"LOOK OVER THERE!"
Basic information
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Full project title
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Project Description
The idea stems in offering a provocative, playful and dynamic take towards renewable energy aesthetics in cities, where citizens, innovators, artists and designers come together to converse, experiment and speculate new ways of engaging with small-scale renewable energy systems in the city. The question is not why we need more renewable energy – the question is how do we design for attractive aesthetic experiences with renewable energy, so that we naturally yearn more for it?
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
“If design is ecologically responsive, then it is also revolutionary,” by Victor Papanek in Design for the Real World (p. 252).
As cities strive towards clean energy futures, the way we experience our urban spaces - the common spaces, the spaces in-between, and the intentional and unintentional spaces - will change. With this change, the plurality of perspectives from different sectors of society need – more than ever – to come together to re-imagine and re-define our urban experiences with renewable energy; particularly in using aesthetics as a language of communication. This project aims to provoke, speculate, and innovate new ways of thinking, seeing and doing with renewable energy infrastructure in human living environments. It is borne out of the need for a place-based, inclusive, transdisciplinary and people-centered design for future urban renewable energy spaces in order to spark conversation, engage interest, and promote social dreaming and creative thinking for what our energy futures could be.
The idea is to gather citizens, artists, designers, engineers and innovators, to iteratively come together in several workshops over some months to co-create situated designs in public gathering spaces. The underlying motivation is to facilitate citizen interaction, interest and awareness in the clean energy discourse, through experiences with or by renewable energy. Some examples include, somaesthetic experiences (i.e. a play on all five senses or ASMR), provocative artwork, playful tactical urbanism and introducing innovative and temporary urban services (e.g. pop-up kitchen running on solar energy). Norrbotten, Sweden, serves as a spatial context of study for this project, for the reason that its contemporary energy rhetoric revolves around pertinent issues of expansive and flexible clean energy production, what this would mean for indigenous heritage, and lastly, possible challenges presented by its subarctic climate. For a visual reference, see Mood Image.
Key objectives for sustainability
With reference to Agenda 2030, the idea most strongly resonates with Goal 7 and 11, in that it aims to increase place-attractiveness through bottom-up engagement on small-scale renewable energy infrastructure implementation. However, it is also important to expand on the idea of true sustainability, which is multi-layered and complex. It is important to address and unpack pre-existing notions of what sustainability is, and how we can achieve it. I therefore offer three key pillars of sustainability that informs and supports the work:
Place-based: A place-based approach to sustainability is necessary, as sustainability inherently centres on resource availability and management (both the tangible and the intangible) within a context. Therefore, holistically understanding the context in which sustainability acts in is pivotal to the decision-making process towards sustainability.
Systems perspective: The motivation behind renewable energy is often ideal, however, the reality of its entire value chain is often disturbing and complex. For example, the input and output of materials, energy and labour in a solar panel’s life cycle could be exploitative, polluting, and generally unsustainable at points. Taking a systems perspective is thus important to ascertain true sustainability in the future; a sustainability that is holistic and conscious to its context.
Democratic and ethical: Workshops would be crafted with careful consideration for vulnerable BIPOC communities, to ensure their active involvement and agency in affecting change in their neighbourhoods. Workshop venues would also be selected for their ease of access for all persons of different physical capabilities. Gender equality would also be ascertained in two concrete ways: ensuring fair representation and participation at each of the workshop sessions, as well as empathetic mediation and facilitation throughout the workshop sessions to ensure all participant voices are heard.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
It is no surprise that energy matters have – thus far – mostly been contained to the hands of the pre-defined experts in the field (e.g. energy engineers and planners). However, with renewable energy technologies increasingly pervading our human living environments, a once unconventional design will now become ubiquitous, involving every passer-by to partake in its environment. Renewable energy infrastructures will become part and parcel of everyday life, and its ability to become culturally relevant and more widely accessible could determine its ultimate longevity – adoption and use – in society. There is an urgent need to pry open energy conversations and render them accessible to a wider audience to partake in, and this action depends largely on refined pedagogics, language of communication and building upon a shared cultural meaning-making process; co-creating new aesthetic experiences. Everyday aesthetics is thus front and centre within this study, and namely engaged with in two ways:
- Through artist-led prototyping with renewable energy, and
- As a pedagogical language of communication in transdisciplinary and citizen co-design workshops.
