by Artistic Research PhD Candidates of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Supervisor: Anab Jain
Humanity is on the brink of weird and non-linear climate experimentation as people around the world must adapt to a rapidly warming, drastically changing world. Diverse stakeholders from public, private, and civil society organizations will need to understand problems in ever-changing circumstances and develop empathy for issues that will manifest themselves in 20-50 years’s time. The same thinking that got us here can’t get us out – we need radical imagination and transformative action to break down structures and worldviews that no longer work for us.
My PhD project explores the potential of imagination and experiential climate futures – futuring processes and immersive experiences of climate scenarios – to advance transformative climate adaptation.
I am trying to find a possible answer to two questions:
1. How could European cities like Berlin radically adapt to and transform the climate crisis?
2. How can experiential climate scenarios help climate practitioners a) surface emotions about futures and b) openly explore perspectives on the barriers and opportunities underlying assumptions about those futures?
This creative practice-based research brought together approaches from design, arts and (climate) sciences. It has produced three projects that bring future climate scenarios to life through different media and forms of engagement, from communication design and an urban intervention through a prototype of a pop-up space to an experience merging immersive performance and role play. It documents and reflects on a co-created process towards engaging people across climate adaptation – creatives and “practitioners” – and its potential to inspire their imagination to explore pathways to transformative adaptation uninhibited by present-day factual boundaries.
This PhD project has identified focus areas and practices for transformation efforts that are currently overlooked in climate adaptation plans. Based on the reflective learnings uncovered, it synthesized a design strategy for collective imagination towards transformative climate adaptation in the form of a half-real, half-fictional creative collective, Urban Heat Studio, and a handbook for creative practitioners, including core principles, sociocratic collective organizing, and practical considerations.
Juli is a designer, researcher and artist. She is a doctoral researcher at the Angewandte and a founding member of the Urban Heat Studio, a creative collective for transformative climate resilience and imagination. The collective gathers people to break down the time barriers between climate impacts tomorrow and today’s structures and injustices that make us brittle in the face of planetary-wide change.
Juli designs participatory interventions that explore how European cities might radically adapt to and transform the climate crisis. With over 12 years of experience across climate, change, design and the arts, she has researched sustainability transitions with EU CreaTures and MIT Climate CoLab. She has taught systems thinking and design (ecosystem) futures, led climate futures workshops for Climate KIC and the Red Cross, and her works have been exhibited at international galleries and festivals such as the Design Museum, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art and Untitled Festival by Demos Helsinki.