculative design and was held at the OsloMet Kjeller Campus.
Day 2 included a morning session where the students were introduced to the theoretical underpinnings of imaginaries and some of the findings so far in the project, and an afternoon workshop where they got to start playing with the materiality of futures through objects. This day was held at the central Oslo Pilestredet Campus and was open also to students from the Department of Art, Design and Drama, where the IMAGINE themes are being integrated into their course-specific subjects.
We will be following the student work and are excited to see what they come up with.
Various forms of technology are intrinsically woven into the fabric of our everyday lives. Technology also holds a central place in how we imagine and anticipate the future. Particularly in how we imagine more sustainable futures to be and come about. Processes of developing, introducing, and using technologies, as well as of imagining future ones, are often filled with ethical dilemmas, assumptions, and power struggles. This course explores how to use speculative design approaches to critically engage with current technological developments and imaginaries of sustainable futures, in order to shed light on and provoke critical reflection on present trajectories of change.
The course is taking place within the frame and scope of the research project IMAGINE– contested futures of sustainability (imagine.oslomet.no). Candidates will be included in the network of project participants and encouraged to find their own role and perspective. The learning outcome of the course includes participating in interdisciplinary research by applying prototyping and visualization skills to make imaginaries of sustainable futures tangible and therefore more accessible for critical reflection. These materializations of imaginaries we call provotypes. A number of projects will be exhibited at the IMAGINE exhibition at DogA. The course gives students the opportunity to develop anticipatory skills and to conduct research through design in the context of an international research project.
Program
DAY 1:
09:00-11:30 am:
Nenad Pavel: Presentation of the course
Marie Hebrok: Presentation of the IMAGINE research project
12:30 – 15:00 pm:
Marie Hebrok and James Lowley: Lecture on critical speculative design approaches
DAY 2:
09:00-11:30 am:
Dan Welch: What are imaginaries and why are they important
Rick Dolphijn and Tamalone van den Eijnden: Imaginaries of sustainable futures – findings from IMAGINE
12:30 – 15:00 pm:
Dan Lockton: Engaging with imaginaries through design – Workshop
Keynote: Social Futures and the Sociology of Consumption
Dan Welch presented the history of futures, imaginaries and utopias in Sociology, reminding us that the focus on past and current situations is relatively new. The origins of Sociology, socialism and utopia were in fact fundamentally intertwined in nineteenth century Europe: H.G. Wells, a contender for the first Chair of Sociology in the UK, suggested in 1906:
“…the creation of Utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper and distinctive method of sociology”.
H.G. Wells is of course more popularly known for his science fiction writing, particularly War of the Worlds (1898). Through his utopian novels, he imagined aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web.
An example of previous imaginaries of the future of consumption, that was mentioned, came from a completely different realm – one of design and product development: the 1950s ‘kitchen of the future’ (digitaltrends.com). They did not get everything right, but they did foresee the robot vacuum cleaner, among other things.
Photo: Robot vacuum cleaner in the kitchen of the future (Source: Tumblr).
These are examples of how future imaginaries have somehow informed the future or become reality, that, along with contemporary imaginaries from various stakeholders are increasingly becoming an object of study for Sociology – developing a Sociology of the future.
Roundtable: IMAGINE: Contested Futures of Sustainability
In the roundtable session, project coordinator Atle Wehn Hegnes presented the project and its underpinnings, and Dan Welch went on to present the theoretical framework, as discussed in the workshop earlier the same week.
The presentations were followed by lively discussions with not only questions to the speakers, but also conversations between people in the audience. Subjects brought up ranged from how to help students imagine future scenarios and go beyond what they already know – here polarity maps were mentioned as a possible tool – to interesting projects and approaches that the audience knew about.
Some concepts, projects and thoughts discussed:
Narratives in policy shaping the future
Sustainable consumption was «invented» to reframe capitalism in a light that makes it look feasible as the underpinnings of capitalism were being thoroughly contested.
What is radical change: A question of scale – new business models may seem like productive imaginaries on a micro-scale but on a macro-scale, they are only reproducing the current systems.
Solar punk
College core
Long perspectives – knowing about alternatives is not enough, you need to feel them.
In late August, the consortium had the pleasure of finally meeting in person. On the 30th of August, Work package 5, EXCHANGE, arranged a workshop at Kulturhuset in Oslo.
Rick first presented the reasoning for the work with the contextual framework. This is linked to Paul Ricoeur’s ideas of imagination as an ecological project, existing not just in the human mind but fluctuating between reproductive and productive imagination. As a result of their explorations, Rick and Tamalone have come up with some proposals, common threads and ways to look at the imaginaries. These themes were presented for discussion and negotiation.
Tamalone presenting the themes.
