According to author Amitav Ghosh, the climate crisis is not only a planetary crisis but also” a crisis of the imagination”¹. Figures about our future are scary or even devastating.
Imagining living in a future where we’ve drastically had to adjust our living to a new reality is difficult, but isn’t it necessary? “How do we move forward to a future we cannot imagine?”².
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Our team researched climate issues and climate-related imaginaries. We then led a workshop on storytelling and individual relationships with climate future.
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We concluded that people need concrete situations and relatable stories to imagine their future.
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That is why we developed a climate fiction scenario in the form of an exhibition so that visitors can dive into a speculative climate future.

_{1 2016, Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
2 2020, Isaijah Johnson, “Solarpunk” & the Pedagogical Value of Utopia}

Walk in this apartment-shape exhibition between AR advertisements, news broadcasts, pollination kit, and discover who Emma is – what she eats, what technology she uses, and what she writes about.She is the representation of anyone's possible future.

Can you imagine yours?

We developed the artifacts by creating future narratives through exploring current research and possible futures found in climate fiction. Artists such as Kim Stanley Robinson, Maja Lunde, and the Superflux studio inspired our work.

We had the opportunity to expand our research practice, improving our knowledge of climate issues and interacting with climate fiction novels.
For this project, we created an entirely new future. We wrote a story and linked our artefacts to it. Emma, her home, the surroundings, the government, advertisement, food, and job opportunities.
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We talked with experts such as biology professors, designers, and creatives who helped us grow and improve our expo.

A visit to Emma is a project that, before the exhibition at Dutch Design Week22, started as a project during the Master digital design.
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Our client visual methodologies collective was working on the ongoing program "climate futures" that explores new ways of engagement.Their challenge for us was to create a tool that engages people in imagining the future of climate change.
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We spent three months designing the project, from research to the final exhibition in the OT301 gallery.We were the first group in the Master exhibiting the project in a public space. 
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I firmly believed that we could exhibit in the Dutch Design Week to share the project with a broader audience, and being selected was a fantastic achievement.

In March, we created a workshop to meet with people from our possible target group (20-40yo -climate change aware). We presented our project, showed six future aesthetic styles (e.g. solarpunk and cottagecore), and then conducted three different exercises to get insights into how people relate to climate change issues.

We invited participants to speculate on collective future stories and personal explorations. This workshop helped in understand that people need to talk about climate change in a concrete and relatable way to free their imagination and visualise their future.

Since the beginning of our research, the outcome needed to be a tool to engage the public in visualising the future of climate change.
The tool, defined for this case as the medium to engage the public, has to provide the opportunity to visualise the future related to climate change.
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The apartment setting plays the first role in the involvement with the visitors' personal life: the familiarity with the ambient engages personal emotions and contextualisation.
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Our ideas of developing an apartment due to its familiarity and relationship with individuals find their roots in multiple papers. For example, Gerald C. Cupchik writes, "Familiarity plays a much greater role in the experience of emotions according to the principle of emotional elaboration." (Cupchik, 2011)

We took up the challenge of developing interactive artefacts to deliver the knowledge to the visitors more meaningfully.
In this way, visitors feel involved in the exhibition storytelling, increasing critics and inquiries about the subject.

Visitors' experience increases while involved in the interactions, reflecting on objects' manipulation andfunction.

Entering Emma's apartment, an overview of different artefacts tells this future story. You can see how Emma lives, works, and eats in her living room. Since the bees are almost extinct, the Netherlands has started a pollination programme to support the harvests dependent on pollination. Emma is one such expert and her practice kit is next to her sofa.