Tomorrow’s Energy Today
How we used guerrilla art and design at the World Energy Congress to bring global energy transition closer
In the midst of climate crisis, how humanity generates and uses energy counts among the most urgent and far-reaching systemic issues we face.
I’m excited to share our latest experiential futures project, Tomorrow’s Energy Today, a series of playful, site-specific interventions designed to help imagine and catalyse energy transition at scale.
Here is the story behind the project, what we did, and some reflections on it all.
THE MISSION
For more than a century, World Energy Congress has been hosted by the World Energy Council (WEC), a global forum for thought leadership and engagement, pursuing a mission “to promote the sustainable supply and use of energy for the greatest benefit of all people”.
Traditionally staged every three years — and going forward, it will be every two — Congress draws thousands of participants from around the world, and from all facets of the energy sector, spanning renewable startups and sustainability activists to national governments and fossil fuel incumbents.
This edition, the 26th, was held in the Netherlands’ industrial capital Rotterdam, a major energy hub and Europe’s largest seaport. Due to the pandemic, it was the first to take place since 2019.
We were brought in by the WEC’s CEO Angela Wilkinson, a dynamic leader, world-class futurist colleague, and friend. We’d been in dialogue for some time, culminating in an invitation to join forces on bringing the event back with a bang after a five-year hiatus, and pushing the possibilities for futures engagement further than they’ve gone before.
For Congress, this would mean a departure from the sometimes strait-laced manner of high-level gatherings.
For us, the tight timeline called for design and production at high speed, as well as easy deployment onsite.
So our recommendation, which to my delight Angela and her leadership team wholeheartedly embraced, was a guerrilla futures approach — setting up unexpected encounters with possible futures — as opposed to a formal exhibition or scheduled program segments.
Where there’s a desire to shake things up, paired with a need to be resourceful, a willingness to be playful serves well.
(In addition, although not the focus of this story, we also ran a play-based workshop at Congress on concretely imagining alternative futures.)
The result was a trio of guerrilla futures forays:
We surprised world leaders with a bill from Mother Nature for the fancy dinner they’d just had.
We created physical provocations “from” various future scenarios, zapped back in time to the present for people to bump into during bathroom breaks.
And we reimagined some of today’s junior participants in the planetary energy transition conversation as the elders they will one day become.
Say what?
To learn more, read on.
STAGE ONE • THE BIOSPHERE BILL
My collaborators and I have been translating future scenarios into interactive experiences for immersion, tangible objects for exhibition, and surprise encounters for activation — all parts of the overarching transmedia action space of experiential futures (XF) — since before terms like design fiction or speculative design existed.
Considering those three kinds of approaches, for this occasion we were able to rule out immersion and exhibition early on.
Immersive experiences suitable for the scale of event would have required a different order of resourcing and lead time.
Displaying tastefully-lit objects on plinths was not the right mode of engagement, and would have been a logistical stretch for the space even if we’d wanted to do it.
With guerrilla futures, we are talking about a less-trafficked sector of XF, recalling some of Jake Dunagan’s and my experiments as far back as the mid-2000s — the FoundFutures project Postcards from the Future; or artifacts left around for attendees to stumble upon (in addition to the immersive scenarios) at the Hawaii 2050 launch for the state legislature.
In this case, the question was how to bring glimpses of a future energy landscape to life via momentary encounters, in parallel with a jam-packed official program?
Here’s how.
With Congress about to begin, on the eve of Earth Day, a Centennial Dinner took place at Wereldmuseum Rotterdam for the hundredth anniversary of the World Energy Council, founded in 1923.
Over 100 VIPs joined the celebration — former President So-and-So, His Royal Highness Such-and-Such — various eminences from across the energy sector, spanning government, industry, and civil society.
There were some speeches delivered, awards presented, and dinner served in several courses.
And then, just as folks were finishing up their dessert and coffee, each table received a bill.
At such events, guests aren’t generally charged for the meal — they’re guests, after all. So this came as a bit of a jolt.
Now they were paying attention.
Whoever received the bill from the serving staff on behalf of their table, when they opened it, they saw an itemised list.
It included not only the food and drinks they’d just consumed — but also a portion of the cooking, packaging, cleanup, service, venue utilities, and even the travel that made attendance in Rotterdam possible in the first place.
It was denominated not in euros or dollars, but as a scope one/two/three calculation of the energy or ecological cost of dinner for the table, expressed in CO₂ equivalent.
