Drawing Futures Together. Diagrams for the Design of Scenarios of Future Liveable Cities

This work introduces an ongoing research project that seeks to develop appropriate visual techniques for the design of future scenarios that are able to capture interdependencies within and across different systems. These design methods are being explored as part of a wider research on the future of cities and sustainable urban living. The issue of cities as complex systems has been explored by a considerable amount of literature, across different disciplines (for example, Simmel, 1971; Lynch, 1960; Jacobs, 1992; Abrams and Hall, 2004). Cities are not only defined by buidings and infrastructure, but also by the material and immaterial flows generated by the activities that take place in the urban environment, as well as the personal experience of its inhabitants Environmental, social, and economic challenges call for actions of radical interventions in modern urban areas. In order to be truly sustainable these actions must be collaboratively developed in trans-disciplinary sessions. Here, people from various backgrounds and with different interests explore alternative solutions, find a common ground and plan concrete actions towards a desirable future (Holman et al., 2007). One of the challenges of this approach is to find effective ways to visualize how individual solutions impact the general context and relate to each other. There is a need to develop “means for drawing things together” (Bruno Latour, 2008), a common language to describe complexity and allow hidden interdependencies to emerge. The field of information visualization is rich with examples of how diagrams can be used to describe a complex matter by focusing primarily on the relations between different sets of qualitative and quantitative data. In this context diagrams are processes rather than finished products: they are working tools for design and decision making. Liveable Cities is an interdisciplinary research project that aims to develop a method of designing and engineering low-carbon, resource-secure UK cities that do not compromise on individual and collective wellbeing. Different areas of the project are investigated by research teams at Lancaster University, University of Southampton, UCL, and Birmingham University, with the help of expert panelists, partners and potential users of future services. Great importance is given in the research to the human dimension of living and working in a city. Quality of life, wellbeing, and citizen aspirations must be assessed and translated into design criteria for transforming the engineering of cities to deliver low-carbon living solutions

Visual conversations on urban futures:understanding participatory processes and artefacts

Visualisations of future cities contribute to our social imaginary. They can, and have been used as speculative objects for imagining new possible ways of living as communities (Dunn et al., 2014). However, future cities are usually represented through coherent scenarios that only tell one story (or one version of it), and rarely express the complexity of urban life.How can the diversity that characterises the city be represented in visions of the future that give voice to different, diverging ways of living and experiencing it? How do these visualisations contribute to inclusive design and research actions aimed at envisioning, prototyping, and reflecting on possible scenarios for liveable cities?My research focuses on ways of visualising possibilities for life in future cities that include and valorise plurality and agonism (DiSalvo, 2010), rather than present (as usually happens) only one story. For a lack of existing terminology, I am calling this approach “Visual Conversations on Urban Futures” (VCUF).Although there are no definitions or structured descriptions of VCUF, some prototypes can be found in design, art, and architecture. These examples show the great variety of methods and media that can be adopted in participatory processes of imagining futures cities.As a designer, I have chosen to adopt an action-research methodology (Kock, 2012; Rust, Mottram, & Till, 2007) to conduct, document, and reflect on a series of design experiments (Eriksen & Bang, 2013) that enhance my understanding of what it means to make pluralism explicit when producing visions of urban futures.The four main design experiments that I have undertaken are:-Living in the city. A first experiment in visualising future urban scenarios from a collaboratively written text.-Envisioning Urban Futures. Speculative Co-design practices: designing spaces for imaginary explorations and mapping them in an Atlas that makes visions readable and explorable-Sharing Cities. Conducting situated conversations on the relationship between social practices and urban futures: co-creating scenarios of sharing cities.-Birmingham Parks Summit. Visions designed to be unpacked, reworked, and developed into actions.The main contribution of my research is the proposal of a set of design principles, including a definition of the design space of VCUF. The design space outlined in the dissertation is a framework that can be used both as an analytical lens (to understand existing processes and artefacts of VCUF) as well as a design tool.Visual Conversations on Urban Futures could offer a significant contribution to the early stages of scenario building processes for possible futures. Manzini and Coad (2015) describe scenarios as “communicative artifacts produced to further the social conversation about what to do”. This way of imagining futures is ultimately about building alternatives to the dominant order by “making possible what appear(s) to be impossible” (Lefebvre, 1970, cited in Buckley & Violeau, 2011).While in times of urgent change seeking clarity and agreement might seem a much preferable route, I argue that articulating divergence is a necessary step to explore truly radical solutions. Stepping back from a solution-oriented approach allows us to visualise and better understand underlying tensions, and to critically question assumptions about what futures are or should be desirable