Tamalone then presented the findings within each theme, which was followed by a group discussion and feedback in plenary.
Their analysis of popular cultural imaginaries identified themes in films, novels, cartoons and advertising, specifically looking at the project’s three cases, dressing, eating and moving.
In the different themes, different aspects drive the future: technology, social innovation, de-colonisation, external factors like weather and catastrophes etc.
Stories around technology, where technology drives the future, dominate the findings, but the other themes that might be considered more marginal should definitely be part of our project. The work shows that there are many narratives going on already which can help us de-territorialise and decolonise how we think about the future and capture other power structures and narratives. They may help us imagine other stories and ways of being, as well as objects and things influencing our imagination.
Thoughts about the future imaginaries
Some commonalities were found – the sources always relate back to the nature of human beings and discuss this; in many of the catastrophe films it is almost irrelevant what the element is or why the catastrophe has come about, they serve as constraints for humans and reflections around human nature/behaviour.
It was striking how few utopian imaginaries are presented in popular culture – in our day-to-day, we usually think of technology as a force of liberation but in representations, it often represents a threat or constraints of some sort.
The ways in which some of our current practices resemble some of the imaginaries were also discussed, e.g., how protein shakes have become a common source of nourishment but that the highly processed food in some films does not seem so appealing.
Group Work Session
Group in deep discussion about one of the themes
This was an opportunity to discuss in person the ongoing and upcoming work and plan ahead.
WPs 1&2
The group discussed how the conceptual framework for the project consists of both the contextual framework from WP1 and the theoretical framework from WP5, and how these two frameworks interact. Rick and Tamalone’s summary report of their findings will give a contextual framework and a few directions for continuing the work with the theoretical framework.
So far, the work with both frameworks has shown that their development needs to be an ongoing negotiation, a dialogical process, starting from the online workshop in June. Furthermore, Dan Welch proposed to base it on Ricoeur and Practice Theory – practice theory being the common ground for most of the project participants and Ricoeur being at the foundation of the project application, combining imaginaries and practices.
We were happy to learn from Audun Kjus that 71 stories about the future had been collected for WP2 on minner.no, approaching our goal of 100. The stories are not just about what the future is going to be but also about how, and they contain a lot of emotions. There is also much more heterogeneity than we are led to believe. The group then discussed how we can start to analyse these stories.
WPs 3 & 4
WP3&4 discussing the upcoming course
The group discussed the development and implementation of the upcoming 6-week course for the Product Design students at OsloMet, due to start in November. During the workshop, it was decided to engage students from Drama, Art, Fashion and Product Design together and make a joint exhibition. Here the inclusion of drama students will allow for performative confrontations that explore the future through other means than things.
Program
10 – 10. 15 am: Face to Face (!) Welcome by Dan
10.15 – 11.30 am: Contextual Framework Session – Rick and Tamalone present work in progress and discussion
11.30 – 11.45 am: Coffee
11.45 – 1.15 pm: Group Work
Group 1: (WPs 1 & 2) Atle, Harald, Virginie, Dan Welch, Rick, Tamalone, Audun, Lisbeth
Group 2: (WPs 3 & 4) Nenad, James, Marie, Dan Lockton, Henry, Joanne, Heidi, Niels Peter
1.15 – 2 pm: Lunch
2 – 3 pm: Feedback from Group sessions & Next Steps
Group Session questions:
– What are the upcoming activities and tasks this autumn?
– What are the main challenges?
– What do we need from other WPs?
– How can we collaborate within and across WPs?
– Does the theoretical framework work help us and in what ways (or not really)? Is there anything we would like to feed into the theoretical framework? (NB: the ‘theoretical framework’ is not intended to constrain WPs or set boundaries for theorising in IMAGINE, it is a WP5 work-stream in dialogue with the other WPs).
Sociologist Atle Wehn Hegnes will join the IMAGINE team from the 15th of August 2022. Atle will be responsible for coordinating the project in the coming year.
WP1 – Mine – Identify dominant imaginaries in documents, media and essays
•An initial list of what the team members suggested as useful objects to study
•Narrowed down the movies for the analysis to those who deal with space travel. Work in progress to systematize findings from the movies
•The WP1 team has gathered and read different theories of imagination and sorted them into categories
•Emphasis on Ricoeur’s theory through a feminist Marxist perspective has been initially developed and will be presented to the team in the workshop on the 9th June
WP2 – Explore
•Developed questionnaire for the data collection of everyday stories about the future – inspired by a similar data collection at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm (January-February)
•Finalisation of the collection site at www.minner.no
•Application to and ethical approval from the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD) (April-May)
•Pilot testing of the questionnaire (April)
•Public dissemination about the data collection (May)
•Launch date 19th May
•Collection period: May 2022 and until we get 100 stories
WP3 – Design
•New WP3 team member: James Lowley, PhD Candidate at OsloMet.