As it happened the organisers had seated me for the evening next to John Elkington, of the triple bottom line. We’d met years earlier when I moderated a panel he was speaking on at California College of the Arts. Thinking he might get a kick out of this experiment, I quietly arranged with our server for him to receive the biosphere bill on behalf of our table.
As the bill was passed around, I snapped a picture of the former CEO of Shell, one of the world’s largest oil companies, showing it to the person within the Dutch foreign ministry who looks after the country’s energy policy.
In experiential futures work generally, but guerrilla futures especially, context is key. This very simple object was lent an amplified meaning by the site, circumstances, and audience.
The artifact had been inspired by a lovely provocation offered by Angela Wilkinson in one of our earlier conversations: what if Mother Nature could bill for our actual energy usage, the true cost and environmental impact of our choices? Seeing potential in taking that thought experiment literally, I thought this dinner might just be the moment for it.
Increasingly, it’s normal for companies to track something like this in the aggregate, but it remains rare for individuals to think about, let alone see laid out, their own ecological footprint. (I keep thinking of engineer Saul Griffith’s groundbreaking Long Now talk on this topic a decade and a half ago, Climate Change Recalculated.)
In case you’re wondering, the numbers we used were guesstimates — which is sort of the point.
As Angela and our WEC colleagues had observed, people incur a far greater carbon cost, and use many times more energy, than what’s reflected in the monthly bills we get at home. A huge amount remains invisible and unaccounted for.
But the biosphere keeps the score.
Here then we see a small-scale irruption of a certain kind of not-too-distant prospect into the present.
As John Elkington recounted the story in his post-Congress report:
[T]he bill itemized the carbon cost of all the main items on the menu. It included a Planetary Overshoot Factor — and encouraged the recipient to “Please retain for your carbon tax return.”
“Don’t worry,” it ended, “this bill isn’t real.”
Yet.
Embedding an imaginary outcome in a plausible context for it today is a way of bringing the future closer.
STAGE TWO • AMBIENT ARTIFACTS
I’d arrived in Rotterdam with a suitcase filled with future artifacts, designed to be discovered by delegates as the event went on.
Fortunately, on this trip I didn’t end up having to explain my strange cargo to authorities (in contrast to a futures installation I once took to Belgium, which included an alarmingly lifelike baby).
So at registration, each participant, two thousand or so of them, received a canvas tote bag. Planted therein was a sticker.
This mysterious icon apparently belongs to an entity from the 2040s, “Sufficiently Advanced Technologies”. It’s a gesture putting people on notice, priming them to keep an eye out for rabbit holes to follow.
Some World Energy Council staff immediately put these on their phones — unexpected, but encouraging.
Then over the next four days, a series of visually related future artifacts started appearing in odd places.
Each of these simple pieces points to a story of a different time when the energy world has transformed. Normal has changed.
The hypothetical is made tangible through the mundane medium of corporate signage.
(For another example see US Earth Force; on the “mundane turn” generally see The Futures of Everyday Life p. 89.)
With help from WEC staff that I hadn’t planned on, but certainly welcomed, hundreds of future artifacts were distributed throughout the enormous convention centre.
The informal and interstitial touchpoints we activated — hallways, bathrooms, coffee breaks — were chosen as opportunities for playful redirection of attention; times and spaces where minds and conversations might be able to wander a little off the beaten path.
A look at the fine print revealed these items to be dated in the 2040s, 50s, or 60s. For those inclined to dig deeper still, each led to a website pulling back the curtain and offering visitors an opening to share their own seeds of transformative energy futures.
However far people venture down the rabbit hole (or not), each artifact is set up to function as an invitation to a light form of play.
Like any other invitation, it is subject to being overlooked, or misread, or declined.
Then again, it might be accepted. The fact that these possibilities are open is the point of an invitation — and act of inviting is, in itself, always socially significant.
Inviting engagement across multiple points of “evidence”, and providing chances to go further, are both ways of bringing futures closer.
STAGE THREE • FUTURE SPEAKERS SLIDES
The third effort to crystallise energy futures owes its impetus to a particular quarter of the WEC community.
The Future Energy Leaders (FELs) are a very impressive, international cohort of professionals in their 20s and 30s who are heavily involved in various aspects of the energy transition. They might be running a sustainability tech startup, or working for a giant utility, or doing a doctorate on some cutting-edge research question.
A few weeks ahead of the event, we were put in touch with some FELs so they could field questions we’d been asking about energy scenarios that domain experts might help us imagine.
Halfway through one of these exchanges, it hit me: what if we were to think of these folks not just as research informants, but as messengers of the futures themselves?
