Creating Transformational Impact with Strategic Design and Futures Foresight: Tools and Techniques

Transcript

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay hi everyone so I'm burnt I'm really stocked to be here today um and to experience your amazing Community I see there's so much overlap between the crypto community and the renewable energy and climate action community and that's what I'm here to talk about a little bit today talking about creating transformational impact and that in particular by using Futures foresight and strategic design I brought a few

examples today um and all of the examples follow the solar Punk mindset um because we use that mindset and uh solar punk as a as a narrative uh to bring excitement and um like uh engagement into the uh energy transition I'm co-founder of ery studio um we are a transformation design agency based in Berlin and our tagline is changed by Design not by disaster because we should not just wait uh until disasters Force us uh into

action but rather take a personal stand on the question of in what kind of future do we want to live and then actively shape the steps to get there so what we do we help organizations and communities shape sustainable transformation and we do that by conveying information by anticipating Futures and by taking Collective action we have a little graphic for that cuz if if you want to design transformation you see here it's like an infographic B diagram you have designing transformation in the middle if you want to design transformation you have to first understand how do we get here did

we get here where we are right now understand like what brought us here and the challenges of today then we have to anticipate where do we want to go what is the future that we want to transform to and in the end we have to take action Collective action most of the time if you're wondering um because I get that question a lot why the hell is a German design agency called Ellery studio just a quick backstory um because that's our origin story we lived like the founders we lived together in Ellery Street in Brooklyn um and while it doesn't feel like it um because we do a lot of really silly

and playful product uh projects in our work um we are indeed a proper Company by now so this is my fabulous team as you can see lots of lots of uh young diverse people from very very various fields of uh design of uh science of psychology um a very interdisciplinary team quickly by the number we celebrate our 10th year this year um we have 23 team members we did over these 10 years more than 400 change projects and uh we have more than 130 Partnerships and all of them are usually from the fields of

sustainability climate change renewable energy social justice all these kinds of transformation kind of topics okay let's let's dive in um let's talk about the future future forite is one of our major tools that we use in our daily work and foresight is a systemic uh interdisciplinary and holistic study and it all is about exploring how people will live and work in the future and for that it Embraces uncertainty and very much discourse like talking to each other um in order to inform decision-making processes or public

policy so Futures foresight sounds a little um very futurist sci-fi so so when do we get our H hoverboards in the future I can't tell you that as a foresight person but what we can do is we can talk about it like how awesome or how horrible it would be if we all had hoverboards and the study of the future is not looking into a crystal ball so it's not it has nothing to do with trends like foresight Trends it's all about asking the right questions and then discussing them like the what ifs that's the most foresight thing you can do and for that we have a scientific

model um with that we can differentiate uh what kinds of Futures we are talking about and this thing is called the Futures cone when we deal with the future we always deal with several scenarios like there's Al always a multitude of possible futures um some of them them are probable some of them are preferable some of them are plausible um but in the end oh sorry that was I one too quick um this is there's like different approaches uh we can talk about the scenarios um that we can come up with

when we think about collectively think about the future and solar Punk actually fits in there as well but as you can see it's outside of of the realm of the possible because solar Punk is talking about Utopias and now what I hear often as a future foresight person um Utopias are unreachable why like why even do that um as you can see the outer rim of this cone is permeable so whenever we talk about Utopias it can inform it can inform inspire and provoke ideas that we can then include in our vision of a pre preferable uh future it

we can use Utopias to explore New Horizons so in the end we can also say the future cannot be studied so future studies future foresight is not studying the future but rather the way we talk about it and and any ideas we have about the future that can be studied okay the goals of foresight uh in that sense are to create orientation to formulate common goals to develop knowledge about the future to work uh working out and evaluating the options that we

have creating images of the future and developing strategies for taking action okay uh a quick detour to strategic design so how do we get these foresight principles to the people how do do we support them in exploring their desirable Futures at allery we use design uh design as a tool of imagination CU what you can't imagine you can't wish for um I teach strategic strategic

design uh at the Berlin school for design and communication so I could talk for hours now of what it exactly is and what what it does but uh I'll keep it really short here um let's look at the role of the designer in the 21st century because there has be quite the Paradigm Shift over the last 10 15 years let's jump back what does a 20 20th century designer do usually it's designing products it's designing Services graphic design is what comes to mind but the thing that most people will say is something with advertising so now that uh communication

