Everyday Urban Life in Queensland 2080
Speculative Design practises through a Fashion Design lens for climate resilient communities
Futurescan 5 : Conscious Communties Conference
Cait Hopper
Short paper and 10 minute presentation presented at the Futurescan 5: Conscious Communities Conference.
7th – 8th September 2022
Nexus, University of Leeds, UK
Association of Fashion and Textiles Courses
Abstract:
Speculative Design is a discipline aimed at creating a tangible link, the perceptual bridge, between the present and possible futures (Auger, 2013). By taking recognisable, contemporary artefacts and altering them or changing their situational context, speculative designers aim to provoke audiences into considering how their actions here and now might lead to a future we greatly want to achieve or perhaps avoid at all costs (Dunne & Raby, 2013). Everyday Urban Life in the Context of Queensland 2080 is a project grounding the global problem of climate change in a local context for the people of Queensland. Through future casting, garment design and digital artefacts, a vision of climate resilient communities in Queensland in 2080 is created.
The project builds on the existing fashion industry in Queensland, local climate projections and innovations in fashion including design for disassembly, digital-only fashion and biosynthetic fibres. This work uses a speculative approach to explore the sociotechnical themes of Climate Sustainment, Industry 4.0 and Circular Economies through a fashion and textiles lens in the local context of Queensland, Australia. As a result, the contributions of this paper are threefold: 1) Highlights opportunities for fashion education to incorporate cross disciplinary design practises like speculative design to make tangible the need for climate resilient thinking in future fashion practises; 2) Provokes wider society to consider the impacts to their local environment from their fashion consumption habits; and, 3) Provides considerations for Queensland fashion designers and design students around emerging materials, practises and technologies for sustainable garment production.