Climate SF cultivates ways to think and work on the condition of climate change that go beyond the technological mindset of conventional environmental design. Climate change is going to be this generation’s condition. Many would argue that it is already the global condition. Yet climate change and environmental violence are not merely technical problems in search of “action” or a “fix”. They are also problems of the imagination and require realignments in thinking humankind’s relationship to the planet and to other species; different attunements to the matters we are entangled with, and the need for new narratives and imaginaries we tell to ourselves. It behooves architects and urban designers to offer much more to the transformation of culture than technical solutions. In particular to use our specific media—drawings, models, videos, material constructs—to make climate change, so often represented in the incomprehensible abstraction of big data graphs and charts, feel instead visceral, intimate, and present as a cultural condition and matter of design. Design disciplines speculate, envision, and materialize the thought experiments of the possible and the plausible.

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. - Donna Haraway

The studio starts with stories that make worlds in the context of a changed climate. Climate SF novels by authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, J.G. Ballard, Bruce Sterling, Octavia E Butler, Margaret Atwood, Pablo Bacigalipi, Kim Stanley Robinson. We consider these texts not as futurisms but as “the realism of our time” (Robinson). They critically explore not only the possibilities of technology but the political, social, ideological, and ecological systems within which it is entangled. We immerse ourselves in the worlds of these narratives as a design site and milieu. The work of the studio operates tendril-like, trading strings with these authors in multiple directions. We learn to tell new stories of being with, and develop prototypes for architectures, objects, and urbanisms that prototype possible fragments in relation to Climate SF.

If architecture is to think beyond its current condition, it is our prerogative to pull open the spaces of our world, to imagine alternative possibilities, to prototype these fragments and to explore their implications. Worldbuilding is the art of creating the plausible contexts and environments in which stories of new or alternate possibilities are able to emerge, and we will learn about this art by studying and operating within Climate SF novels. In SF novels, worldbuilding focuses less on plot and characters and more on alternative worlds through which they are able to understand our own world in new ways. In this way SF writing is as much about the present reality as it is about a future or other imaginary. Seo-Young Chu, in her Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sheep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation (2010) argues that science fiction is a “form of ‘high-intensity realism’ capable of representing non-imaginary objects that elude more traditional, ‘realist’ modes of representation.” SF novels perform this through critical “cognitive estrangement,” thus differing significantly from both fiction and fantasy.

As part of the “worldbuilding” analysis of the SF novels, students develop a Situated Apparatus drawing that maps their novel’s network of interrelationships and entanglements between sites, artifacts, humans, nonhumans, climate, agencies, practices, technologies, laws, and any other elements of the apparatus identified as part of the web in the world created by the author. One of the aspects of the Situated Apparatus drawing is that it is quasi-spatial and therefore a cross between a map and an actor-network. This drawing enables the recreation of the world in each SF novel on one’s own terms, setting an attitude, mood, tone, and territories of interest.

If science fiction can be understood as a kind of storytelling that creates “prototypes of other worlds, other experiences, other contexts for life” then a Diegetic Prototype is like an “artifact brought back from those worlds in order to be examined, studied over”, critically questioned. Author Bruce Sterling argues that “It’s not a kind of fiction. It’s a kind of design. It tells worlds rather than stories.” 

The SF novels are considered through Umberto Eco’s notion of “The Open Work”, where the “author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee a work to be completed”. In each novel, architectures, micro-architectures, and urbanisms are described or referred to. Some are described in detail, while others only mentioned briefly. In dialogue with each novel’s worldbuilding, its socio-political framework, and its environmental agency, students project, propose, and explore one of these architectures or urbanisms in further detail. The Diegetic Prototype expands on the thought experiment of the novel through the medium of design and material speculation. It draws on the practices of “design fiction”. It is a material experiment that develops new fragments of the possible – a possible existence within the societal context of a changed or rapidly changing climate.