Glasgow School of Art
Innovation School
Product Design
#Project Direction/Aim
The primary purpose of this project is educational. I use the practice of speculative design to immerse my audience in a reflection on its relationship to the environment in 2021. I use speculation that will be projected in 2100.
2100, "it's almost tomorrow, it's hard to change behavior"
Olivier Barrere.
#Research's begenin
"More and more water"
Olivier Barrere.
I started my research by listening to podcasts, TV shows, reading articles, about global warming. The problem is that this is a very large and complex subject.
So I went in search of specific actors in the Basque community to understand which topic was the most important in the Basque Country.
That's how I came to understand that water is a heavy and important issue.
Olivier, a sustainable development biologist, explained to me how water was a source of confusion here. Indeed we are surrounded by water, the ocean, rivers, mountains and heavy rain. But most of us do not use these external resources for our consumption. We are simply depleting our water tables, and scientific speculation shows that we will have used it all up by 2050. The question that came up almost immediately was: How can humans become aware of their relationship with water in a society where we no longer realise how rich this resource is.
We use drinking water for our toilets, washing machines, showers...
In the course of the project, I met a fisherman, Imanol, a farmer, Pierre, and to complete my system, a class of students in applied arts, aged between 16 and 18.
Imanol is a fisherman, in his late forties, who has been in the profession for 20 years. His grandfather and father were fishermen. During our conversation, he explains that he sadly no longer sees his future in fishing. Due to the political government supporting industrial fishing, the local fishery is disappearing and getting poorer.
Pierre is a farmer, he produces mainly Piment d'Espelette which he sells at the markets. He also produces various jams and has a large farm that also provides lodging and some animals.
He explains that for the last 10 years he has been completely independent in his water consumption. He has 15,000 cubic metres of water tanks to meet all the needs of his estate.
In 2020, for the first time, there will be a 3 week drought and he will have to reconnect to the public water service for this particularly difficult period.
How do you bind a community together, while making it aware of its relationship with water?
extract of my work with the student's class
As I introduced at the beginning of this section, my aim is participatory and educational. I want to create a co-design project with actors from my environment. What could be more effective than working directly with your audience? My audience is the young public. I want to make them aware of the importance of water.
I became aware of my interaction with water in 2009. I was 10 years old, I had just arrived in Congo. For the first time in my life, I encountered inequality and poverty. I also saw how people could pray for water in hot weather and mourn the damage it caused in the floods. I understood this relationship of desire and hatred, of wealth and precariousness caused by water. I realized that I was using water without understanding its value. I want to share this awareness to develop our relationship with this wealthy that is often little considered as such in my country.
Why Speculative design practice as a driver for this project??
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Future can be debated and discussed before it happens.
“For a while now, we’ve both been very interested in the space between reality
and the impossible, a space of dreams, hopes, and fears. Usually this space is occupied by future forecasts (commercial world), design scenarios (corporate world) and utopias and dystopias (literary and cinematic worlds).”“WHAT IF…”, Dunne & Raby, http://dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/496/0
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Speculative design is stimulating our imagination by proposing different questions,
thoughts, ideas and possibilities using design as a communication medium. The most
important is that Speculative Designers are not giving solution. They permit us to understand that how things are now is just one possibility among so many others.
“Designers cannot do this alone, though, and the projects here benefit from dialogues and consultations with people working in other fields such as ethics, philosophy, political science, life sciences and biology.”Between reality and the impossible, Dunn and Raby, {exhibition}
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Fiction used in speculative design plays between its barriers. It poses fictitious images
and physical objects to build this imaginary around us; half in our imagination and half
in our hands. This balance allows us to enhance our images and our imagination,
rebounding between narrative and physical samples.
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Speculative Design is a playful way to engage with a community.