C-SAN Futures - Designerly Strategies for Scaling Up Climate Change Approaches in South Africa and Norway

The project C-SAN Futures has been a joint commitment between the design institutions at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) and Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). The project was based on increased calls from the global climate change research community for new strategies for translating their knowledge into actions. Unfortunately, the climate change research communities seems to be quite alone in really understanding the magnitude of the problem and how the present windows of opportunities to address the issue are closing in before our very eyes. The C-SAN-Futures project has therefore tried to utilize and modify approaches developed within the design profession to develop new strategies and methods that can facilitate public discourses about plausible future alternatives. The project has focused on how 'we' would like 'the futures' to be, rather than strictly forecasting how it most likely will become. The underpinning rationale was that we believed, and still believe, that social, political, economic and global concerns today tend to be more of a real bottleneck than what pure individual and technical solutions are. Typical methods explored have been future scenario building where video and more traditional design model building are used in concert. During the app. three-year long project have three fieldtrips by design students in South Africa and Norway been accomplished (in the last one joined by design students from Nairobi). These have been accompanied by prototype building, seminars, jointly attended conferences and other public events where Climate Change and how to mitigate its consequences have been scrutinized: During the first year (2014) design students from Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), accompanied by researchers from both CPUT and AHO, performed the first intervention in dry areas of South Africa and Namibia. A documentary film covers the field trip between Cape Town and Windhoek, and a multimodal web-text with some reflections and film snippets is available at http://kairos.aho.no. During the second year, design students from AHO accompanied by researchers from AHO, CPUT and Chalmers Institute of Technology (from the program Design for Sustainable Development), made a second attempt by developing future scenarios and products underpinned by a 4-week long field study in Kenya. During the last year of the project, were students from CPUT and AHO also brought together in Kenya, enabling design students from the School of the Arts and Design (StAD) at University of Nairobi to join. The field study was based on the fact that we today experience a substantial and arguably long term unsustainable urbanisation. This in spite of that one could argue that rural life has a higher potential for long term "quality of life" than the shanty-town settings that often are the consequence for those becoming urban in countries like South Africa and Kenya. The future scenarios have primarily been implemented through students' works that are underpinned by insights from the field-studies they done. These have also been exhibited at AHO each June 2015-17 (app. 10 projects each year). The projects typically explore products that e.g. facilitate new ways of living, new energy generating technologies and/or carbon capture and storing (CCS-) systems. Concrete examples therefore range from scenarios using products designed to be shared, local communities capturing wind-energy in new ways or, as a quite low-tech CCS-system, using an oven that both produce biochar and gas for cooking. During the last years have the work at CPUT been severely hampered by student unrests. As a consequence, has the focus, on one hand, shifted to a more internal institutional building process with support from AHO-staff. But, on the other hand, also towards an even more global outreach, clearly manifested at a public project seminar we held in Oslo (Oct 2015) where we, together with institutions from several nationalities, established a lean global design network, initially with the provisional name Design Strategies for Climate Change. In order to scale up and make the project sustainable after its actual termination we have during the last year continued to work on the growth of the "lean global design network" with especially CPUT, Hunan University in China and University of Nairobi in Kenya. In late 2016 were we able to receive continued funding from the UTFORSK 2016 call. The project title is "designBRICS - a global design network addressing climate change". The project is a direct continuation and extension of the work we done in the present SANCOOP financed project; with University of Hunan in China as a new additional partner. As the title implies it, among other things, involves building the lean network discussed above, with a special focus on design-, climate and development research cooperation with BRICS countries.

There are increasing calls from the global climate change research community for new strategies for translating knowledge into action. Unfortunately, the Climate Change research communities seem to be alone in really understanding the magnitude of the pro blem and how the windows of opportunity to address the issue are closing in before our very eyes. Consequently, whatever focus one takes in the complex Climate Change issue, probably the most crucial challenge today is to translate the still incomplete knowledge we have about our Climate System into actions that already today can make a difference in a more sustainable direction. In order to succeed one cannot only focus on the understanding of the Climate System, per se, but technological and scientifi c research also needs to be followed up by corresponding investments in order to achieve a better understanding on how new technologies and changed behavior can become accepted and implemented in our societies. This implies that we have to swiftly develop new relevant knowledge and methodologies about change itself. This is where design - concerned with both potential and actual change - adds a critical, and potentially fruitful addition to current discourses of climate change. The C-SAN-Futures project therefore intends to utilize approaches developed within the design profession to develop new strategies and methods that can facilitate public discourses about plausible future alternatives. The project will focus on how 'we' would like 'the futures' to be, rather than strictly forecasting how it most likely will become. One typical outcome will consist of comprehensible scenarios that can be 'back casted' as 'discursive elements' and subsequently underpin more vivid and creative public discourses. The u nderpinning rationale is that we believe that social, political, economic and global concerns today tend to be more of a real bottleneck than pure individual and technical solutions are.