We knew that rooms throughout the Congress venue would be equipped with large screens to support the panels and presentations with slides or live video. In between sessions, these would feature short films and promotional material.
So based on my one-on-one interviews with a cross-section of FELs, and with their permission, we made for each an advertisement for a talk that they might conceivably give in the future, at a World Energy Congress decades from now.
And again with the vital cooperation of WEC staff, we were able to slip these glimpses of imaginable system shifts into the flow of delegates’ present-day experience.
It was great fun ageing up the FELs a little bit, and, with inspiration from key ideas touched on in our conversations, coming up with imaginary organisations, or futurised versions of existing ones, that they might work with someday. We also concocted a timeline for Congress and its locations over the next 40 years.
Just to be clear, our gracious participants are not to blame for any liberties we may have taken in projecting their stories into the futures.
Yet despite a dose of artistic licence on our part, each of these puzzle pieces did tie to a real person — their life, background, interests, and what they had shared in discussion — rather than being an unmoored bit of speculation, drifting in the ether.
Whatever transitions are collectively accomplished over the next generation in these domains, many people are actively working on them right now. And we can be sure that any, say, 60 year-old who might be invited to tell their story in, say, 2054, is 30 years old in 2024.
Here’s the thing: the folks featured in these slides were physically present and participating at this event. Not merely abstract avatars for futures-oriented conversations we need to be having, but actual agents for the futures themselves; contributing to making potentially dramatic change possible. Future Energy Leaders.
Personalising the future is another way of bringing it closer.
REFLECTIONS
I’m writing about this stuff for learning, personal and collective. So what are some of my takeaways?
To start, I want to try to unpack what kind of thing this was. We could call it a hybrid guerrilla futures project.
I am referring to an effort that takes attendees by stealth, but that also occurs in a bounded or scripted context like a private venue or ticketed event, with organisers’ involvement, blessing, or at least forbearance.
If most experiential or participatory futures projects — like Imagination Is a Commons, Sing Wild Seeds, The Futures Bazaar, or the immersive scenarios mentioned earlier for Hawaii 2050 — could be said to sit at the “solicited” end of a spectrum, consciously opted into by participants, then pure guerrilla futures interventions — future-jamming signals injected unbidden into public contexts, as in FoundFutures: Chinatown, or projects I’ve done with classes in Honolulu, Chicago, Toronto, and New York — are at the “unsolicited” other end.
At times, the former strategy is just the ticket. For instance, Time Machines — immersive scenarios at the scale of a room — benefit from a happily captive audience that has chosen to be present for both the future experiences and the facilitated conversations that follow.
At other times, for various reasons, the latter strategy may be needed. Consider for example the climate awareness-spreading efforts of blue line projects around the world.
Each approach has its affordances, and there are good reasons why guerrilla futures is sometimes preferred, as well as equally good reasons why it isn’t the way to go every time. (See The Futures of Everyday Life, Chapters 5 & 6.) As any seasoned activist, advertiser, street performer, or other solicitor of attention-in-motion can attest, it’s tremendously difficult to earn and properly repay an audience “in the wild”, on the fly.
But in between these poles, there is a guerrilla futures type of action sited in a slightly more manageable context. It might retain the organic element of surprise (which can only be diminished when things are officially cordoned off as “art”), while reducing the risks of being overlooked, misconstrued, taken down, and so on.
Some other examples of hybrid guerrilla futures projects include the immersive scenarios we plonked our audience into instead of the regular panel session they were expecting at South by Southwest, the launch of hypothetical product NaturePod at Canada’s largest interior design expo, and guerrilla futures artifacts at the General Assembly of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
This collaboration with the World Energy Council has helped me see some new potentials for hybrid guerrilla futures.
The key was how enthusiastically WEC staff engaged — partly, but not only, the exuberance unleashed by my Tom Sawyering out the installation of weird future artifacts in toilet stalls (and some absolutely jumped at the chance to do that, bless ‘em).
The whole on-site aspect of this collaboration unearthed possibilities I hadn’t fully entertained, around widening the circles of participation and ownership in the new ways of thinking, the futures, that we were seeking to incept.
Some other ways to take things further include:
- Diversifying experiments. The three sets of guerrilla futures fragments at this Congress — the Biosphere Bill, Ambient Artifacts, and Future Speaker Slides — were whittled down from a longer list, which started with an inventory of every candidate context for intervention that we could think of around the event. Some very exciting possibilities that ultimately weren’t feasible here, I hope to try later.