obviously plays a really really big role in any transformation new tasks have emerged for creatives the 20th first uh 21st century designers we now um like the other stuff still exists obviously but uh there's a new branch of designers now where designers are researchers mediators facilitators translators of content creative problem solvers and also critics critiquing um developments that are happening so you can say strategic design is an

integrated approach to understanding and exploring problems finding new ways forward and developing and testing Solutions okay because change needs imagination needs communication okay now I brought a bunch of examples from the fields from the German energy transition and the first thing I want to jump in uh if you remember at the beginning the understanding part is really important for any kind of change understanding we create through translating complex issues for nonexperts and we do that with

infographics infographics uh you might ask what what is that um infographics are graphic visual representations of information data or any kind of knowledge and they're um presented in a quick and accessible way but uh a picture says more than thousand words so just to illustrate what an infographic is that's a that's a genius infographic one one of my favorite ones try to explain that in text and you will write a whole A4 page okay how does this look like h how does this look like uh in the field

with us what we do we do a lot of infographics for change policies here's just a few examples um I do love posters infographic posters because uh a well-placed infographic poster next to the office coffee machine will reach much more people than uh a really sophisticated communication campaign but this event is all about solar Punk so I brought a few examples of solar Punky information design like this one a graphic novel about Rudy the space dog who has adventures in the mobility transition like explaining facts and figures science behind why we would should move to a sustainable um

Mobility system it talks about public transport about cars about online shopping air travel of course is a big topic and biking of course so this comic combines scientific research and relatable storytelling to bring across a rather dry information that nonetheless is relevant to know if you want to take part in public discourse or in political discourse okay so if you think scientific research on Urban Mobility is a dry topic how about the energy Market in Germany so um we created another publication um that is basically a

oneone handbook for people who are about to join the workforce in the sustainability world in the renewable energy industry um because lots of people are flocking into this industry right now it's growing exponentially so if you have um a chop interview that's what can help you prepare for it it's a book that um is based on a scientific model that we created CU nobody actually did that before creating a scientific model of the German energy Market um and just really explain the Integrity details of it and nobody got time for that so infographics is a great tool to onboard people really quickly and it's of course filled with

lots lots of visual content uh that is easy accessible okay I have another solar Punky kind of project um that is not sustainability but I thought it might be interesting interesting for you for for this community um we did a comic series about cyber security together with the uh research cluster Kasa at the University of bom um and it compl translates all their content into like everything they research on into science Comics English language so I will share this with you as well I have a link tree where you can access all these books that I show um they're all uh free also because it's

mostly um publicly funded kind of research projects we do these things in okay this is how it looks like okay but information can also take a really different shape and that's um where our newest project comes in that we will launch next week it's called info drag drag queens explain the energy transition and thanks to a grant that is that was weirdly enough funded by the US Department of State uh for a viability study a proof of concept project um and for that we produced a few um pilot series of short infog uh infographic videos where our dear friend viaka Falls

one of Berlin's most notorious drag queens brings some possess to The Climate discourse and we have a few epod right now three three episodes understanding climate change the renewable energy Revolution and a drag queen's guide to climate change as I said this is a viability star uh study it's a test if the translation of into of scientific content into a format like that can work smoothly um based on the capacities of uh science projects you can also check it out um we have a little um website for it um in

our link tree here already is the is the QR code um I'll have it at the end of the presentation as well okay now back to solar Punk because solar Punk informs a lot of the stuff that we do that's why it's such a powerful narrative have you heard of speculative design it's a relatively new um branch of design anybody heard of that no yeah there's one perfect and there perfect spec design is a kind of design that doesn't present commercially driven proposals but rather designs proposals that identify and debate crucial issues

that might happen in the future sounds very much like solar Punk right and it is so back to solar Punk this is actually also how I ended up here uh we did um a few years ago um because it this solar Punk is a very young kind of uh story Punk um I think it started around in the early 2010s um and we we stumbled into this topic and thought this is great for bringing people together to talk about Renewable Energy Futures so we created the solar Punk Festival um in Berlin it was an experimental kind of summer school for two weeks where we brought

