From solarpunk hi-tech archinatures, and the afrofuturist technocultural aesthetics of the self, to the idealised and fashionable rural life of cottagecore influencers, people are pushing online their own visions of what an ideal — or feared — future life on this planet could look like.
Along with our ongoing experiments with AI and existing collections of climate fiction, we are developing a series of workshops to explore the depths of climate future imaginaries through digital methods and participatory practices.
This series of activities allows us to explore and collect sets of digital images that represent how people envision possible futures, with special concerns to the relationship between humans, non-humans, nature and the climate.
Doing research by designing educational activities revealed to be a fun and rewarding process, both for our collective and the participants.
At that time, we designed a one week online workshop for a full class of students from the minor Designing User Research (CMD, AUAS), who explored future imaginaries by collecting images online and visualising them through image grids and computer vision algorithms. This first workshop informed a design brief that was taken up by three students, who were coached in developing a participatory event and an exposition about digital collage making as a participatory practice to discuss our future with climate. In parallel, we developed a five week online course at the School of Machines, Making and Make-Believe, where participants with different backgrounds explored the question of how a deeper understanding of images and data can lead to artistic interventions in the context of climate change.