Part 2. Designed artifacts to help imagine the carbon-neutral future of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
In our previous post, we described how we helped citizens — young and old — and also ourselves to imagine the future of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA hereinafter), under a climate crisis in the future with an aim to figure out what MMCA could do today. We designed a series of workshops and various artifacts to facilitate discussions people ordinarily do not engage with.
In the 2001 Design Issues paper, Heskett constructed the following “seemingly nonsensical sentence” (his own words), “Design is when designers design a design to produce a design” (Heskett, 2001). Let’s break it down and apply this into our MMCA project.
(1) Design is when designers (2) design a (3) design to produce a (4) design
The first one is a noun. Design as a practice or professional field. The second one is a verb, the act of doing it (as in design-ing). The third one is again a noun that pertains to intermediary artifacts: sketch; mock-ups; blueprint; user journey map etc. Anything, tangible or otherwise, produced during a design process falls into this category. The final one is the “finished product” in the context of Heskett’s writing (Ibid.). In our case, this would be a carbon-neutral future of MMCA. In this post, we unpack what we designed during the project. Let us explain.
Design fiction and scenarios for imagining futures
Our main goal was clear: citizen participation and imagining together with them. Imagination has the power to let our hope bloom. It nourishes novel and unexpected ideas for change and brings them up for discussion. Speculating futures enables people to escape limitations and interests intertwined in the present. Futuring gives us a chance to reconsider some of the fundamental premises that form current systems and structures, while diversity and ambiguity bring us creative policy ideas for sustainable futures.
Take some time to imagine the following questions: How would you live your days twenty years from today? What would your future look like? You might not be able to answer those questions right away. Envisioning the future is not easy because the future is full of uncertainties intertwined economically, socially, culturally, and environmentally. Then, how about an art museum in the future? That could be even more difficult to envision.
Here are three workshop props designed to facilitate future imagination: a storybook, fictitious newspapers, and four extreme museum scenarios. These artifacts invited participants to the future, guided how the world will be, and made people critical. Among them, the storybook and newspapers are made using design fiction. Design fiction is about creative provocation, raising questions, innovation, and exploration (Bleecker et al., 2023). The four extreme museum scenarios are designed based on children’s imagination which is the result of the former workshops in a relay. They were designed with two intentions: empowering children’s voices to give them the agency they deserve; and facilitating a bottom-up process for more radical and legitimate policy ideas.
Prop 1. Story of Sooyeon’s day in 2081
For the children’s workshop, we created a story about a fictitious character called Sooyeon in 2081. She is 8 years old, she chats with a domestic robot, eats fruits as breakfast, and goes to the library on a tram. But she faces daily difficulties caused by climate change. She can’t play soccer outside due to extremely hot weather, can’t have strawberries unlike her mother when she was young and is concerned about people called climate refugees who lost their homes due to a mountain fire.
This story is a mix of scientific facts and fiction. Based upon the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) climate scenario reports, we did ideation within the team and created plausible stories using our imagination. Our aim was to deliver the potential difficulties children of the future might face from anticipated everyday challenges to social issues, such as climate refugees and animal welfare. To communicate these complex issues easily and swiftly with children, we used illustrations as a visual aid and real-time voiceover.
Our young participants felt strong empathy for Sooyeon. This experience helped them think about their surroundings and themselves in that context. It made children reflect on their days and understand how our lives are intertwined under large environmental and social changes. Upon exploring the museum with us after reading the storybook, they became sensitized to the practices that can be observed in MMCA today.
We then asked them to write a letter to the adults of today and the current staff of MMCA. For instance, they expressed concerns about the excessive use of electricity in the museum or the wasteful practice of printing a large number of exhibition leaflets. With this storybook and other related activities, we learned a great deal about how they imagine and speculate futures and what they prefer and do not prefer.
> Download the book in PDF (unfortunately only in Korean)
Prop 2. News article in 2061
For teenagers and up, we designed a more age-appropriate artifact — newspapers from the future that are again based on IPCC climate scenarios. We depicted future scenarios with various climate change consequences from various topics from daily lives — such as the rising popularity of vegan Big Mac and people decorating domestic solar panels — to massive topics — energy transition through a collaboration of the city of Seoul and Tesla and global inequality caused by the arctic flooding. The news articles from the future were designed as triggers that would help our participants viscerally imagine and feel the environmental, social, political, and moral issues around climate change. The newspapers also had a column by an art critic that discusses how art museums operate and how visitors react in the era of the Anthropocene, as well as advertisements about artificial lung implants due to the terrible air quality.