together artists scientists um all kinds of designers and strategists to exchange to learn from each other and to make art together and to have fun together we have a little website for that um where all the results are on there but uh as you can see here some of the international team of artists that came together in one of the briefings um we did a a foresight Workshop uh speculating on Futures we had lots of seminars and lectures um spread out over two weeks we took the whole bunch uh of artists then to a to actual former open pit

mine if you ever go to melt Festival in Berlin that's where it is it's a it's an event space now it has this impressive huge huge Machinery then we painted a huge mural based on all the scientific input that the artists got and in the end at the technicial University uh Technical University of Berlin we uh had an exhibition um where we used the materials of the stage building department the artists created speculative design pieces about a solar Punk Energy Future and they built a capsu a living capsu 30 square meters of solar Punk Futures incorporating all the things that they learned um into a living room with lots of tiny

storytelling devices for example there was a spider that could a genetically modified spider that could silk screen print things uh screen sorry 3D uh print then we had fashion designers who created wearables and um like actually created this jacket on location we had interface designers who created a a way of um like a home control station for the living capsule and uh we had a lot of exchange so the people coming together exchanging IDE years and the most important things

about speculative design asking the what if questions okay I have yet another um example but this time it's about co-creation as you've seen at the festival people come together they design things together um this is also a tool that we really love to use cocreation is a design process in which active participation of stakeholders plays a central role from the beginning to the end now um the project I want to show show you uh is called future Booth I'm at a lot of climate conferences um you might have seen in

sustainability um talks this picture have you seen something like that before it's a it's an absolute trob it's a caricature of sustainability many of the scientists we work with come to us and say like your designers create imagery for us we don't have positive images of the future and if you go to a climate conference you will see this picture in every single presentation um up till like a few years ago this was the standard picture that had to stand in when people talk about Futures we started a bunch of years ago during the Fridays of Futures uh initiatives um to go to these events and

start illustrating the Futures and ideas the students had there so here's an example you see there's our sign the future booth and we had like graphic recorders translating the the ideas of the students of the activists into images but of course you all know um who wouldn't know if not you um just one and a half years ago we got surprised with an amazing technology that makes this kind of work much easier and we integrated it instantly of course generative Ai visualizations and we traveled for the full last year from climate conference to climate conference and collected visions and images from climate scientists what are the images

that they have in their heads um and we visualized them and now we played them all back over the year into that community so that everybody can use these images CU each of them has a little story for example like a scientist wanted to live in carved out mushroom houses or he is one who said they would love to have public transport that is basically invisible of course renewable energy could be a much more aesthetic kind of thing and that's very very solar Punk oh this one I put it in because I love it so much it was an Austrian scientist um there's this inherent L desire for more comp able and like chill

out existence but in the end pretty much everyone just wanted to live in the Netherlands like all the scientists uh these are the visions that the scientists have in their heads oh and this one is my favorite it was a a young scientist in Madrid at a climate conference they wanted to see how iconic kind of City landmarks are plastered in solar panels so with all these things of course were used on social media campaigns by some of our partner organizations uh it's quite nice because you have the imagery and you can tell a nice story um for each image and that's how it looks like okay timing is good I have one more

thing that I want to show you a tool that is really powerful for us peer-to-peer learning and of course gamification is a good thing now with sensible topics like topics that ruffle feathers um nobody likes a pointy finger like if you come in there and tell like this is how you do it this this is um how it's done right these complex issues very often are much better approached by learning from each other especially when you have lots of people from different disciplines come in um and for that I um have an example like last year we created a gamification

toolkit um about gender equality because of course there can be no solar Punk future without equality and this toolkit is a roleplay game and it's originated in the experiences of climate researchers and scientists and you can prepare yourself by playing it to sexist situations at the workplace and um oh perfect timing time is running out if you want to experience it I have it with me so anybody who wants to play it we can play it right here right now after the talk so bottom line line uh and that

will close my presentation facing total complexity in the challenges that we uh that we are facing right now the world defitely is in need of light-heartedness and playful imagination and solar Punk is a treasure Trove uh of stories and ideas that you can totally utilize almost weaponize to bring people together and in that sense keep on solar punking thank you burn for a great presentation we have time for one brief question so if there's one question we

can take it if not then I guess feel free to reach out to burn um nearby and see you in 5 minutes [Music]