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Oh, hello there. A few years have passed since we last sent some news. Sorry about that, here are some fresh ones!

So, we have a bit of catching up to do. How are you?

Things have changed quite a bit on our side. In the previous episodes: part of the team moved to Berlin and started the Future Fishing Training Program. We did design fiction workshops with local governments and universities, coached companies on how to make their long-term vision tangible, and brought whacky futures to life through public performances. Fast forward to 2020, we adopted one Bernd Hopfengärtner right in time for us to use his special storytelling powers for a next batch of projects that relied heavily on building complex worlds and devising interesting ways to narrate futures. And that must be about where we left you.

Cue opening credits: N O R M A L S, we are N O R M A L S, defenders of the fu-utu-ures.

2020 — Some Tests Of Remote Presence

We can’t pretend we didn’t have to rethink our ways at the start of the pandemic. With no real idea of how long it would last or how heavily it would constrain social interactions, the best we could do was to speculate, and imagine ways in which we could adapt. How do we think collective imaginaries when gathering people is a challenge of itself? How do we work with clients, colleagues, audiences when we can't be in the same room? The year would push us to learn how to connect a collectively-built world with an experience that is both interactive and remote.

Future Forum — Eavesdrop into the future

Our first pandemic-era adventure took us to the Kulturforum, west Berlin’s main museum district. Built in the 1950s after the city’s partition, it has museums showcasing classical paintings, modern and contemporary art, as well as decorative arts, fashion, and design. It also has a music instrument museum, a chamber music hall, and the Berlin Philharmonic. And it needs an answer to the question of its continued relevance in a rapidly changing world. In collaboration with curators from the various institutions, we reflected on the value of the museum as a place for political debate and social engagement, and started imagining its role in a world of digital scarcity, urban exodus, and not-yet-mainstream biocomputing.

This fiction, exhaustively compiled in a publication, was created as a backbone for an interactive audio experience for the Kulturforum. The idea: visitors having downloaded the museum’s app get ‘accidentally’ contacted by an intern from the Future Forum through a device called the ‘antitelephone’, and tasked with the mission to retrieve knowledge that has been lost in the future. But communication is far from perfect, as information can only travel through time, but not space, which requires for the audience to follow the narrator’s guidance. The experience takes visitors on a quest through several museums of today’s Kulturforum, augmented into future versions of themselves.

For the full experience you’ll have to come to Berlin, but you can already have a browse through the worldbuilding documentation .

Future Forum was commissioned by Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin , museum4punkt0 , and the project was led and developed by our friends at NEEEU .

Later that year we were invited to contribute some sort of collective future-making intervention for the hybrid edition of NODE Festival. The idea was to build a believable fiction of a planetary simulator that regularly prompts the audience for decisions and automatically updates the simulated world according to the audience consensus—or lack thereof. With the festival taking the shape of a physical TV studio streaming live content, the challenge was to prepare a system that lets us adapt the performance based on the reactions of a remote audience. Our workaround was to devise a mechanical turk of sorts—a pen-and-paper parametric worldbuilding chart doubled-up with some ready-made 3D models to mix-and-match on the fly—and to cover it up with a layer of fiction.

The fiction was embodied by the ‘Honorable Professor Norn’ and his assistant Pyry Kettunen, who took the stage at the start of the festival to introduce SKULD as if it were an actual piece of software developed within a university context. Their intervention paved the way to two days of intense worldbuilding, with hourly updates piling up into an absurdly insightful (or insightfully absurd) collection of futures featuring air dams, salt soup, and social athletics.

If you’re curious about what the machine came up with, have a look at the extended report .

SKULD was developed for NODE 2020 , under the curation of HOLO .

2021 — Possible Futures Are Wildly Political

With the world nearing multiple tipping points, it makes sense that we’d be asked to reflect on potential social alternatives, what they mean both practically and culturally, and what their long-term implications might be. The reasons were different: in Madrid, it stemmed from a reflection on how visions of the futures have evolved through time; in Berlin the intent was to extrapolate based on various value systems that currently coexist within Germany. Of course, being the designers we are, it always ended up trickling down into daily-life artefacts and spilling over into publicly-accessible formats. In 2021, we did the splits: physical prototypes on one side, virtual reality on the other.

