A Room for Breathing Future Air

The works in the previous piece were mostly placed in exhibitions. Up to this point, speculative design gives the impression of being “food for thought, but in the end, something that stays inside the museum.” But what if this approach had actually changed the world? With Future Energy Lab, carried out in the United Arab Emirates in 2017, the British design studio Superflux changed an important decision.

Five Futures and Three Airs

The UAE’s Ministry of Energy and Prime Minister’s Office were working out a renewable energy strategy looking ahead to 2050. Done the usual way, the conversation would have taken place through scenario reports and graphs. Superflux, however, built “the future” inside the meeting room.

Built quite literally inside the meeting room, a model city based on economic data held five futures, each varying the share of renewable energy, public transport, peer-to-peer energy trading, and social and cultural change. Participants moved between them and watched how the happiness index, energy diversification, costs, and carbon emissions changed. The collaborating firm Rorosoro prepared an energy simulator and a role-playing game, and props were made to bring each future to life: a holographic financial advisor, an energy cryptocurrency, even souvenir models.

The most dramatic device to appear here was “air.” For the future in which current trends simply continue, Superflux produced air samples for 2020, 2028, and 2034. They followed the expected mix of particulate matter, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone, and participants remember them as foul enough that they could barely take a breath.

TED talk by Superflux co-founder Anab Jain (2017); the UAE project begins at 6:39

Graphs Have No Smell

Why air, of all things? Everything this series has discussed comes together here.

First, it brought the center of the cone we looked at earlier, the default future, right before people’s eyes. Usually, nobody bothers to imagine the default. That’s also why the illusion arises that things will be fine if nothing changes. This air shows that the choice to do nothing also has clear consequences.

Second is the power of the diegetic prototype. “PM2.5 concentrations up by so many percent” is a figure to be judged, but a smell that stings the nose is an experience the body reacts to before any judgment. Superflux’s co-founder is said to have steered the discussion of renewable energy investment by asking what kind of air participants’ children and grandchildren would breathe. It’s the moment an abstract figure turns into a concrete problem: my child’s breath.

From the standpoint of someone who works in UX, this isn’t an unfamiliar method. In another series, I once described experience as a process of acquisition that builds up through time and the senses. Policymakers are users too, in the end. It’s just that what they had to experience was a future that hadn’t arrived yet.

What Changed

Superflux explains that the work provided insights that went straight into the UAE’s “National Energy Strategy 2050.” The strategy was announced shortly afterward and included a plan to invest 163 billion dollars in renewable energy. A method once used to ask questions in galleries was put to work where a country’s energy plan was being decided.

Of course, one whiff of air alone would not have settled the policy. A strategy of that scale is built up over a long period from many discussions and much data, and this work can be seen as a decisive moment in that process, when decision-makers experienced the default future with their own bodies. That said, its influence is known mainly through the studio’s own records, and the difficulty of showing the size of such impact in numbers is a long-standing problem for this field. And the announcement of a strategy is a separate matter from how much cleaner the air actually became.

Even so, what this case shows is clear: placing decision-makers inside the future really does exist as a form of work, and the result in that case is not an exhibit but a decision-making tool.

Speculation with a Client

Meanwhile, a somewhat uncomfortable question raises its head here. Earlier, I said that the power of speculative design comes from standing outside the market. But how critical can a future be when the government commissions it and the government evaluates it? Who decided which futures made it into the five options and which were left out? Who got to enter the room and smell the air, and who will actually end up breathing it?

Anab Jain, a co-founder of Superflux, once said that because clients often want publicity rather than real critique, the studio turns down more of the work that comes in than it takes on. It suggests that practitioners in the field are aware of this tension too. In the next piece, I’ll take up this question.

References

• Superflux, Future Energy Lab
• Anab Jain, Why we need to imagine different futures, TED (2017)
• Tim Maughan, How big tech hijacked its sharpest, funniest critics, MIT Technology Review (2020)