Danish Council of Sustainable Visions - Implementing Long Term Thinking in Future Making

Nørgaard, Andreas Kornelius

4. Term

Sustainable Design (M.SC)

2021

2021-05-28

68 pages

Due to the escalating climate change, during the last two decades scholars from different fields have engaged in investigating how to enable transitions, to make sustainable transitions possible. Together these insights and academic texts make a loose field known as transitions theories. Within transitions theories, the idea of visioning, the act of envisioning long-term visions, is proposed as one of multiple elements in enabling transitions, as visioning can have a coordinating and aligning effect on climate efforts in the present, towards a desirable future. However, due to the immaturity of the field, there are still vague areas in unconsolidated areas. Some of these is what form visioning should take, and how it can be implemented in an institutionalized way, as part of ‘future making’ in society. In this thesis, I investigate how to design a visioning practice that can be implemented in such an institutionalized way, and part of this design is the use of fictional practices. This is due to the fact that methods of imagining the future in decision making, is at present based on projection of the future based on the present, not visions. These methods are bound to the society as it is, and have difficulties imagining something radically different, and thereby sustainable transitions. And fictional practices can help to break this limitation, by using a method of more open imagination. The design outcome is an advisory council called the Danish Council of Sustainable Visions, and is a practice of visioning through methods of ‘world building’, workshops, speculative documentaries and speculative fiction. The aim of the Danish Council of Sustainable Visions is not to plan or decide on specific futures, but to open up conversation and debate on what futures are more desired than others, as well as how they could look. In other words, in the present societal structures in Denmark, there seems to be a great lack of actors engaged in imagining and developing futures for the society. This leads to development of the society, and hereunder technology, to be based on random chance. The aim of this thesis is to counter this, by designing implementable abilities to imagine and develop desirable futures of the Danish society.

Due to the escalating climate change, during the last two decades scholars from different fields have engaged in investigating how to enable transitions, to make sustainable transitions possible. Together these insights and academic texts make a loose field known as transitions theories. Within transitions theories, the idea of visioning, the act of envisioning long-term visions, is proposed as one of multiple elements in enabling transitions, as visioning can have a coordinating and aligning effect on climate efforts in the present, towards a desirable future. However, due to the immaturity of the field, there are still vague areas in unconsolidated areas. Some of these is what form visioning should take, and how it can be implemented in an institutionalized way, as part of ‘future making’ in society. In this thesis, I investigate how to design a visioning practice that can be implemented in such an institutionalized way, and part of this design is the use of fictional practices. This is due to the fact that methods of imagining the future in decision making, is at present based on projection of the future based on the present, not visions. These methods are bound to the society as it is, and have difficulties imagining something radically different, and thereby sustainable transitions. And fictional practices can help to break this limitation, by using a method of more open imagination. The design outcome is an advisory council called the Danish Council of Sustainable Visions, and is a practice of visioning through methods of ‘world building’, workshops, speculative documentaries and speculative fiction. The aim of the Danish Council of Sustainable Visions is not to plan or decide on specific futures, but to open up conversation and debate on what futures are more desired than others, as well as how they could look. In other words, in the present societal structures in Denmark, there seems to be a great lack of actors engaged in imagining and developing futures for the society. This leads to development of the society, and hereunder technology, to be based on random chance. The aim of this thesis is to counter this, by designing implementable abilities to imagine and develop desirable futures of the Danish society.

design ; bæredygtighed ; fiction

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