Imagining a sustainable life

Project Information

70% of all carbon emissions are from households, and 50% of all emissions come from the wealthiest 10%. While that partly describes a great inequality of the situation we're in, it also shows that the ecological crisis is largely a product of the wants of a minority and not the needs of the human population. In fact, many climate scientists are now in agreement that we have the technology and knowledge needed to solve the climate crisis, but we lack the ability to collaborate globally, move toward the solutions, and change our ways of living.  
 
The project addresses this problem in the context of lifestyles, and creating desirable futures by exploring ways to build a life within the Planetary Boundaries. Instead of focusing on individual consumer behavior the project investigates how to create bigger coherent visions of what a sustainable life might look like, and give a clearer target to move towards in all aspects of life, not just what we consume.  
 
We need to change what we want for our futures, but to do that we need to understand what wants are possible, what different options mean in the context of the whole planet, and what foundation we can build a life on.   
 
”If we can't imagine how we want to live in the Anthropocene, it is very difficult to stake out pathways to get to preferable futures.” - Jan Kuiper, Stockholm Resilience Centre (2023). 
 
”The greatest crisis in human history may requiring imagining ways of living - not just of energy production but of daily habit - that we have never seen before. How do we begin to imagine such a household?” - Noah Gallagher Shannon, The New York Times. 

Methods

The project investigated the question by experimenting with ways to interact and visualize lifestyle choices and climate data. The process was iterative and developed by working with users with a set of digital and physical prototypes. The main goal was to create an engaging experience that gave a personal vision for a possible future and an interest in moving towards it. 
 
To limit the scope to the time frame the current tool only investigates food choices and food production, and users in the target group ”young adults in Sweden". The purpose of the limit was to create a foundation to build on for further work, and later explore other aspects of lives and mediums better suited for other age-groups. 

Result 

The result is a digital interactive tool. The user interacts by placing tiles on an area representing the habitable surface of earth divided by the global human population. This area functions as a representation of the world through the lens of one persons life. By seeing how the tiles affect the Planetary Boundaries (like co2 emissions, land system change, freshwater use etc) the user can create their own set of food choices that fit within the boundaries. In this way the options, technologies and paths forward that exist can be put in the context of a whole life. 
 
In the end the goal is to create an engaging tool that can be puzzled with to explore what combination of food, transportation, housing and other aspects of lifestyles are possible. In doing so the aim is to inspire new situated narratives, in specific lives and geographical locations, of ways to live in the future, and in turn a clearer vision of what to build on and what to move away from in our future lives. 

Open the interactive prototype