Bright Futures, Dark Futures: Envisioning the Consequences of Climate Change

Sarah Lippmann (Drexel University)

Despite increasing recognition of the consequences of climate change, there remains a sizable disconnect between awareness and action. Research suggests this is due in part because the issue is both so large and slow-moving as to become intangible. The scholarship and design work to be presented in this symposium aims to make manifest some possible environments and lifestyles that could become our future. While many design exercises explore urban scale interventions or changes in policy, this symposium discusses future scenarios through the lens of interior design. The scale and experiences of interior spaces make the consequences of climate change more tangible by addressing the psychological and material conditions of future places and lifestyles.

These presentations take as their jumping off point the book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase, in which he describes four provocative scenarios for the future, speculating on how society will change as a result of two global forces: automation and ecological catastrophe. Frase’s writing employs methods of social science in combination with tools of speculative fiction—what he calls “social science fiction”—in order to explore how current and future conflicts will play out. Based on an analysis of political, economic, and environmental trends, Frase outlines a matrix in which the possibilities of abundance or scarcity are paired with the possibilities of equality or hierarchy. This makes for four possible combinations, from optimistic to pessimistic: communism (abundance and equality), socialism (scarcity and equality), rentism (abundance and hierarchy), and exterminsim (scarcity and hierarchy). The presentations in this symposium come out of a set of studio design projects that grappled with the material, social, and ecological consequences of each of these scenarios. The symposium participants will present designs for each of the future scenarios and discuss the broader implications these changes may portend.