Stockholm Speculative Futures Meetup — Age of Species
In Stockholm, we are building a critical mass for future thinking with a new meetup Speculative Futures Stockholm Chapter. The first event sold out, showing the interest of the community in this topic, and following the huge interest we want to share what happened in the first event. Read all about the Age of Species with the invited speaker Petra Ljlia and our very own A Constitution for Mars workshop.
What is future speculation?
Every time we talk about what the future could be like, we are speculating about it. This speculation can be more or less reflective or complex, i.e. “What will happen if my football team wins the match next Sunday?” vis à vis “What are the consequences of the climate crisis on society?” And although we cannot guess the future, by speculating and exploring possible future scenarios, we can develop the capabilities or skills needed to address that possibility. Since the future is not an absolute given and can be influenced by present actions, the attitude shift from hindsight to foresight allows us to critically address the present and consequently design the future we want.
Moreover, future speculation becomes increasingly relevant as uncertainty raises. Currently, we live in an unprecedented time of uncertainty as humanity faces wicked and unmatched complex challenges such as climate crisis, the global refugee crisis or the rise of extremism. The fact that we know so little about how things will turn out, raises the need to be ready for different possibilities. In other words, we need to be imaginative enough to explore the future in a way that we can develop the necessary tools and capabilities to prepare or avoid for a specific future. An example brought up in the event by Fernanda Torre was the 9/11 Commission Report that followed the events leading up to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. This report addressed areas where north-American institutions and leaders miss-performed: “We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management”, continuing to add: “The most important failure was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat. The policy challenges were linked to this failure of imagination.” This report points out, in a very stringent way, the importance of foresight and future speculation: if we do not allow ourselves to explore possible futures, we can never prepare for them.
However, future speculation not only holds the aim of anticipation or prediction. Perhaps more importantly, speculation allows us to lay the foundations for the future, thus turning uncertainty into opportunity. There exist many established methods for exploring futures. Some of these include future visions, science fiction, speculative design & design fiction, foresight and extended strategy, futures thinking, scenario planning, futures wheel and trendspotting. E.g. commercial future visions are a way for companies to communicate their future visions through visually appealing videos of how imagined products will improve people’s lives. However, these commercial visions mainly focus on future technologies, leaving politics and bigger global challenges untouched. Other methods, such as science fiction and speculative design, go beyond the most probable futures to also engage with plausible and possible futures. This includes exploring the consequences of current systems, in order to discuss the kinds of future people want and don’t want. Such an approach to futures acknowledges that engaging with how the future could be different is necessarily a political question that involves philosophical concerns.
Age of Species
The Age of Species is a two-year long curation project by Petra Lilja, industrial designer, curator and Ph.D. student at Konstfack, that has engaged 8 international design studios in speculative design as an approach to creating multi-planetary future scenarios, as a tool to reflect on current earthly situations.
During her talk Petra Lilja made the point of how speculating on life possibilities on Mars can help us better understand and address the problems we’re facing on our current planet. A lot of the problems we’re facing today, and increasingly will face in the future, like climate change, biodiversity loss and extinction, and poverty and inequality can be traced back to our present decisions.
Besides focussing on our planet’s current and future state, Lilja also makes the point of seeing the world from other perspectives that not anthropocentric: “One aim is to disrupt human-centeredness and open up for reconfigurations of design practices to better engage with troubled presents where a myriad of other species is overlooked and becoming extinct”, states Lilja in her Konstfack webpage.
Petra Lilja’s presentation had two main aspects that show the value of future thinking: a critical approach to our present values and a backcasting quality to the reflection of the future. In terms of a critical approach to our society’s present values, Petra Lilja uses the megalomaniac ambitions of present entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, to expose the ridiculous (or visionary?) ambition of colonizing Mars: why would we spend so many billions in space exploration when we have so many problems to address in our planet? Why should we aim for Mars colonization when we have a perfectly good planet right here? (if only we would take care of it!)
Additionally, Lilja’s project looks at backcasting. Starting by defining a desirable future and then working backward to identify policies and programs, this planning method will connect that specified future to the present. In this project the curated design firms will be the ones defining the products, services, and interactions of tomorrow, which will then be backcasted into a present reflection; leading to the questions: do we really want to live in such a world?/have these products in the future? What can we do, or not do, to make it happen?
A Constitution for Mars
As follow up to Petra Lilja’s project presentation, the Speculative Futures Stockholm Chapter team developed a workshop aiming at the creation of a set of laws for the new colony in space: A Constitution for Mars. The workshop was lead by Trieuvy Luu and Martina Eriksson and Paul Lequay. For the workshop, we split the audience into smaller groups and engaged in a more reflective, deeper discussion about how we envision a new society on Mars. The main aim was to create and contribute with one life-lesson to the new society on Mars, in other words, what are the lessons we can share so Mars does not have the same fate as Earth. At the end of the workshop, each participant got an inflatable balloon and a “Wisdom from Earth” -card. The participants were then asked to write down their most precious wisdom-message to send to Mars and release the balloon into space (in fact we released the balloons inside not to create pollution and so people could walk around and read each-other’s messages).
“No lifeform should EVER be exploited on Mars!”
“Learn from the microbes, the ants and the trees as well as the mushrooms.”
“Meditate. Be kind.”
“LAGOMNESS. Live in moderation. Don’t consume more than you need.”
“No citizenship.”
“Marsians; All you need is love”
“Maybe this is another shot at making a life worth living on Mars. In any case, don’t fuck up now!!!”
Engaging with your co-participants in this workshop allowed us to co-create the event and generated the opportunity to engage in important discussions around the role of technology in a less human-centered society and living in symbioses between human- animal- values.
What is next for Speculative Futures Stockholm
The Speculative Futures Stockholm is working on an exciting plan of activities for the next fall, make sure you keep following our events on Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Stockholm-Speculative-Futures-Chapter. The Stockholm Chapter is composed by Daniel Petersson, Fernanda Torre, Lorenzo Davoli, Trieuvy Luu, Marie Louise Søndergaard, Martina Eriksson, Johan Grönskog, Paul Lequay, Kimberley Beauprez and Johan Hammarlund. A big thank you to all of them! We are just getting started, so please reach out to us if you are interested in joining us!
Last but not least, thank you to all the great people who participated in our first event. Thank you also to our host Antler and our sponsor Above.