We printed those articles on low-quality newsprint paper and cut them roughly in order to make them look more realistic — as if someone has been clipping them. The participants were asked to read each one carefully and hand them over to the next person, and share their thoughts in teams and as the whole workshop group.
These stories in the newspapers from the future — some fun and some radically provocative — helped our participants to more easily imagine a future with the consequences of climate change and sparked deep discussions. Some said the stories seem already realistic even for today, as the news about the climate trauma center and the substitute meat. One of the participants asked us if she could bring them home to share with young students she teaches at an elementary school. Of course, we said yes.
> Download the newspaper in PDF (Unfortunately only in Korean)
Prop 3. Four extreme scenarios of MMCA in 2061
For teenagers and up, we additionally provided four future museum concepts to help participants imagine the museum of the future more specifically. As it was described in detail in our previous post, the four scenarios are made based on the data we got from workshops with children. Our intention was to drive the participant’s discussions from the imagined future by the younger participants to empower children with the agency they deserve.
We analyzed the activity sheets used in children’s workshops and synthesized them through an internal ideation workshop. The ideas included, to name a few, closing the museum every 2 years to reduce energy use and its environmental impact, turning off the air conditioner because sweating a little bit does not hurt, removing all the printed material to save trees, and installing a black-and-white printer while allowing the visitors print only when they really need leaflets. These unconventional ideas were synthesized into the scenarios of MMCA in 2061 with few details added to make them a bit more interesting and plausible. For instance, we developed the museum-closing idea into “Involuntarily closed museum when the carbon emission hits a set limit”.
We created four scenarios with two important aspects in mind: first, the direction from which the power and legitimacy flow in the policymaking process (bottom-up or top-down), and second, the two pillars of climate change responses (mitigation or adaptation). Of course in real life, such dichotomy could cause more harm than good, but our intention was to pull each scenario to an extreme for critical discussions. These four ridiculous (or plausible) scenarios were given to the participants from teenagers to over 46 workshops. By speculating and having difficult discussions, our participants envisioned the details of each scenario as a team.
Now, let’s look into one of our four scenarios, “100% zero waste museum under strong regulation of government”:
“What if, due to the government’s strong regulation, the museum must thoroughly achieve zero waste throughout the entire process, including the production, transportation, and exhibition of artworks?”
What images come to your mind? To evoke critical speculation further, we provided a list of questions as discussion points to our workshop participants. They were free to answer the questionnaire we provided or create alternative futures if they thought a given scenario was too absurd.
- How is an exhibition in a museum different?
- What is the biggest challenge art museums will face?
- How would an artist’s life be different?
Some participants interpreted this scenario as a new chance to make a circulation system of art materials, while some criticized the top-down regulation on art creation. A college student majoring in architecture suggested a facility that lights up only needed rooms when/what visitors request, while one student majoring in art history imagined a new nationalist art due to the weakening international exchanges. One participant over 46 commented on the worth of artworks in two dimensions — heritage and economic value — discussing whether preserving artwork is really worth the cost and environmental impact.
By sparking deep discussions around the wild speculations in the radical scenarios, we could draw a rich picture from citizens’ opinions, concerns, hopes, needs, demands, and values. The ideas were used to ideate museum policy for the current, near future, and far future.
> Download the four scenarios and discussion points (unfortunately only in Korean)
More about our work
To facilitate the bottom-up policy-making process towards a carbon-neutral future of MMCA, we designed these artifacts mentioned above for a series of future workshops and citizen participation. We were able to get plenty of quality data for the final policy-making workshop with decision-makers of the museum (for more details, check out our third post). As a service and policy design studio and research lab, we had clear intentions to design a series of workshops for actionable strategies for MMCA, while at the same time aiming to create an artistic experience and convey a particular political viewpoint (to learn more about these aspects, check out our previous post).
We assume that our design artifacts and methodology might be somewhat unusual to many readers. We introduce our project and share our experiences in detail with the hope to inspire more teams, studios, and institutions to challenge the status quo and become more experimental in solving the wicked problem we face together as mankind.
To learn more about the MMCA Museum-Carbon-Project and all fifteen projects including ours, visit HERE.
If you want to work with us or try a new policy experiment, contact us. We are always ready to view problems in new ways and bring a healthy impact to society. To see who we are and what we do other than carbon neutrality and futuring, visit our website: www.newdesign.studio
Written by Minju Han and Seungho Park-Lee
References
- Heskett, J. (2001). Past, present, and future in design for industry. Design issues, 17(1), 18–26.
- Bleecker, J., Foster N., Girardin F., Nova N., Frey C., Pittman P. (2023) The Manual of Design Fiction. Near Future Laboratory