Transforming the planning progress – challenges for the service designer

This paper focuses on the public consultation process for planning applications which have an effect on physical changes to urban settlements. We draw on experiences from project work undertaken on the planning system in Liverpool (UK). We discuss the process as is, critique the current limitations in regard to public engagement on planning applications, and develop advice to service designers who want to work within such an existing institutional setup. In particular, we caution service designers to be aware of issues related to open data access, the difficulties in managing expectations of actors, and the importance of understanding one’s own biases. We suggest that more research is required on understanding suitable service design approaches to break up existing institutional practices in urban planning

“All You Can Eat”:Prototyping Speculative Food Futures

This workshop is concerned with the relationship between food and global health, and in particular with the role that design can play as a futuring practice (Fry, 2008). Industrial food and food practices have contributed to both human and planetary ill-being. This has been captured well in UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which are linked directly or indirectly to food. The proposed workshop will employ speculative design, to engage participants in developing a menu of provocative solutions that would help the design community identify and map possible direction for design research in the areas of food, design and global health. The workshop outcomes will include a visual workshop report to be published on the EAD website, an illustrated menu of provocative speculative design solutions that map future food/design directions and a Little Book of ‘Speculative Design Food Futures’

Diving in: What will it take for consumers to transition to a circular economy ready-to-cook fish product? Insights from the UK

To balance production needs with the need to sustain or regenerate the health of ocean ecosystems, stakeholders in the European fish and seafood sector are calling for transition to a circular economy. New industry methods will produce fish-based foods that consumers are not accustomed to eating so we ask, what will it take for consumers to adopt these industrial circular economy foods? Taking the Seafood Age consortium product prototype as a basis, we have created a design method for would-be consumers to reflect on their fish consumption practices and possible adoption of the fish product prototype prompted by a de-sign speculation. This paper reports on insights emerging from the research and recommendations for product adoption amongst consumers in the UK. Our findings have implications for food designers, design researchers and fish and sea-food, plus more broadly food industry stakeholders concerned with circular economy product and method adoption in industry

The Future of Community and Values

This paper examines the future of community and values for 2050 in three areas: likely trends, probable trends, and possible outcomes. It evaluates current and emergent patterns, in particular the overarching shifts toward a more individualised society; the use of digital technology as both enabler and inhibiter of participation in wider society; and the rise in socio-spatial inequalities and the empowering responses to those inequalities. In order to generate new insights and establish a wider understanding of the implications of and for communities and values out to 2050, our paper sets out a novel way of examining key trends and patterns through five stages. First, we introduce a matrix that enables us to identify examples of communities across their different states (i.e. formation, movement, preservation, dissolution) in relation to core characteristics of communities (i.e. access, place, power, security). Secondly, we use a wide range of different examples of communities to populate this matrix to illustrate the complex interrelationships of the different types, their values, and scale of influence. Thirdly, having examined these examples through business as usual scenarios, we then use a speculative mode to explore radical alternatives based on the evidence collected to understand the challenges, barriers, risks and threats that may face the future of communities and values out to 2050. These scenarios are described in order to explain the way events might unfold and in doing so, enable us to understand what guidance and actions may need to be followed to direct us toward a desirable future. Fourthly, we then use an analytical mode to examine evidence that enables assessment of the underlying changes informing risks and threats (i.e. who we are, what we will do, why we will do it). Finally, we compare these two modes to understand how the future of community and values might change over the next 30 years

