Opinion BOOKS Back to the Future: Vistionary Books and Books About Visionaries

by Stuart Walker

A number of design schools are currently using a `scenarios' approach as a tool for thinking about change and for examining environmental issues and sustainable development. The `scenario' can be used as a contextual anchor for discussing and exploring new approaches to contemporary problems and evolving paths in new directions. Scenario development can be an imaginative and creative stimulus for looking at future possibilities, but as Dr. Murray Gellman has remarked "[we need Utopian models] not as blueprints but as aids to the imagination". 1 Scenarios are currently being used in Industrial Design at TUDelft in Amsterdam, in what they term "Illustrative Processes", and at the Domus Academy in Milan in their evolving "Vision Design" project. Vision Design is a follow on from a project called Eco-Design. The impetus behind this development is that "Eco-design has not been able to directly address the need to create radically new types of products that are consistent with the sustainability scenario" 2 . One of the reasons given for this is "The limitation of traditional "marginal" approaches relying on sequential one-by-one (product-by-product) decisions, while only systemic changes are believed to bring about sustainability." 3 In EVDS, scenario development has been used in a number of research projects and courses in recent years. In Planning, the Edgemont II project developed by Professors Bill Perks and Robert Kirby, and Master's student Andrea Wilton-Clarke, explores the possibilities for a sustainable community form. Industrial Design student Ralf Nielsen used this type of context for examining sustainable product development and production. The work in the Planning Program also inspired the "House of Moderation" project which has been run as a 701 studio and an industrial design studio in recent years. This approach also informed participants in the "House of Communications" industrial design studio, run last year in conjunction with, and sponsored by, Bell Northern Research. Scenario projects have also been run in the EVDS core course 609 - the Calgary 2020 project asked students to consider future living possibilities within the context of reduced oil availability. Scenario development is not a new concept, it has been used in the past as both a warning and an inspiration. George Orwell's 1949 book Nineteen Eighty Four is a black look at totalitarian regimes and control using intimidation and force. It served as warning against the perversion of communistic ideals through corruption and power, told through the story of Winston Smith and his revolt against the Party. In 1932, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World focused on the negative side of capitalistic overrun, with genetic and psychological engineering, mood enhancing drugs, and a life of unquestioning, meaningless pleasure in an inane (anti) Utopia. Huxley's last book Island, 1962, creates a more optimistic vision of an ideal society which balances the benefits of western scientific discovery and technological progress with the spiritual progress of the east; a society which is ultimately forced to face the pressures of increasing greed, mass communication, rising population and aggression. In contrast to these fictional works, Without Sin by Spencer Klaw, 1994, is a fascinating account of the rise and fall of the Oneida Community, a nineteenth-century experiment in Utopian living, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in upper New York State in 1848. Gell-Mann, M., The Natural Resources Manual, IDSA 1995, p.12 Fioruzzi, M., From Eco-Design To Vision Design, Domus Academy, (Unedited draft, Confidential), February 1995, (with permission), p.1 Ibid, p.1 1984 - George Orwell, Penguin Modern Classics, first published in 1949 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley, Triad Grafton, first published in 1932 Island - Aldous Huxley, Flamingo Modern Classics, first published in 1962 Without Sin - The Life and Death of the Oneida Community, Spencer Klaw, Penguin Books, 1994

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