ReFuturing Studio: Designing Long- term Sustainability for the Biosphere

The trajectories of the Earth’s climate and ecosystem services are unravelling, pushing the life sustaining biosphere on the path towards “biological annihilation”. As the worst climate predictions come to pass, it has become urgent to introspect on the predictable consequences of our global economic system designed for extractivism. Attempting to address and understand these issues seems to create a sense of foreboding and anxiety about our climate futures. This paper will discuss this in relation to the tendencies of defuturing in design, that is, the negation and erasure of our better futures and possibilities when trying to imagine a long-term sustainable future for human and non-human others. The discussions here are based on observations and discussions with design students in a workshop called “ReFuturing Studio” which attempts to engage young designers to confront the urgency of climate breakdown and long-term sustainability beyond “business as usual” (BAU). This paper argues for a “refuturing”— to reclaim that which is defutured and dehumanized, beyond the homogenizing and hegemonic futurism of BAU by re-imagining, rethinking and ‘re-humanizing’ through a ‘designerly knowing’ of the yet unknown long-term sustainable futures. Refuturing thus critically proposes alternative perspectives, solution spaces where designers and design educators can begin to understand and reconcile design practice with climate action by “designing for the biosphere” by imagining possibilities for co-regenerative practices as a means for human well-being and ecological flourishing.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2021.10

Volume Editors
Jonathan A. Scelsa & Jørgen Johan Tandberg

ISBN
978-1-944214-38-8