How did images of the future evolve through time? That’s the question Fundación Telefónica proposed to answer in 2021 with their exhibition ‘La Gran Imaginación’ (The Great Imagination), which took visitors through a gallery of images, blueprints, and prototypes of collective imaginaries and showed how both near and far future resonate with present contexts—technical but also cultural. Within the frame of that project, four design studios where invited to visualise four paths towards the future, each focusing on a different dynamic from today’s perspective, with a curation based on Jim Dator's Four Futures : continuation, transformation, discipline, and collapse. As we picked the latter track, we were put in contact with agronomist and researcher Raphaël Stevens, co-author of ‘ How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for our Times ’ and ' Another End of the World is Possible: Living the Collapse ’. After reading his research and discussing the underlying concepts, we realised that ‘collapsologists’ who advocate for local resilience and mutual aid as a way to counter the failure of thermoindustrial society are often mistaken with survivalists and peppers, whose answer to the same question is far more individualistic. It seemed blatant that there was a lack of positive imaginaries around the idea of collapse, and so we set out to portray an original vision of the ‘end.’

At the core of the world we built is the fictional nation of ‘Pyria:’ a people who, aware of the impending collapse of their system, collectively decide to initiate an early, radical but voluntary transition towards a new civilisation model of post-industrial statelessness. They plan what could be seen as a minimum viable technological society, which must come hand in hand with a shift in values: the relationship to land, neighbourhood, and the very notion of conviviality are all back on the table.

Check out the digital catalogue . And here are photos from the exhibition , featuring physical versions of the imagined artefacts.

G R A S I A S — The Good Collapse was commissioned by Fundación Telefonica in the frame of the exhibition ‘ La Gran Imaginación, Historias del Futuro ’ curated by Jorge Camacho . It is based on the work of Raphaël Stevens .

We had been working with the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) before, when we produced a short video presenting their scenario study on 'The Future of Values held by People in our Country.’ The Fore:Sight Glasses project aimed to take the findings of this study further into the speculative realm, and to turn the resulting fictions into an interactive VR experience. So we developed personal stories, speculative places, objects, and contexts for six futures: the European Way, Competition Mode, Return of the Blocs, Multi-Speed Society, Bonus System, and Ecological Regionalization.

In order to let the audience reflect on each scenario’s specific values and narratives, we decided to explore comparable contexts. Each future is represented by two virtual spaces—one private, the other public—and the experience allows swapping between the same space in different futures. With a window into individual everyday life, another into society, the project explores the material life. What do similar objects look like in different scenarios? And what does their design say about the prevailing culture or the materials used about production paradigms and the availability of raw materials? As you compare the concrete materialization of things, you look behind their surface.

Until you make it to one of the events where the VR fiction can be experienced, you can check out our little documentation page .

Foresight Glasses was done for the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in Collaboration With Z_Punkt .

2022 — Two Solutionisms And A Website

Did we try to come up with some solutions in 2022? That certainly seemed to be the general mood, with the year starting with a project that pushed us towards more plausible and practical bits of futures and culminating in the creation of a fictional candidate to the French presidential elections. Of course, we don’t ever really do solutions—isn’t it our little gimmick to say we prefer to design problems?—and with each new proposal more ethical, technical, social conundrums popped up. Just what we need to bring back the ambiguity we so eagerly advocate for .

At the request of an undisclosed client, we imagined a system to train and reinforce sustainable domestic practices. It consisted of three ‘Responsibility Machines’ for monitoring consumption at home, specifically water, heat, and electricity. But instead of blurting out abstract cubic meters and kilowatthours, they translate the data into something more relatable. The system invites us look at our habitat as if it were a big creature we must nurture, and which tells us its needs in ways we understand. This angle let us sneak in a little thought experiment: if we can't handle the complex nature of our consumption, wouldn't it be easier to delegate it to a higher, more capable system? Would we accept for artificial intelligence to become an authority figure, a coach, a teacher that helps us do better and scolds us when we fail?

In practice, the proposed system is fairly straightforward: you unpack the machines and introduce them to your home by turning things off and on to identify each appliance's, each tap’s unique energy signature. You then go back to your daily activities and let them tell you what you can improve. It’s all the small things you can do to become more frugal, the house improvements that improve your home’s efficiency, the replacing of old appliances, but also tips to time your consumption better—when there is less pressure on the grid, or when the weather conditions mean an increase in supply (a concept that is tied to renewable energies). Beyond the practicalities, the system is also here to educate you: to let you physically relate to how much resources your home consumes, to push you ever so slightly beyond your comfort zone with personal challenges, or even with your neighbours for some local sustainability contests. In the midst of winter, the double-sweater day is always a special holiday.

But enough said, have a look at the whole system if you wish.

In France, we have Gaullism: the cultural heritage of the Général de Gaulle, hero of the resistance and father of the fifth republic. Fifty years after many of the problems that made De Gaulle relevant stopped existing. We have so much Gaullism it hurts. The political discourse struggles to detach itself and enter the 21st century. People like to say ‘he would have agreed with me’, and people who disagree say ‘he would have agreed with me’. We like it when dead people talk. The French have other heroes—Napoléon easily comes to mind. When we need a woman, it’s often Simone Veil, or Simone de Beauvoir for those on the left. We have two Simones. You see where this is going: Simones de Gaulléon is an excuse to let four heroes of the nation tell the living that no, they might not have thought quite like that. When you change the context, politics change too—they have to.

