Forecasting peers into the future - backcasting builds backwards from an imagined future. Regen·era is a great example of the latter.
Other than Roberto Unger —”the point of living is to die only once”—the other axiom that the Alternative UK lives under is the famous line from Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
But you may need imaginative room to explore the outlines of that model - a “design fiction” that points you to a newly designed reality. And that’s what seems to be happening with a major project from Design Science Studio, titled Regen·era.
First, some self-explanation:
HabRitual and the Buckminster Fuller Institute decided to launch an INCUBATOR (titled Design Science) to mentor, scaffold and fund artists to help create a cultural shift towards a world that works for 100% of life.
As part of their strategy, they created a story-universe that aims to encapsulate many of the recurring and emerging themes around the current zeitgeist, more planet conscious and connected.
That story-universe has its representation in Regen·era., a virtual world that summarizes the ethos of the cultural movement so-called The Regenaissance.
Ontological Design
Ontological design is the design discipline concerned with states of being, existence and designing the human experience. It does so by operating under one essential assumption: that by designing objects, spaces, tools and experiences, we are in fact designing the human being itself.
The key assumption of ontological design is this: Everything we design outside of ourselves has an influence inside. In other words: as we design our tools, they design us in return.
By designing our environment, we are designing how we think and feel. By curating perception, we are designing reality. This is the operative engine of ontological design.
At the Design Science Studio we design processes of “human becoming”. By crafting experiences, architecting environments and curating information we are defining a systemic, creative approach to designing being, existence, and reality itself, and we do so based on the principles of nature, wellbeing and equity for all beings.
Art that changes history
“The future is always first an idea”. This quote from Emilia Lahti has been our motto from the day we started on our mission to imagine a better future that works for all life.
Every (r)Evolution starts with a story and they develop as those stories are believed by more and more people.
Nature Magazine did a study and discovered that you only need 25% of a population to believe in something for that something to become mainstream. Decades of green activism and solutionism are finally coming out of the underground and joining the conversation. It’s the time to achieve critical mass.
A primary goal at the Design Science Studio is to create art, stories, experiences, books, paintings, street art, podcasts, gatherings, crypto art, ads… anything that can carry a message! These messages become tools to propel transformation.
There is no planet B, and we have a once-in-a-century opportunity to take everything we’ve learnt in the past hundred years and correct some of our mistakes. We still have an opportunity to re-align ourselves with nature and to design a world that accounts for all beings, where a sufficiency of resources exist for everyone.
A world that is equitable and just, without colonization or racism, where all needs are served. A world that is in communion with nature, where we upcycle and recycle, where we grow in community and in harmony with our environment, where we create more human connections and work to live and not live to work.
Too hippie? Well, the future is always first an idea. Our work is to dream. Our work is to imagine. Our work is to empower those who can draft and sketch the future we want to inhabit and to give them wings to share those visions with the world, because we only need to convince 1 in 4 people that it is possible.
So what kinds of constructs does this philosophy build? Regen·era is one answer. Click onto the link and you eventually scroll downwards into a world that is regularly visited by a floating city - inside of that space, all manner of social and technological dreaming is encouraged. As they put it:
regen·era is a fictional world created by the Design Science Studio to push the memes and ideas of the Regenaissance in a playful, visual and interactive way, to amplify the chances of these ideas to spread out and become part of the popular culture.
regen·era is a concept, but also multiple spaces and platforms where these ideas have a home and where curious travelers can explore them.
We are launching regen·era as a virtual world, but it might take other forms throughout the decade, since it’s more an idea than it is a physical or virtual space.
What we love about the idea of the floating city is that it really can fit anything. A discussion that occurs between a regenerative philosopher and a designer about new governance systems could happen in one of the cafes of regen·era.
The blueprints and operating manuals to create permaculture settlements could live inside regen·era’s library. It’s a place for ideas, dialogues, intentional design, collaboration, ideation. It exists because of each one of its parts and will exist for as long as there are contributions to it.
That’s why your role is so important.
The simple fact that you are here, counts. But, oh dear, in so many other ways too!
One of the most important things we do at Design Science Studio is to mentor, steward and fund 144 multidisciplinary artists every year to create art that has the potential to change History. Connected; conscious; planetary-aligned; regenerative art, capable of telling the story and imagining a possible future.
…Futurecasting is the process of making predictions of the future based on past and present data and most commonly by analysis of trends.
Backcasting is a planning method that starts with defining a desirable future and then works backwards to identify policies and programs that will connect that specified future to the present.
While forecasting involves predicting the future based on current trend analysis, backcasting approaches the challenge of discussing the future from the opposite direction; it is a method in which the future desired conditions are envisioned and steps are then defined to attain those conditions, rather than taking steps that are merely a continuation of present methods extrapolated into the future.
We believe in designing futures that we aspire to. We then backcast from them the necessary steps to achieve them.
Introducing some of these concepts in your reality today through the use of fictional frameworks allows us to “incept” ideas in a way that seem doable. Then we use history-telling to frame your reality or your near term future, telling the story from the future, like it had already happened
We ask you to live the present told from your future, asking you to put one step in front of the other in small steps, and then to turn around only to realize that you are deep in the circle.
At some point, the backcasted future and the projected present collide and merge. That’s where the magic happens.
The Regenaissance is a cultural movement that started in 2020, the result of decades of ecological activism and new approaches to old problems. Driven by a will to reimagine our society at scale and imagine possible futures, thousands of artists, thinkers and doers around the world are sharing memes related to new ways to interact with nature and ourselves, in relationship with the planet.
This cultural (r)Evolution is transforming food systems, social structures, education, living, politics and our view of our living systems. It’s happening, it’s now, and you are part of it.
regen·era Rising is global confluence for creators of regenerative futures, celebrated every year on March 21st to commemorate the arrival of regen·era to Earth to show us what was possible.
The arrival of the city is celebrated with a week-long virtual summit full of immersive experiences, celebrations, talks, workshops, art and surprises - each showcasing the important, powerful and collaborative ways design, science, and story collide within the shared environments of Zoom, New Art City and Topia.
Join the (r)Evolution in a cultural exploration at the intersection of art and science, harnessing the potential to shift and propel the next hundred years of our evolutionary process.
The clutch is in, will we shift up or down? ’It's Utopia or Oblivion.”
- R. Buckminster Fuller
From weaponry to livingry.
From extraction to regeneration.
From me to we.
It’s speculative… but we surely need more imagination than less in our envisionings of a future - pulled one way to planetary boundaries, and pulled another to AI and human-substituting automation. We’ll watch the regen·era space with interest.