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Postcards from the future - Barend Koolhaas en David Mulder

This studio explores design fiction as a catalyst of change. Throughout modern history, design has been a powerful way to speculate about possible futures. From the 1920s constructivist images for a post-revolution Russia, to China’s engineering propaganda and from the radical design in 1960s Italy to Afrofuturism. Despite scientific progress, it is often the imagination of a possible future that creates the leap of faith that drives modernization.

Within the framework of the DAE Zero Hunger Project, the studio will apply this narrational aspect of design on the UN Sustainable Development Goal of ZERO HUNGER. Students are asked to research competing expert scenarios for a world without hunger. From ideas to reshape food systems, proposals to dramatically change nutrition patterns, to creating highly efficient large scale food production in greenhouses or radically localizing food production and consumption.

Students will critically reflect on these contested ideas and will take them as a starting point for a design scenario that speculates on how the world would look like if these ideas would be followed. By engaging, (re-)imagining and interrogating present narratives, the studio aims to enable alternative paths to a radically new future. Each week, students will produce a postcard that is emblematic for the week’s work. Together, over eight weeks, the postcards form a compendium that speculates on alternative paths towards a world without hunger.

View the postcards on Instagram