Envisioning plural futures through narratives and design

This thesis attempts to set a platform of knowledge on future and future habitat. This platform aims to deal with the un-representable characteristics of climate futures through holistic and plural envisioning processes. The study manifests a collection of representations and intends to be a tool to be implemented for future thinking, future imagining and future/design researching. A factor triggering this thesis is the upcoming ecological crisis, which is claimed to be triggered by human activities and is steadily advancing towards living beings. The scientific community has provided the risks and causes of the environmental challenges, yet there is no collective action taken to remediate the causes of this crisis. The second factor motivating this thesis is that the materiality of the environmental problems. The ecological problems are at world state, intangible, spatially and temporally far. Hence, there is the difficulty in representation of the problems as they are neither visible, nor livable. The problems are beyond being physical phenomena and the idea of ecological crisis has evolved into social, cultural and political meanings. The level of the problems' great complexity continuously increases as they flow and evolve through our internal worlds. The first claim rising here is that there is the need of deliberate yet structural transformation towards sustainability. There is also the deficiency of the emotional, affective and aesthetic, psychological, spiritual, experiential and experimental states regarding the future problems. All motivate this study to approach future and future habitat transdisciplinary within the trajectories of science, literature, design, architecture, and urbanism and future studies. A third factor influencing this thesis is the need of imagining alternatives to the crisis-ridden future. The motivation here stems from the infinite possibilities that the future accommodates. Through this thesis, I introduce new ideas, concepts, tools, and methods, to enable the moving away from catastrophic possibilities, towards the salvation and beyond. I also emphasize the potentials and limitations of future-oriented thinking, future narrative, and future imagery. As humankind is inherently plural, I believe there is a need for the future to evolve into desirable actualities for different identities. For this reason, I introduce strategies of multiplication in future narratives. The last factor motivating the study is that, the potentials, promises yet perils that technologies incorporate. While technologies embody the potency of yielding new possibilities and steering our future towards equilibrium; they are entangled with unforeseen, unanticipated or unintended results that can utterly change environments, lives and experiences. For these reason, the study proceeds analyzing the potential transformations in futures from the scope of the impacts of the implementation of biotechnology and synthetic biology. The second claim is that in order to direct future developments towards the needed and desired ways, design can enable the exploration of the potential values, contributions, and consequences of technologies. Through design interventions, we can envision and explore the future conditions and question on their preferability. In this way, design can boost our actions and direct the evolution of the future towards humanity's own choice. Design moreover can create critical, demanding, discerning consumers and in this way can affect and direct the genesis and journey of technologies within the industries and marketplace. For these reasons, factors, and arguments, this thesis builds a journey between the present day and the sustainable future day with an ultimate goal to trigger the path towards sustainability. The journey is constructed through 4 layers; all intertwined with each other as each layer uses the previous layer's output as an input. Each layer surpasses the former layer in terms of detail, information, tools, and attitudes. Through these layers, I refer the plural collection of ideas and meanings on future challenges, catastrophes, hopes, actions, adaptations, and solutions. The novel Oryx and Crake by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood stimulates this thesis after being the input of the first layer. The narrative initiates the multi and cross-scale interconnections with the second layer. The novel is critical as it presents ideas, meanings, and senses about future, elaborates on biotechnology and accommodates aesthetic tones of climate change and even our extinction. The narrative builds six different axes in the first two layers and six crosslinks in-between. The themes, the interrelations proceed through, are ecology, natureculture, technology, biotechnology, the urban and the somatic/perceptual. The second layer accelerates the discussion on the narrative of Oryx and Crake, by introducing design and experience elements, theories, measurements, and concepts from various fields. The catastrophic narrative in the first layer collides with its alternatives sparking in the second layer. As the first layer is on literature but limited to words and language, the second layer includes the design and experience elements, which have the potential to initiate methods, solutions, and actions towards desired futures. Throughout the second layer, I explore design objects and images, and emphasize their interactive, observable and experiential qualities. Through the cross-links connecting the first two layers, I analyze diverse topics. The possibility of and the alternatives to ecological catastrophes; nature and culture divisions with conceptual redefinition proposals; the naturalization processes and the limits of technology; potential, promises and perils of biotechnology; ecological, technological and political conditions impacting the urban with alternatives; the aesthetic tones and experiential modes for the ecological crisis. The third layer expands the scope of the framework by introducing concepts, methods from future studies; plural scenarios, experiential and speculative design attitudes. Thinking about the infinity of the possibilities through this layer initiates the development of novel narratives, scenarios, and strategies. The aim of this layer is to understand, map and envision future possibilities and to give them form, with a goal of better shaping futures for different identities. In other words, the study captures plural yet competing visions from countless and multidimensional future possibilities, in order to provide a path towards viable, desirable, preferable futures. For this reason, the study elaborates on experiential factors, shared lived experiences, playable modes and collective memories of futures. It exhibits hypothetical objects and spaces within speculative design attitudes to present inquiries on needed, desired transformations in society, cultures, ideologies, ethics, politics, and economy. I believe that through this thesis, I efficiently communicate the specifics of a knowledge platform, which envisions various future possibilities through their alternatives and addresses a great variety of meanings concerning future habitat. Throughout this framework, I implement narratives, design and representation strategies; I dream, speculate on and contextualize paths towards sustainability. After emphasizing on the potential of pluralism, I motivate the reader to contemplate the plural yet exponential transition trajectories.