Climate Fiction Prototyping: Tools for Designing in a Climate Crisis

Harnessing the power of storytelling to explore complex service scenarios and maximize stakeholder engagement.

We’re living in a new climate. Even as we transition toward lower-carbon futures, science tells us there’s still more heat and change ahead. We must adapt to these new normals. This includes living with extreme weather, investing in early-warning systems for more powerful storms, and helping people in diverse professions from farming to public health do their jobs.

In many ways, designing services that help us adapt to these new climate normals follows a standard product design process. Start with a need, such as more frequent and intense rain, a group of affected people, such as small businesses, and flow through research and prototyping. Yet the scale of the climate crisis adds complexity to any standard design process. A designer must be comfortable with technical climate science and move between multiple potential climate pathways. To avoid maladaptation, it’s important not to close down pathways. Designs will unfold and target years in the future and, by necessity, involve myriad stakeholders who speak different professional (and sometimes actual linguistic) languages. Most of all, we have a hard time wrapping our brains around just how the climate crisis will change our world.

We need design tools that meet the complexity of these design briefs.

At CIID, we’re experimenting with the use of comics as a first prototype. Shaping the comics allows us to explore and surface some of the complexity we design within. Sharing the comics with stakeholders allows us to have a medium with which anyone can engage — technical scientists, government officials, and ultimately the people who will use what we design.

Each comic we craft is a service scenario about a provocative ‘product’, but the product itself is hidden. Instead, we let the story and illustrations communicate a climate-changed future, design principles, touchpoints, and some implications and limits of a potential design.

The Search for Inspiration

Storytelling is one of the oldest tools we possess and a force for engaging emotionally with an issue. While design and storytelling share a rich history, a few particular signals led us to the use of comics in our design practice. The growing sub-genre of Climate Fiction is expanding visions of society in the future and how humanity adapts and lives in possible climate-changed worlds. In a similar vein, Alex Steffen’s work on The Heroic Future challenges individuals to imagine and confront climate-changed futures.

“The climate crisis is a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” — Amitav Ghosh, Climate Fiction Author

But how to use climate fiction as a design tool? In the field of science fiction, Brian David Johnson coined a method for ‘science fiction prototyping’. We saw this as a departure point — what if we used ‘climate science’ as the ‘scientific inflection point’ for exploring designs and their implications? Frankly, the climate world could use some optimism and courage, not to mention a few heroes and a dose of superpowers. We were equally inspired by the UN’s efforts to use comics as an educational tool for communicating climate change to kids.

Crafting the Comics

Phase 1: Expand your imagination

Memory and imagination are closely linked. Before embarking on any brainstorming, we invested in building better memories, diving deep into climate projections, the context of our brief, and socio-economic trajectories. Our project partners conducted a large qualitative and quantitative baseline study about the communities we are designing for, helping us understand current practices, challenges, and the people at the core of any service. We supplemented this with futurescaping exercises and climate projections for the region. Lastly, a landscape study of a wide range of existing Adaptation Services illuminated design patterns and structures.

From all these inputs, we shaped three future ‘worlds’: one with high cooperation, strong social connections, and collective funding; a second world with service experts that act as mediators between businesses and strong institutions; and a third world with high technological development and fiercely independent businesses.

Phase 2: Brainstorm stories, not concepts

Within each of the three future worlds we brainstormed potential story arcs, running with an idea and shaping a product or service into the story. We challenged ourselves to explore radically different stories and went back and forth between the methods of science fiction prototyping and service journey maps. In the end, we landed on three stories that each push the boundaries of potential services: a collective council, a climate agent, and a personalised product.

Phase 3: Add the magic

As a final step, we took the three stories and fleshed them out. We added details, exploring what was happening in the backstage of the service, implications of the concepts, and the limits of a service. We also leaned into the medium and overemphasised the science and characters to make the stories more memorable and provocative. In particular, we turned each service concept into a superpower: Collective action in one story became magic rings that members could use together to unlock more power; service agents in another story became undercover superheroes; and a prediction app in the final story became magic binoculars that could see the future. At this stage we also engaged with professional comic artists and illustrators to bring the comics to life. We couldn’t have crafted the stories without the ideas and expertise of Tom Manning, Peter Snejbjerg, and Shruti Nivas.

In November, we’ll be teaching a workshop at UN City Copenhagen on how to create your own stories for designing in complex, emergent topics. We’ll explore inspirational adaptation case studies, construct visual narratives, and practice using these provocative props to build engagement and alignment with stakeholders. Sign up — we’d love to have a wide group of diverse professionals join us!