Where Monstrosity Dovetails Delight: using design fictions to transform fear into plastic potential | Pia Ednie-Brown

Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Pia Ednie-Brown Can the act of designing fictions contribute to our capacity for negotiating or eliciting change? Might this approach have particular importance in a time of looming, apocalyptic climate change, where the ability to adapt to shifting conditions is high on the agenda? This paper presents a series of provocative design speculations, each aimed at transforming an environmental problematic into a scenario that rides a line between utopic and dystopic imaginings. Proposing a notion of ‘transformability’ as a more productive one than ‘sustainability’, these design fictions confront environmental fears by folding them into scenarios that both delight and disgust. It is argued that these playful, imaginative and inventive fictions are productive of the kinds of plasticity we need to master in this contemporary climate of change. Pia Ednie-Brown is an Associate Professor in the Architecture program and a research stream leader at SIAL, teaching design and theory, and supervising Masters and PhD candidates. She has a research practice, Onomatopoeia, involving art-architecture installations, animation, sculpture, creative writing and theoretical analysis.