Speculative design in resident dialogues: enabling foresight and highlighting climate conflicts

Purpose and goal:

The project has unveiled paradigms within our own understanding of citizen engagement, where often internal structures and unspoken emotions can shape the approach. Workshops and tests has lead to a more citizen centric framework and methodology. The speculative design methods make it easier for us to gauge citizens engagement. They also contribute knowledge to the organization about speculative design in citizen dialogue, both of which are goals for 2024’s climate dialogues as a whole.

Expected results and effects:

The project has resulted in a framework for our upcoming citizen dialogues, a “dialogue funnel”, which is based upon reflections and patterns from previous dialogues. The specific methods that have been developed will be used and developed further, such as “The co-existence lab”, “The placard bureau”. Based on testing and reflection we have both internalised knowledge, ways of working and methods. This will be used in an upcoming, wider strategy for citizen engagement in climate issues.

Approach and implementation:

Initially, the resident lead a lab group in using speculative design to develop concepts for citizen dialogue. This generated creative ideas from the labgroup, but was also very time demanding. It certainly is a challenge to trigger creativity and reflexivity in a time constrained working life. Luckily, we were able to adjust our residents role to that more of a designer and “sparring partner”, where the lab group could focus more on testing and fine tuning the concepts from our resident.