Nanhai Food Stories.:Edible Explorations of a Place in Transition

Nanhai, in Shandong Province, could be described as either a new district (新区) or a ghost town (鬼城), depending on whether the focus is on its promises or on its emptiness. Like other similar sites in China, Nanhai is a place in transition, suspended in a liminal space between its rural past and its metropolitan future. While literature on new or ghost towns in China tends to focus on their urban form (see for example Shepard, 2015), what tends to be forgotten is how people inhabit, shape, and negotiate place. Indeed, liminal places like Nanhai can hardly be described as cities, because they present themselves rather as a fluid combination of village and high-rise lives. In Nanhai, various communities with different origins, temporalities, and reasons for being there coexist. The food that these communities produce, prepare, and eat can be seen as a marker of social and cultural identities: a way of marking differences but also building connections (Appadurai Arjun, 1981; Lupton, 1996, p. 30). We propose that tracing food patterns, histories, and mobilities can help to capture and appreciate Nanhai, beyond its mere urban form. This paper presents a Research through Design (Frankel & Racine, 2010; Frayling, 1993) approach that seeks to explore and understand the identity of Nanhai through its food stories, and that experiments with ways of sharing these stories through design actions and artefacts. It will introduce a theoretical framework for the proposed approach and discuss how this contribute to debates of transition towards culturally significant sustainable and desirable lifestyles. By describing the outcomes of a recent student exhibition organised as an exploratory first research activity, the paper will present and discuss some example of food story listening and telling (Valsecchi, Pollastri, Tassi, & Chueng-Nainby, 2016). These examples include artefacts such as games and playful packaging that have been designed as a way of making food stories visible and interactive. Finally, as the first public presentation of a novel research programme, the paper will bring some open questions to the debate on design opportunities for places in transition and will aim to generate further discussion on this topic

Morecambe Bay Timescapes:Drawing together coastal futures that will, may, or could

This paper considers the role of drawing and creative processes of visualizing possible coastal futures as a means for engaging young people in climate change research and coastal management processes. While predictive models show the impact of climate change in coastal areas around the globe, what will happen to individual places will largely depend on local strategies and interventions. Yet, the complexity of these phenomena as well as the high level of specialisms involved often tends to leave local communities, and young people in particular, unable to participate decision-making processes which will determine the future of the places where they live. In the Morecambe Bay Timescapes project, three secondary schools and one college across Morecambe Bay were involved in a programme of activities which combined fieldwork, archival research, climate modelling, and art practice which led to the design of visions of hyperlocal coastal futures. These visions were used as part of an interactive exhibition that brought together young people and experts in conversations about possible futures. This paper describes the role that drawing played in enabling such conversations, by providing a way for students to work through multiple layers of complexity and articulate their reflections

Design for Noticing with the Biodiversity Logbooks

This paper introduces the use of design to improve noticing skills in order to address environmental issues at a variety of physical and temporal scales. We illustrate the application of ‘design for noticing’ through Biodiversity Logbooks – a pilot project intended to reduce ‘plant blindness’ amongst primary school children. Plant blindness is the inability to recognise, appreciate and value plants and it has far reaching social, environmental and economic implications. In this project, we designed pedagogical tools and processes to foster the skills of noticing plants in their environments, and connecting the small-scale of their individual features to large-scale systems. Biodiversity Logbooks was designed in collaboration with primary school staff. We present initial lessons learnt from our work to support the delivery of specialist content and to create activities that can be embedded in the curriculum for the long term

Resonances:listening tools for transcultural storytelling

As designers, we are often called to focus and extract information from the public and civic context, and elaborate them into insights and research purposes that will inform design projects. Storytelling is one of the most important tools in the research toolbox to communicate the insights we collect in the field, and to engage the research participants, and it is grandly challenged when it faces to serve people and cultures: how are stories built? How will plots, characters, and narrations be orchestrated? Which culture of reference will be displayed? Which critical translations will be performed? During this active conversation with the participants, we will share and discuss principles and recommendations for a design storytelling toolkit that leverages listening as the key pathway to shape stories across cultures and contexts