•Masters course MAPD5000, Technology and Design at OsloMet will start in November and includes 15 students. A pilot has been conducted
•10 Master students at TU/e are working on representations of futures of “moving”
•4 Bachelor students at TU7e are working on representations of “dressing” and several more on “eating”.
•Master and Bachelor students working on how we relate to time and how that affects our thoughts about the future
WP5 – Exchange
•Present workshop is the first of three during the project period
•Second half of the workshop will be arranged on the 30th August
IMAGINE-researchers Marie Hebrok and Henry Mainsah have published a paper about design fictions, Skinny as a Bird: Design fiction as a vehicle for reflecting on food futures, in the journal Futures (sciencedirect.com).
Abstract
This article explores the use of design fiction as a vehicle for critically reflecting on the complex issue of sustainable food consumption and production. The paper presents the design fiction Bird, a food delivery service that provides food rations to its customers based on their exact nutritional needs and self-improvement goals. The service makes food consumption sustainable by design, leveraging individual lifestyle ambitions to circumvent the need to translate sustainability awareness into action. We discuss what it means to embed provocation, critique, and reflection in a design fiction that highlights potential preferable and non-preferable trajectories of change related to imaginaries of technocentric food futures. Through a design fiction artefact that reflects a complex set of ethical, social, cultural, political, and environmental issues related to food consumption, the aim is to examine how design fiction can serve as an entry point for imagining and critiquing possible futures.
Work package 5, EXCHANGE, arranged a workshop on Zoom over the span of two days last week. The workshop’s theme was ‘Towards a Conceptual Framework for Contested Imaginaries of Sustainability’.
The workshop on June 7th started with an introduction by Dan Welch and Nina Heidenstrøm with an update on all of the work packages. The first session was Jo Cramer‘s presentation on Fashion and Imaginaries. She introduced literature on contested futures, theories and definitions of fashion.
The second session of Tuesday’s workshop was about speculative design and design fiction, and was led by Dan Lockton, Marie Hebrok, and Nenad Pavel. They discussed how speculative design can be used to make imaginaries tangible and open for critical discussion, and argued that speculative design has the potential to democratise future imaginaries by involving more people and distributing the power to define. After a presentation by Dan, Marie, and Nenad the attendees imagined an ordinary Tuesday in a more sustainable future in groups and visualised and presented it by using an online whiteboard. The aim was to increase our own awareness of how we are influenced by imaginaries of sustainability.
Examples of results from the session
Day 2 of the workshop, Thursday, began with an introduction of Ricœur through the concepts of memory and imagination, by Rick Dolphijn. Tamalone van den Eijnden followed with a presentation of (re)productive imagination as processes with different economic and social values and the (Marxist) feminist critique of this. The session ended with a discussion of how a theory of careful imagination could enrich the project. We also discussed how the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey reproduced older narratives and influenced science fiction movies, and used an online whiteboard to examine how space odysseys are (re)produced.
Nina Heidenstrøm and Dan Welch led the next session, where they talked about sociology and the future historically, and through practice theory and socio-temporal rhythms. They also presented results from the project Imagined futures of consumption (manchester.ac.uk).
Thursday’s final session was led by oral storyteller Heidi Dahlsveen, and it was a combination of storytelling and practical exercises like memory games and reflections on first time experiences – Kairos moments, that touched upon and summarized the themes from the previous sessions.
Through the workshop, we also talked about the next steps, reading lists and groups sessions and our next meeting and roundtable at the ESA midterm conference in Oslo this fall.
Program
June 7th Day 1: Design and Fashion
12.15 – 12.30pm: Welcome and Introduction to the Workshops – Dan Welch and Nina Heidenstrøm
12.30 – 1.15pm: Fashion and Imaginaries – Jo Cramer
1.15 – 1.45pm Lunch
1.45 – 2.45pm: Design Fiction/Speculative Design – Dan Lockton, Marie Hebrok, Nenad Pavel
2.45 – 3pm: Concluding Thoughts
June 9th Day 2: Sociology, Philosophy and Storytelling
10.20 – 10.30am: Welcome – Dan Welch and Nina Heidenstrøm
10.30 – 11.30am: Ricœur: Ideologies and Utopia (Philosophy) – Rick Dolphijn, Virginie Amilien, Tamalone van den Eijden
11.30 – 11.45am: Break
11.45 – 12.45pm: Practice Theory and Imaginaries (Sociology) – Nina Heidenstrøm and Dan Welch
12.45 – 1.15pm: Lunch
1.15 – 1.30pm: Storytelling and Imaginaries: Heidi Dahlsveen
1.30 – 2.30 pm: Concluding Thoughts and Next Steps
