7 minute read
Festival Keynote - Anab Jain - designer, filmmaker, futurist, & educator
‘...there needs to be a step between the problem and the solution - something that does not promise quick solutions but opens possibilities, foregrounds the ecological nature of the problem space and acknowledges the interconnected nature of such complex problems.’
At the edge of the Amazon Rainforest in north central Brazil sits the largest iron ore mine on the planet. Scientists have learned that nearly 10% of the deforestation the Brazilian Amazon has been between 2005 and 2015 due to mining activities. Previously, it was thought to be just 1% to 2%, but they did not take into account all the ancillary services that were also needed, like roads, housing, airports, and hydroelectric dams to provide energy for mining operations. Wood from the surrounding forest is cut for charcoal to fuel the pig iron plants resulting in annual deforestation of 606,100km².
On a recent field trip, I heard a lecture from Helmut Antrekowitsch, Chair of Nonferrous Metallurgy at the University of Leoben, Austria, about the bigger geopolitical and economic tensions around mining. He spoke about the dysfunctional economics of certain forms of recycling where dumping a unit of red mud (the bauxite residue waste) is €5 while recycling costs €500. We know the destructive impact of mining on ecosystems and communities - a recent article in the National Geographic explores a tragic story of a 890km railway stretching from the Mina de Carajás iron ore mine to the port of Ponta da Madeira in São Luís. The train carries ore in metal boxes, destroying ecosystems and communities along the way.
In an article for The New York Times, David Wallace envisions life after climate change and how renewables revolution will require a mining revolution, and that the need for lithium for electric vehicle batteries will grow eight fold by 2030. A 2020 World Bank report emphasises that the production of minerals such as graphite, lithium, and cobalt could increase 500% by 2050. To meet the growing demand for clean energy technologies, they estimate that 3 million tonnes of minerals and metals, with the need to deploy solar, wind, and geothermal power as well as energy storage in order to achieve a sub-2° Celsius rise. Lithium is everywhere.
It’s in antidepressants, the stainless steel in needles that deliver vaccines, the aluminium in heat pumps, the copper in wind turbines, the titanium in Mars Exploration Rovers, and the gold in the James Webb Telescope.
It is evident that our actions to the challenges we face have an ecology of causes and effects that we need to be cognisant of.
Larger political infrastructure challenges need to take into account wider economic, political, social, and cultural implications. These things don’t happen in isolation, and to say “stop extraction” or “only take trains” means we are pushing the problem elsewhere. Understanding externalities and unintended consequences becomes crucial and we need to understand that every action has a wider ecology of effects.
It made me realise that there needs to be a step between the problem and the solution - something that does not promise quick solutions but opens possibilities, foregrounds the ecological nature of the problem space and acknowledges the interconnected nature of such complex problems. This means that the solutions will also be equally entangled and not siloed into narrow forms.
A lot of my understanding of the space further deepened since we at Superflux have initiated an experiential research project called Cascade Inquiry with the support from King’s College London, a generative space for collectively imagining and building features where positive climate action has been taken. In this project, we investigate the planetary climate crisis and the lack of ecologies of action at the scale that is needed. We ask, where is power located? Who can access it? How can we act on that power? And, what change can we create? One of the people we revisited was Karen Barad, whose writing in their book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning resonated deeply. They write, “There are no singular causes, and there are no individual agents of change. Responsibility is not ours alone, and yet our responsibility is greater than it would be if it were ours alone.” Responsibly entails an ongoing responsiveness to the entanglements of self and the other - here and there, now and then. We need to meet the universe halfway to take responsibility for the role that we play in the world differential becoming.
I believe that the 21st and 22nd century century versions of design, reimagined and renewed, could operate in this halfway space: to become the collective tissue that conjoins our actions to a larger ecology of change; to understand and take into account externalities and unintended consequences; to generate multiple tipping points of positive transformation; to empower the non-institutionalised fugitive spaces and the commons; to attune us with the wider ecology of planetary life. I want to call such a practice Ancillary Design.
Ancillary Design meets the universe halfway. It is the connective issue that conjoins our ecology and our actions for larger ecology of change, understands externalities, generates multiple tipping points of positive transformation, and powers the undercommons and attunes us to a wider ecology of our planet. A quick Google search shows that Ancillary Design is a thing - it’s a term used to describe a variety of informal office furniture that supports multiple postures like sitting, perching, lounging, and standing. Ancillary furniture is more for in-between spaces like lounges, lobbies, cafes, and so on. I love that idea of expanding this beyond furniture to how design can truly support multiple postures and truly exist in these in-between spaces.
Something that is connective, liminal, and operates in this halfway space is not easy to explain. There are some big challenges: polarisation, short term thinking, equal paralysis, inequality. And as the in-between connective tissue Ancillary Design can fix these challenges through deeply collaborative, rich practices and tools, coproduction methods such as deep listening, embodied experiences, mythmaking, and movement building towards an ecology of incredibly positive effects empowering communities to activate hopes and reimagine plural worlds.
You may argue that in and of itself, these are not really design. I agree. But together I think these methods, approaches, and tools can aid us in the times ahead to reimagine design’s changing role. The end justifies the means - but what if there is never an end?
All we have is means, so I’m going to share some examples of what I see as Ancillary Design to emphasise that none of these are new or recent works, and they’re not the only possibilities. Here, we’re not inventing anew but you’re looking at what already is as if it were new, connecting with rather than producing.
A designer, filmmaker, futurist, and educator, Anab Jain grew up in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, within the entangled postcolonial landscapes of a fast-growing nation. Through a series of planned and unplanned circumstances, she has made London her home. Although the idea of a home remains as expansive as our hearts and minds. Anab believes that a rigorous praxis of imagination and experiential storytelling can emotionally connect us with plural futures – enabling us to make better decisions today, a belief and commitment which led her to establish the speculative design and experiential futures practice Superflux in partnership with Jon Ardern. Now in their 13th year, Superflux has just received the Design Studio of the Year Award in recognition of their contribution to the fields of speculative and futures design with a committed social mission. Working for a diverse set of clients and commissioners, Superflux imagines and builds future worlds we can experience in the present moment. By creating new ways of seeing, being and acting, their work inspires and challenges us to look critically at the decisions and choices we make today.