A prior and deep understanding of aesthetics will aid in ensuring this study focuses on a people-oriented approach towards aesthetics – and on the different ways in which the what and how everyday renewable energy aesthetics in the urban realm could be. Tenets of everyday aesthetics will be drawn upon, with the likes of John Dewey, Crispin Sartwell and Yuriko Saito. Previous experiences in utilising everyday aesthetics in pedagogical workshops with the youth in Luleå have shown that aesthetics, as a language of communication, can ignite creative re-imaginations of what future human living environments could be. Future artist-led workshops involving different sectors of society may thus spark and provoke much needed conversations on situated renewable energy futures through rapid prototyping and co-created materialisations.
Key objectives for inclusion
Several perspectives towards inclusivity have been considered within the context of this study:
- Gender equality (discussed above),
- Inclusion of vulnerable and at-risk communities through representation and agency (discussed above),
- Open and public access to co-produced knowledge online, and finally (discussed below),
- Physical and digital access to workshops in pandemic times (discussed below).
In strange times as Covid-19 has presented us, it is important to brainstorm creative alternative strategies to carry out workshops in the case that physical distancing measures are still recommended. This is to ensure the study would run smoothly in the coming months or year, despite the tight Covid-19 restrictions. For example, a dynamic “pop-up workshop” has been successfully experimented with within the past year, where a traditional indoor workshop setting was switched out for outdoor learning and interactive experiences. The event was held outdoors, at a bustling transport node in a neighbourhood in Luleå, where passers-by were engaged with (from a distance) through inspiration images and idea mapping on the side of a building wall, on what activities they desired for in the development of a new urban square in the neighbourhood.
It is also important to consider and engage the at-risk groups from the comfort and safety of their own homes. Thus, interactive and dynamic digital tools would be used to facilitate online workshops. Some examples include using Mural, Miro, Mentimeter and Zoom, and these (have been, and) will be performed with fluent dexterity.
Finally, the co-produced knowledge from the different workshops will be made publicly accessible and available online for dissemination to a wider global audience. For example, journal articles will be published Open Access, events and public communication will occur over several different social media platforms and popular science articles will also be collaboratively written and published.
Innovative character
The innovative concept of the idea is three-pronged:
- Designing the conditions for on-the-ground social innovation,
- Cultural accessibility towards energy matters,
Transversal workshops will be planned and conducted to include both experts and non-experts. However, what happens outside of these workshops could be considered even more important; empowering and enacting grounded change in mindsets and ideologies within local publics. Thus, designing the conditions for social innovation is central to this work, in experimenting with grounded movements and public outreach in many different ways in motivating wider communication and meaningful engagement that bridges the gap between different sectors of society (e.g. harnessing partnerships with relevant campaigns and environmental agendas such as We The Power at Patagonia or with the Land Art Generator Initiative, creating films or Facebook or Instagram Live videos, and building website or printed brochure disseminations).
The motivation behind aligning with an artistic approach towards energy is in offering a shared dimension for different sectors of society to comment and convene on – the obvious and not-so-obvious aesthetic experiences of urban spaces in their daily lives. This segue into cultural accessibility explores and moulds the values that individuals, communities, groups and the wider society may have towards renewable energy in the city. Artists, designers and innovators involved in the process will be responsible for sparking conversation through a myriad of ways (e.g. provocative prototypes, exciting aesthetic experiences and services, and engaging pedagogics) and in leading the exploration into cultural values that may inform desirable situated futures.
