Visualising a Sustainable Everyday…
Visualisation is an important part of design activities helping to anticipate the future developments of a project and stimulate discussion between the different players involved. So, within design research too, and especially design research for sustainability, visualisations should play an important role in stimulating social conversation among a large number of different actors, on possible alternatives to the mainstream model.
In the Sustainable Everyday project below, visualisations in the form of short films have been made showing different “life bites” from possible new and more sustainable lifestyles. Each focuses on one particular character and shows how they organise themselves in everyday life, be it through a workshop offering equipment to maintain and repair products, a service to customise different alternative mobility solutions or a training initiative to foster energy saving and local production.
The movies are short clips based on real characters interacting against a patchwork background picturing the mix of resources available in each place. The video writing is deliberately rough and imperfect: it belongs to the category of quick ‘Video sketches’ promptly made during the reflection stage. They are realistic enough visualisations to enable users to project themselves into the scene, but at the same time have the unfinished status of a draft to allow for interpretation and adaptation of the proposition.
Eighteen such Video sketches have been developed to produce a wider range of visions of possible alternative sustainable lifestyles. As shown in the matrix below the visions can be read from different points of view.
Vertically, it starts from main everyday life functions (How to do the shopping? How to maintain objects? How to move around in the city? etc…) to introduce six multi-services centres (the Food Atelier, the handyman Shop, the Mobility Agency, etc…) each one offering a range of more sustainable solutions around a domestic function.
Horizontally, it shows three different types of more sustainable lifestyles and related strategic design approaches to develop sustainable solutions (a Quick mode based on standard, efficient solutions; a Slow mode, enhancing personal involvement in the search of quality; a Co-op mode based on collaboration and sharing).
Finally, across the matrix, three different characters act in the different scenes and demonstrate how they fit together in coherent lifestyles.
Taking this last approach one step further, the eighteen movies have been used in different interactive exhibitions around the world, where visitors were able to take the role of one of the three actors in the movies and compose their own lifestyle, both satisfying their own needs and improving their average sustainability. The visualisations were used as ‘lifestyle building blocks’, showing everyday solutions, to facilitate dialogue about possible, desirable and more sustainable futures with a wider public. The visualisation of scenes of everyday life enabled people from different backgrounds and cultures to picture a possible implementation of these solutions, in their own day to day. They were able to grasp complex strategies for sustainability by seeing them from the user point of view, discuss advantages and inconveniences, and finally project themselves into a vision.