- Deepening scenarios. Not all experiential futures encounters warrant detailed worldbuilding and piles of underlying research. The more of a low-cost test balloon the intervention, the more obvious that there’s no need to overdo it. But the range and complexity of challenges in energy transition calls for commensurate richness in the futures conversation. Other XF contributions, optimised not for simplicity and glanceability, but to unfold over time, could help us collectively rise to these challenges.
- Extending documentation. A source of inspiration that emerged early in my longstanding XF collaboration with Jake Dunagan was Brian Eno’s definition of ambient music — accommodating multiple levels of attention. (The design principles of “the tip of the iceberg” and “the art of the double take” — see TFOEL p. 195 — conceptually connect here, as does Dator’s second law.) Jake has spelled out this design heuristic further with the “5–5–55 principle”: when making an experiential scenario, consider how it might land with someone who engages it for five seconds, vs five minutes, vs 55 minutes. The more time someone invests, the more they should get out of it. Future iterations might find ways to capture and share these impacts more systematically.
- Closing the learning loop. The Future Speaker Slides idea emerged from considering the FELs’ contributions through the lens of the Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) cycle, a framework for designing XF projects (like this one for the United Nations Development Programme). Mapping, mediating and mounting futures ideas grounded in the thinking of specific individuals, as we did for the slides, constitutes a foundation that with a bit more time one could build on; looping back to them, or other stakeholders, and mapping the thought process as it evolves, pushing on imagination’s horizons.
THE UPSHOT
It’s hard to overstate the importance and urgency of large-scale action in the energy sector. There is so much work to do.
I suggested at the top that this project aimed to “bring energy transition closer” — and I mean this in two senses; psychologically, by making it slightly more accessible to imagination, and historically, by making it slightly more accessible to action.
If this sounds a bit grand, I will happily defend small steps in the right direction over inaction any time.
In this post, we’ve noted a number of tactics for beginning to taking such steps: embedding imaginary ideas in a plausible context for them today, inviting involvement across multiple points of “evidence”, providing chances for audiences to engage further, and personalising the futures. (This is not an exhaustive list.)
And the Reflections above speak to how such beginnings might be built upon, for increased ambition, rigour, and reach.
For our part, my co-designer Ceda Verbakel and I were challenged and rewarded by this minimalist experiment with maximalist aspirations. We are immensely grateful for the trust that our partners placed in us.
And the real achievement here belongs to them. A modest scope, simple futures artifacts in paper and pixels, and a playful sensibility — these things may be tempting to dismiss, but the project required our collaborators at the World Energy Council to brave some new territory that many organisations shy away from. And the experimental drive, joy, and gumption of Angela Wilkinson and team were as impressive as anything I’ve encountered at this level in more than two decades of futures collaboration. To them, I say bravo, and keep going.
Everywhere I look, I see a desperate need for grounded foresight; ethically infused public imagination. It’s not a sufficient condition, to be sure, but it is a necessary one.
If this is a need you see too, then spread the word — and let’s make it happen.
TOMORROW’S ENERGY TODAY
Guerrilla Futures Artifacts for the 26th World Energy Congress
Concepts, copy, and design by Stuart Candy and Ceda Verbakel. Photos and video by Stuart Candy.
Special thanks to World Energy Council leadership, especially Anastasia Belostotskaya, Tania Baumann, Marius Oosthuizen, Catarina Veiga, and Angela Wilkinson.
Many thanks to the Future Energy Leaders interviewed: Guilherme Castro, Ravneet Kaur, Filip Koprčina, Mogale Modisane, Ghada Rahal, Vaishali Tonk, and Ivo Wakounig.
Much appreciation to Arwa Guesmi and Avicia Burchill, and to the whole WEC team, for their enthusiasm and logistical support onsite, and to all participants for being good sports.
And a hearty shout out to our English-to-Dutch artifact text translator, Maya Van Leemput, and printer extraordinaire, Gilles Bensemoun of MagentaColor Print in downtown Los Angeles.
All project materials Creative Commons 2024 BY-NC-SA, by Stuart Candy and Ceda Verbakel / Situation Lab and World Energy Council.
Related:
> On Getting Started in Experiential Futures (The Omidyar Group)
> Impacting the Social (Dialogue with Bryan Boyer and Candy Chang)
> Futuring to Transform the World’s Largest Humanitarian Network (IFRC)
> Introducing Experiential and Participatory Futures at the BBC
> Adding Dimensions to Development Futures with UNDP
> US Earth Force (World Bank Climate Investment Funds)
> What Is NaturePod? (Interface Inc)
