Foreword
ReFuturing Studies is a reader that is the culmination of student works from an elective master course as part of the final years of a Masters education at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The course, Rethinking Development and Sustainable Design, was introduced for the first time in the spring of 2016. The course is closely related to strategic topics at the Institute of Design and its research project designBRICS which has primarily manifested itself in a lean network of design institutions with AHO in Norway and two other institutions in BRICS countries, China and South Africa along with institutions and scholars from other regions in informal capacities from Brazil and India. In our fifth attempt, it consists of three MA students, one teacher and one PhD-candidate from the Institute of Design who have contributed to the course.
What has brought us all together is a common concern about future challenges that we as a global society face when it comes to mitigating Climate Change and developing its social envelope in a fairer direction. A recurring issue in this path has been addressing ways in which we as designers can best contribute to ‘change’the ‘unfortunate changes’we believe we are seeing today within the present climate-, political- and developmental crises. This shared concern is evident from the titles of the course and the reader that signifies the reimagining of these challenges with an urgent need to explore alternative approaches to the destructive trajectory human civilisation is on. We believe we need to practice a form of ‘reFuturing’ whereby we rethink contemporary notions of development and sustainable design as we know them today i.e. re-imagine other alternative futures to the ones we otherwise will be left with.
The course has been organised around a series of text seminars where different topics and texts have been introduced and discussed. This has taken place once a week from January to April 2020, giving time for individual reading and research in-between. Even though just covering a fraction of the topics and literature explored, the final and most concrete outcome of the time we spent together is this reader. Every year we have tried to modify both content and the format according to the attending students’ interests and other circumstances. However, this year partly due to the ongoing nCOVID-19 pandemic and partly to reach a larger audience, we have decided to make a digital version of the reader to be easily assessable online.
These personal essays written by the students are reflections conveyed on the topics they have chosen. This year the students have chosen quite different but still very relevant and inter-related entries to the topics at hand. Jon Erling Fauske has explored the present situation at the Arctic and the impacts of the commercial doom-tourism now taking place there. Guro Kobberstad Dysthe, on the other hand, has chosen to explore mechanisms, abilities and motivations for required change from a more individual and social perspective. Finally, Hans Kristian Erlandsen Villa, has explored Biomimicry and trying to understand what it takes to develop products that facilitate a society to live in concert with nature rather than in opposition to it. However, what all their texts have in common is a genuine interest in how we as designers, in different ways, can work with the climate crises that we all, more or less, are facing already today.
We hope you’ll enjoy the reading and find the time to reflect, rethink and affect change for a future worth having.
May 2020, Oslo
Håkan Edeholt and Jomy Joseph
