In the 1972 short film Design Q & A, the renowned designer Charles Eames is asked “What are the boundaries of design?” to which he replies, “What are the boundaries of problems?” This clever response was bold at the time and prescient for contemporary design, which is practiced as an expanded field, applicable it would seem, to all our modern concerns.
I wonder how Charles Eames[i] would have responded to climate change.
The exhibition Strange Weather: Forecasts From the Future (currently at the Science Gallery Dublin) explores our relationship to, and experience of, weather and climate through projects that blur the distinction between design and art. Some of these are playful such as Karolina Sobekca’s Thinking Like a Cloud, in which we use a custom designed instrument to collect cloud samples that are then ingested. This isn’t simply a taste test of clouds but rather a good-humored research project through which we become willing subjects in an ongoing experiment into how the microbial composition of the atmosphere affects us. The hope is that through such participatory experimentation with the weather we develop an appreciation of the scales of interconnectedness between ourselves and the climate.
Marina Zurkow’s HazMat Suits for Children is a more somber expression of the issue. In a near future in which ecological disasters become commonplace, even children may need protective gear to keep them safe from toxic exposure. Zurkow has re-designed the bulky, fluorescent suits we associate with bio-hazard clean-up crews to fit a child’s body, to chilling effect.
Some might say this work is ridiculous or superfluous. Or that it’s not good design because it doesn’t solve the problems of climate change or even seem to contribute to solving them.
But this isn’t an exhibition about how to halt climate change. This is an exhibition about how to live in the anthropocene.
The anthropocene is a term used to label our current moment in geological time. It points out that we are living an era characterized by the impact of human civilization on ecosystems. Although the term is technical, originating in the sciences, it’s gaining traction more broadly as shorthand for the complex set of conditions and effects brought about by humans, one aspect of which is climate change.
With regard to design, the term anthropocence is useful because it shifts our understanding of the problem and subsequently, the possibilities for action. We cannot undo or “solve” a geological era. Yes, we should, indeed we must, use design as a response to climate change. But we also have to be careful of falling into the trap of solutionism: the idea that we can scope and rectify conditions with technological fixes.
So, as an exhibition about how to live in the anthropocene, Strange Weather sidesteps proposing grand strategies for un-doing or mitigating climate change and instead provides us with tactics for understanding and coexisting with climate change. Thinking Like a Cloud shifts our relationship with the weather. HazMat Suits for Children provokes us to consider the equipment we’ll need in the face of new, widespread crises.
Other projects, such as Weather Betting, asks us to gamble on future weather patterns, predicting our atmospheric conditions in the face of extreme variability. The Archive of Old and New Events brings together a speculative collection of artifacts from cultural festivities that no longer take place due to the effects of climate change, as well as new festivities that come into being in its wake. In this imagined future, 5th Ave in New York becomes the site of annual toboggan race, made possible by massive snows brought about from a polar vortex, and then includes in the collection the toboggan shorts worn by the 2028 winner. A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting begins gathering a collection of common artifacts that may disappear due to melting ice caps, rising sea levels or the expansion of deserts. Metal crampons, for example, will be relics of a past ecosytem once the planet’s ice has melted.
Both the Archive of Old and New Events and A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting speak to a need to consider climate change in the context of cultural heritage and ask what infrastructures we need to design soon in order to preserve our histories.
In addition to showcasing a projects that prompt reflection on how we might live in the anthropocene, Strange Weather also gives us a way to think about scale and design. Climate change is literally one of our biggest problems, measured in terms of ocean depths and desert areas, and the anthropocene is a geological era — a temporal scale beyond the scope of any familiar notion of design. Some design-related responses have involved geo-engineering, in which we manipulate the environment itself, altering the way clouds produce precipitation or reforming the surface of the earth. But design interventions don’t necessarily have to be as massive as the problem. We can design small-scale responses to large-scale conditions. Many of the proposals in Strange Weather — archives, games and playful experiences, simple gear and tools — are ordinary things reconceived in light of extraordinary circumstances. They are attempts to re-frame and engage a condition of awesome proportions through everyday experience.
Perhaps Charles Eames was right, that the boundaries of design are the boundaries of problems. It’s notable that in his answer Eames doesn’t suggest that design provides solutions. This, too, is perhaps prescient of contemporary design, where the question is not just how do we solve existing problems, but also how do we want to live in a new, human-shaped era.
[i] Charles Eames was ½ of the dynamic design duo of Ray and Charles Eames. It’s unfortunate that Ray was not also included in the film Design Q&A because it would be worth know her perspective on design as well.
You can follow Carl DiSalvo on Twitter at @cdisalvo. Subscribe to re:form’s RSS feed, sign up to receive our stories by email, and follow the main page here.
Strange Weather: Forecasts From the Future was curated by Catherine Kramer and Zackery C. Denfeld, co-founders of CoClimate.
