Introduction. An excercise in futurescaping
The philosopher Ewa Bińczyk, in her book titled “The Epoch of Man. Rhetoric and Lethargy of the Anthropocene” 1 1 E. Bińczyk, Epoka człowieka. Retoryka i marazm antropocenu, Warsaw 2018, p. 280, passim [The Epoch of Man. Rhetoric and Lethargy of the Anthropocene, transl. Sz. Włoch, 2018, www.academia.edu/45093352/The_Epoch_of_Man_Rhetoric_and_Lethargy_of_the_Anthropocene, projekty.ncn.gov.pl/opisy/331416-en.pdf, accessed: 5 August 2024 – KCA]. ↩︎ claims that the way Homo sapiens approaches the ongoing climate crisis is characterised by helplessness and resignation. Our imagination is shaped by apocalyptic visions; consecutive announcements about vanishing species induce a state of mourning, and the poignant awareness of the inevitability of change and the impossibility of preventing it – at least from an individual’s perspective – gives rise to anxiety known to psychologists as the ‘climate depression’. 2 2 R. Jurszo, To będzie koniec cywilizacji, jaką znamy. Depresja klimatyczna w Polsce, „OKO.press” 15.07.2019, oko.press/to-bedzie-koniec-cywilizacji-jaka-znamy-depresja-klimatyczna-w-polsce-wywiad/, accessed: 16 February 2021. ↩︎ Simultaneously, the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit argues that only the privileged can afford the luxury of falling into despair, while the rest have to act – because they have no choice. 3 3 R. Solnit, Depresja klimatyczna to luksus, transl. A. Dzierzgowska, Pismo no. 6, 2023 [R. Solnit, “Why climate despair is a luxury,” The New Statesman, 17 July 2023, www.newstatesman.com/environment/2023/07/rebecca-solnit-climate-despair-hope, accessed: 5 August 2024 – KCA]. ↩︎ This is why wallowing in passivity and apathy is – according to the essayist – an attitude that is unsympathetic to those whose houses are already on fire.
Since design is, by nature, an optimistic and proactive profession, designers try to devise remedies, or at least search for solutions to help ease the pain. The 22nd Milano Triennale – one of the world’s leading events dedicated to architecture and design that opened in Milan in 2019 – was held under the title “Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival.” The curator, Paola Antonelli, proposed the term ‘restorative design,’ whose aim, like the bouillon served in the first French ‘restaurants’ in the 18th century, was to help recover and regain strength. Here, it was not about introducing ‘eco-friendly’ technologies or materials but rather understanding the role of design in shaping the attitudes and habits of the public. The therapeutic potential of design is recognised by Susan Yelavich, a design theoretician who states that “although the job of designers is to relieve pain and suffering, sometimes the best thing they can do is to create opportunities to laugh when times are bad.” 4 4 M. Rosińska, A. Szydłowska, Projektanci sprawiają, że rzeczy stają się dostrzegalne. Z Susan Yelavich rozmawiają Monika Rosińska i Agata Szydłowska [in:] ZOEpolis. Budując wspólnotę ludzko-nie-ludzką, ed. M. Gurowska, M. Rosińska, A. Szydłowska, Warsaw 2020, p. 73. ↩︎ An even more radical approach is proposed by the design philosopher Tony Fry, who advocates “elimination by design”, i.e. an activity that would lead to reducing the number of objects designed and produced altogether. 5 5 T. Fry, “Elimination by Design”, Design Philosophy Papers, vol. 3 (2) 2005. ↩︎ Despite such a proactive stance, the above-mentioned approaches are marked by a certain resignation, which arises when design professionals come to realise that cutlery made out of biodegradable plastic is not very likely to save us from disaster. Consequently, a palliative therapy is proposed, offering to alleviate the pain and suffering as if the world were about to end. However, the world will still be around for a while – in a changed form, in a different context, with a different set of problems, challenges and opportunities. This different, probably not better, but still habitable world will also require designers to furnish it and adapt our everyday surroundings to new challenges.