Simones de Gaulléon was a real candidate to the 2022 French presidential elections. They have been speaking publicly, and got to be featured extensively in the French-speaking press as a thought-provoking take on French politics, along with a just as friction-seeking (fictional) origin story. This political figure was presented as the product of several attempts to build AIs that can accurately replicate the minds of historical figures. In a vacuum they seem accurate, but when exposed to information about the contemporary world they start adapting their discourse. Catching the eye of a group of political scientists, Simones became a collaboration with the lab’s researchers toward ‘optimising politics.’

Simones de Gaulléon did nothing less than rethink the social contract and propose a collection of measures to update it. Every day, a new project would be ‘calculated’ and communicated on Simones’ social media, with an invitation to give one’s opinion on the candidate’s website—visitors were invited to express how desirable and realistic they find each proposal. The press covered the project, either for its value as a political proposal or as a thought experiment, with some news outlets going as far as to interview the algorithm and, in the week leading to the runoff election, asking its opinion on the debate that had just taken place on national television. A final reveal of the fiction was done after the elections were over.

The campaign website is now offline, but we have compiled a little project documentation of our own.

— Simones de Gaulléon was a collaboration with Politique Fiction , Bastien Kespern , Max Mollon , and Roman Miletitch .

Right about that time we got ourselves a new website. It was the occasion to look at what we do, how we do it, and why. We’ve come a long way since our first experiments and workshops, but we still had this sort of holy trinity of authorship, commissions, and coaching. So we decided to officially split things in three parts: Lab , Studio , and Co– . Our original explorations are all in Lab, and we keep our self-initiated projects and other cartes blanches under that umbrella. Studio is for client work that involves making futures tangible—there are physical prototypes, VR experiences, performances, videos, etc. Finally, Co– is our consulting and training platform for those who wish to get acquainted with designed futures and our take on strategic foresight.

Well, just have a look if you haven’t yet.

2023 — Symptoms Of (Climate) Change

Is it getting hot in here? The first two projects of the year have both prompted us with thematics linked to global warming from the get-go, albeit from radically different angles: one looking at population displacement caused by environmental effects, the other through the filter of zero-carbon mobility. In both cases, it was very much about adaptation more than mitigation: with climate change indubitably part of the equation, which other variables can we tweak to balance things as best as possible?

Something about climate migration

The mighty NDA won’t let us to tell you much about this—for now. Just know there’s been a project looking at how climate change causes both human and non-human displacement. Research was done, interviews happened with both experts and people having to relocate away from land lost to the effects of climate change. Scenarios that explored the different ways people might relocate in different contexts were derived, and imaginary worlds built accordingly. Finally, a very big report was compiled. We can’t wait to tell you more, but we still have to.

At the start of April, an automotive fair opened its doors in Paris: DriveToZero. It had a focus on zero-carbon mobility, and there’s a lot to unpack there—that topic certainly features many brands of charging stations for electric vehicles, promoted by a mixture of start-ups and ‘reconverting’ oil giants. We were granted full license to give this vision a poke and decided to produce four design fictions exploring what racing could be like in a zero-emission culture. We wanted to look not only at cars, but also tracks, rules, drivers, and the systems around it all.

The result was Zero GP: an installation of four videos each showcasing a life-size vehicle on a minute-long stretch of a fictional race. These illustrate the change in values that comes hand-in-hand with various interpretations of what a zero-carbon future might mean.

We are extremely thankful to the organising team for going all in in this project without really knowing what to expect. They not only provided the best technique available to them, with four massive screens to show the vehicles at full scale, but they also gave us a prime spot at the very center of the salon and in direct view of the Eiffel tower.

Have a look at the photos and videos and 3D models .

Zero GP was conceived in collaboration with Lorena Lisembard , and exhibited by Infopro Digital at the salon Drive To Zero .

Strategies For The Future

While we’re not expecting our speculative provocations to ever be implemented, we’re increasingly realising the value of imagining radical futures for informing decision-making. There are insights specific to playing with radical futures that can be useful to strategic planning. Imagined worlds that don’t cater to the dominant discourse or a client’s comfort zone can be reverse-engineered into actionable milestones, and we have ideas on how to make it happen. It’s quite likely that the next few years will find us increasingly working in collaboration with people who are capable of setting things in motion, for real.

How about you? What are the news on your side? We hope the last three years have been good to you. In any case, feel free to shoot us a quick message if you’d like to say hi, or to share whatever popped up in your mind while reading this. Or to ask us to stop spamming you with all these triennial emails.

Have a lovely day, and speak again in the future.

N O R M A L S

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