Send message to Author

Short abstract

This paper examines two design fiction workshops with scientists from the French Subsurface: a Common Good programme exploring desirable futures for the Parisian underground. It shows how speculative design can pluralize sociotechnical imaginaries and open debate on urban subsurface futures.

Long abstract

Urban undergrounds are increasingly framed as strategic infrastructures for energy transition, transport and resource management. In this context, the future of the subsurface is often defined through technical modelling, engineering expertise and infrastructural planning. Such approaches tend to stabilize a dominant sociotechnical imaginary (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) of the subsurface as a resource for circulation, storage and extraction.

This paper explores how speculative design methods can help reopen these imaginaries (Dunne and Raby, 2013). It draws on two design fiction workshops conducted with researchers involved in the French research programme Subsurface : a Common Good, which investigates sustainable and collective uses of the subsurface. The workshops invited scientists from different disciplines to collectively imagine desirable futures for the Parisian underground through speculative scenarios and artefacts.

Rather than producing predictive visions, these workshops functioned as experimental spaces for collectively interrogating existing assumptions about the underground. The speculative narratives and artefacts produced during the workshops reveal tensions within scientific communities between dominant infrastructural imaginaries and alternative visions emphasizing ecological functions, shared resources, care and new forms of public spaces.

By analysing these workshops as collective practices of anticipation, the paper argues that design fiction can operate as an STS method for pluralizing sociotechnical imaginaries and opening debate on the futures embedded in urban subsurface research.

References:

JASANOFF S., KIM S-J., Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, University of Chicago Press, 2015.

DUNNE A., RABY F., Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, The MIT Press, 2013.