Three Things I’ve Learnt at The Terraforming 2020
(Did I get the Medium title style right?)
As 2020 flies by with ever increasing speed I’ve realised never sharing properly the work done during The Terraforming programme which I attended in the first half of the year and which has ended few centuries ago in July. I guess that my brain is just trying to compartmentalise all that period as it’s too much intertwined with trauma of the pandemic suddenly crashing all the beautiful plans we had for 2020. Now as I’m back in Milan since few months and have been re-immersed in all the practical service design work, all that happened in the beginning of the year seems to be a glimpse of a parallel universe. A bit frustrating detachment of two contexts is exactly what urges me to give a proper closure to the experience.
It’s been years that I wanted to go to Strelka Institute’s postgrad program but every time something felt not exactly right about it. With The Terraforming I finally felt that it was a perfect fit for all the Interstellar Raccoons’ obsession with space vs terrestrially, inhuman perspective and super large scale design attempts. But the final push came directly from my very practical service designer role.
Since the inspirational Interaction’18 conference with oblo we’ve started to look at a more systemic perspective of design to expand the scale of our work’s reach. That led me to some immersion into the history of systems thinking and cybernetics and made me hungry for more reflection on the approach especially as it’s becoming more and more mainstream applied to design nowadays.
Following that in 2019 we’ve been working on a future visions project for a certain Asian mobile electronics giant looking for the future scenarios of their products use with 5–10 years horizons. There I’ve felt how being grounded in hardcore evidence-based design approach was not always helpful for the more long-term thinking. In short, based on my recent work experiences I saw the need to practice more large-scale, long-term, speculative and non-user-centered type of design. And I’ve got it all and more from The Terraforming.
(If someone wants to get more information about programs’ process feel free to contact me, while here I’ll focus on the personal outcomes so far.)
1.
First came the large scale.
As the programme had to be suddenly rearranged after the first 6 weeks offline to accomodate the new online format we got incredibly lucky with a task of dedicating the whole 5 weeks to the exploration of effects of pandemics proliferating on the planetary scale. With our group working on a topic of “planetary metabolism” we wanted to understand what was happening with demand and supply being suddenly distorted by the arrival of the virus itself and especially distorted information about it causing panic buying and even collapse of certain industries like poultry crisis in India. We faced the task of mapping a system operating in both “real” and “virtual” realms and spanning from microscopic to macroscopic scales (virus, people, planetary goods flows, markets and information).
It was a great challenge of understanding and representing all the various flows, human and beyond human actors altogether. My personal joy was to finally create dynamic system maps telling a story step by step with layers of information through it:
You can see the resulting essay “Anatomy of a Trojan Horse” on Strelka Mag
(let the images load for a while as they are gifs and will start moving at some point :)
Project by Laura Cugusi, Ani Dalal, Yulya Besplemennova, Marina Dubova.
2.
After some training in a planetary-scale thinking it was time to raise the stakes adding also a long-term lens for the final project. And it was way beyond 5–10 years horizon which already seemed challenging to me before.
We found the common focus between team members related to the energy flows on the planet and a sudden new lens to look at it was Kardashev’s scale of civilisations development which describes their advancement by the amounts of energy they can consume — that of a planet, star, or a whole galaxy it occupies.
As we were interested in the aspects of planetary flows we focused on “Type 1” civilisation using all the energy available on its planet. It meant imagining the future around 300–500 years from now when it is forecasted to become possible. And this time the medium got even more dynamic as we had to turn our scientific deck into a video format (and it even got its own soundtrack).
Besides very long-term thinking it was also an exercise in seeing multitude of possible futures and imagining how the contemporaneous possibility of their existence brings us to the decisions to that we have to start making right now.
The method of “backcasting” was interesting to see how we can unravel the far future possibilities and connect them to more and more near future events that get more realistic step by step.
You can see the full project description, video, essay, soundtrack and the complete timeline on its website.
Project by Yevheniia Berchul, Yulya Besplemennova, Stuart Turner, Iani Zeigerman.
3.
But besides very large-scale, very long-term thinking and beyond human focus I got also another thing from The Terraforming.
After the programme I felt that I didn’t get as much methodology and clear tools to apply and replicate the process we had to my future work. But after a while it felt only right as we were acting in the truly uncharted waters of design not solving problems, even with the speculative solutions, instead we were learning to ask questions, investigate and reframe them to then communicate using all the available mediums.
It took me some time to reflect and synthesise what exactly we were doing, why is it relevant to the state of design right now and how to explain it to others I’ve formulated it as an “Upstream Speculation” approach. Where the power of speculative synthesis is being brought and applied “upstream” of the conventional design process — not at the moment when the solutions are imagined, but when the questions are first asked. For now this is reflected in a presentation deck I’ve created for a workshop — you can see it with all the speaker notes to understand the point, while I’ll be looking for some time to rewrite it as another post.
Now I’ll just need another year to figure out how to really apply it all to my work =)