The task of envisioning the world in the near future, transformed under the impact of the climate crisis, was proposed by Indian-British design studio Superflux. Between the years 2017 and 2018, they created an art installation titled “Mitigation of Shock (London, 2050).” 6 6 superflux.in/index.php/work/mitigation-of-shock/#, accessed: 16 February 2021. ↩︎ It was an exercise in imagining everyday life in London affected by food crises, extreme weather phenomena, and resource shortages. In a dwelling built “someday, in better times,” they installed new plant growing systems, cookbooks invented for times of scarcity, urban scavenger guides, local cooperative and barter network lists that would substitute services of global capital, homemade humidifiers and grow lights. From the windows, you could see makeshift shelters for people who had to leave their homes due to raised river levels, as well as greenhouses and abandoned construction sites. The installation helped to visualise the scenery of everyday life after the climate catastrophe. It was not a proposal for a solution, or a tranquilliser, nor was it an attempt to raise alarm. Rather, it was an exercise in imagining, a first step to come to terms with the idea of living in a heavily altered world. In the year 2050, in London, Warsaw or in Łódź – we may, perhaps, face shortages of water, food and electricity the same way as these shortages have been occurring already in many places in the Global South, and to be clear – these are not solely a result of climate change. Cities will be hit by storms, floods, droughts and high winds. Policies to curb further global warming, economic and geopolitical perturbations, as well as the already existing energy shortages are likely to result in an increasing number of activities going offline, or operating in a different way – adapting to new renewable energy sources. Perhaps in the future, we will use fewer electrical devices, and we will rethink transportation, heating, and air conditioning or filtering. We will reconsider food supply chains, and perhaps we will produce food ourselves. It is possible that we will reduce travel, change the way we work, reorganise our cities and the technologies we use. It is also possible that the field of our activity will shift from cities into spaces defined today as non-urban. 7 7 S. Boeri, Urbania. O miastach przyszłości, transl. A. Wójcicka, Wysoki Zamek, Kraków 2022, pp. 50–51. ↩︎ This is what was suggested by an exhibition titled ‘Coutryside: The Future,’ curated by Rem Koolhas and inaugurated in February 2022 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Resilience is a term that has been functioning in urban design, after being borrowed from the field of psychology. Generally speaking, it is the “ability to rebuild, regenerate, adapt or recover from the experience of rapid change, disruption, perturbation or cataclysmic events.” 8 8 L. Świątek, Miasta spustoszone. Koncepcja rezyliencji w procesie rewitalizacji małych i średnich miast, „Przestrzeń i forma” no. 23/1, 2015. ↩︎ It refers to the kind of planning that takes into account possible crisis situations and proposes solutions that support the ability to regenerate and adapt to changing conditions. This is an approach that is usually implemented in large-scale projects (a city, a building), and powerful disasters (hurricane, fire, flood). Complex systems – including natural ecosystems – behave in a way that is difficult to foresee. 9 9 G. Monbiot, Regenesis. Jak wyżywić świat nie pożerając planety, transl. M. Lipa, Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, Warsaw 2023, pp. 55–57. ↩︎ Regardless of the seeming simplicity of each individual element constituting the system, once combined, they begin to behave in a complex way, which means they have emergent properties. In addition, they organize themselves to create order, but this, at the same time, makes it impossible to control them top-down. When shocks appear in such a system, they can disrupt its functioning. It is impossible to foresee the course of events exactly, because when they self-organise, they amplify the resulting chaos. And, when the critical point is hit in this process, a return to the previous state is impossible or requires a lot of energy. Meanwhile, the term ‘resilience’ can also be useful when we want to talk about design adapting to whatever climate crisis may bring, and to what we cannot foresee.
The first volume of “Projektowanie” (“Design”) is dedicated to such mental exercise: how design will change affected by climate change? How will we live, eat, and spend our free time? How will technology transform? Will electrical products, technological gadgets and appliances connected to the internet end up in landfills? How will transportation be organised? Are we facing deglobalisation and what will it mean? How will we organise our life in the city, in our neighbourhoods, and in our communities? How will we coexist with other species in our cities?
We have invited specialists from very different disciplines to collectively reflect on the challenges design faces in regard to the inevitable changes that await our – hitherto quite dull and predictable – cities. Since design is, par excellence, aninterdisciplinary activity, resonating with a plenitude of phenomena and processes that happen throughout the world, such a multithreaded reconnaissance is, in our view, inevitable if we want to think of design as something more than superficial styling. Nowadays, the role of designers is not limited to devising the forms and functions of industrially produced objects, but it relies on connecting experts from various fields to seek comprehensive and systemic solutions to increasingly complex problems.
This volume opens with essays that, in reflecting on the past, explore potential models or patterns that could be implemented in new contexts. The cultural anthropologist Weronika Parfianowicz, sourcing from the theory and oeuvre of Czechoslovakian Modernists, finds the origins of post-growth theory in their decades-old philosophy where the ideas of curbing production and consumption went hand in hand with their leaders’ political engagement on the side of social justice and – rare in the mid of the 20th century – ecological sensitivity. The design historian Józef Mrozek, on the other hand, reminds us of the ‘little ice age’ that happened a few centuries ago in Europe, and analyses the way it influenced the economy and kickstarted innovations that we would place today under the ‘design’ label. Piotr Kowalik, an art historian and lawyer, builds a bridge between the past and the future: citing the story of Bauhaus and the radical ideas in postwar architecture, he analyses the ideas of the New European Bauhaus. Another block of texts is devoted to the topic of energy. A team of anthropologists and cultural theorists: Zofia Boni, Zofia Bieńkowska, Franciszek Chwałczyk and Paloma Yáñez Serrano – research the way heat is experienced as a manifestation of climate change and analyse the way air conditioning deepens the inequalities in the already unfair access to cooler places. The curator Katarzyna Roj, in conversation with architects Małgorzata Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis from the Centrala task force, discusses the topic of comfort and, to be more precise, our openness to experience discomfort as a display of our resilience and ecological responsibility. Together, they reflect on why architecture should reconsider the paradigm of comfort and what could such discomfort-embracing design look like in the new reality. The section concludes with sociologist Agata Stasik’s narrative on the future of power engineering and the social visibility of electrical energy, and with an essay by Agata Jałosińska, who is an anthropologist and an HCI 10 10 Human-Computer Interaction. ↩︎ researcher tackling the ideas of a ‘green’, i.e. consuming as little energy as possible, Internet. The next group of texts relates to social issues. The art historian, facilitator, and co-creator of the “Culture for Climate” initiative, Aleksandra Jach, elucidates on how to transform cultural institutions so that they are better prepared for climate challenges and – which turns out inextricably related – become managed in a more equitable and just way. The economist Agnieszka Sobol writes about transforming urban spaces in the context of climate change, and Tomasz Olejniczak reflects on the possible scenarios of designing organisations in Poland in the context of deglobalisation seen as an inevitable, cyclical long-term process that manifests itself differently in the centre and in the peripheries. Finally, Marek Krajewski analyses the consequences of immobilisation as the main strategy for defeating the COVID-19 pandemic. He is especially interested in the rituals of agency: the hyperactivity that provided a solution to regain a sense of control over the surrounding reality.