However, while the bird’s-eye view is vital and effective in capturing macro-evolutions and systemic changes, little is often left to the individual, the narrow personal perspectives of who will live those new life paradigms. When we try to envision what the future will look like, we do so for two reasons: to prepare ourselves to fit a new framework or to steer our society’s evolutionary trajectory towards more desirable conditions. In both cases, having just a data-driven approach could limit our capacity to imagine the direct implications and consequences of specific events at a human scale.

Nevertheless, macro visions are often interpreted by the general audience as predetermined and unavoidable scenarios, too big to be addressed by the single and too complex to steer their course. Inverting the above-mentioned directionality and looking ahead, progressing from micro to macro, from the individual to the system, we aim to bring the future closer, endorse a sense of belonging and empower people in their quest for change. Therefore, offering a speculative dialogue that talks about the ordinary and the mundane, is one of the keys to promoting public engagement and actionable feedback in opposition to a passive acceptance of what will come, waiting for a top-down solutionist intervention. The interpretation of the signals that can inform the debate around the Future is intrinsically complex and whether it happens in research labs, universities, foresight studies, or a global summit, there is a diffuse, as well as understandable, lack of accessibility ¹. Art and design, but also literature and in general any creative expression, are ideal environments where one can grow a democratic understanding of the risks and opportunities connected to an idea of progress. Few of us can data-dive and decode the multitude of parameters that indicate possible futures or understand cutting-edge technologies; on the contrary, all of us can measure potential changes in our own lives, our families, our jobs, our feelings, and we can foresee individual solutions and aspire to personal states of happiness.

Marta’s Future

Marta is the character around whom the project, developed by Mariella Ottosson in collaboration with Media Evolution, gravitates. Marta has no specific powers nor bionic limbs, she has an ordinary social life, she lives in Malmö, Sweden, she works at an algae research center, and she seems relatively happy. Marta is also from the future but the amount of present we recognise in her story is the crucial factor that allows us to identify with her, feel what she feels, and start thinking about what our life would look like if we were born in her time ². Marta’s perspective defines three specific directionalities for this speculative exercise.

From inner self to outer world

One direction goes from Marta’s personality to the outer world. She is not the embodiment of what every future citizen should be, but just a player within her socio-cultural context. It is relatively easy to perceive her positive attitude, her proximity to her community, and her attachment to memory. The way her narrative is framed is far from providing utopic or dystopic images and more adjacent to concepts like Eupsychia—the aspiration to an ideal inner self—or Eutopia—the construction of a reachable and obtainable optimal future³ .

In speculative design theory, a strategy to capture the audience's attention is the use of disturbing or destabilising elements to question people’s assumptions and challenge their positions⁴. However, there’s nothing uncanny about Marta’s reality, we understand that the climate crisis transformed her world but there’s no fear for the future, no judgemental admonition or sense of guilt. In the last few decades, the battle for sustainability and environmental awareness has been fought on the ground of loud warnings and violent representations of the imminent destruction of our planet.

Unfortunately, those strategies didn’t seem to work and a change of tone, a suggestion that a deeper understanding and relation with nature is vital, not only to save us but mostly to re-establish the balance in a relationship that humans have dominated and abused for too long⁵. From Marta’s individuality, we have a glimpse of what is her surrounding, her community, and the broader empathy with other Swedish cities and citizens in what looks like an environmentally savvy and technologically advanced hive mind. Marta is fascinated by the new opportunity to communicate with nature, specifically algae, and appears at ease with her context, there is not a fight for survival but a will for collaboration.

From a human-centric approach to a planetarian egalitarianism

This introduces the second direction this work suggests looking at: from a human-centric vision to a planetarian egalitarianism. It’s easy to think of the future as a consequence of human actions and how those actions will make our existence at risk. The climate crisis is mostly about the human condition and the inability to keep up with the habits and lifestyles that are also the main cause of it. Nature will eventually regenerate at its own pace, while for us the clock is ticking and we feel the urge to solve the problem right here and now.

In Marta’s world, technology helps humans adjust to the new conditions, but there is also the idea of equal rights that goes beyond a mere anthropocentric view. In her world houses are lifted and no dams are built, nature is carefully listened to and cared for. Her optimism in the belief that technology will help inter-species harmony contrasts with the common perception that technology is a tool we should use to control nature and protect our hegemonic status. What if nature could vote if nature would have a voice in a planetarian congress? We will probably have just a bunch of ballots in our human hands compared with the vastity of the actors involved. Marta is inviting us to rethink our role in nature, not waiting for a savior, a human-centric technological wonder to save us but start working on a soft-landing towards a new holistic reality where humans and nature are connected and interdependent.

Hyper-contextual visions

The third change of focus in Marta’s story, the third direction that takes a distance from common conceptions, is the passage from a global and homogenous future to the valorisation of hyper-localised visions. An essential characteristic of the Future is that it is not real yet, we cannot verify its validity, so we can assume that everything could be possible and there’s no vision more valuable than another. However, the Future we are exposed to also represents a very concrete image that influences our present decision-making and our ability to build alternatives. For this reason, it is extremely important to consider the Future not as a singular entity but as an array of possibilities that all contribute to creating many future visions, all unique and all equally valuable. The principle that each individual as well as every single community should hold the right to self-determine their future is what the Anthropologist Arturo Escobar reports as Pluriverse, a world where many worlds fit.

Marta’s future is rooted in Malmö and no same future exists in that Pluriverse⁶ . Marta’s narrative builds on that specific context, those specific geological conditions, the history of the region, and the traits and traditions of its inhabitants. There is no will for universality, there is no assumption that other algae centers exist anywhere else outside Sweden, and there is no suggestion that Marta’s life is what everyone around the world should expect for their Future.

Another important point to highlight is the conversation around technology. The vast majority of the world’s countries are not developing their own technologies and they are left with no option but to import ready-made ones. Often societies are asked to adapt to innovations that are created and distributed by someone operating in very different cultural contexts endorsing what we can define as techno-colonialism ⁷. The company where Marta works, “Synthesis”, shows us the development of a fully endogenous technology that is a direct response to unique conditions and resources.

The importance of tangible futures

To conclude, I’d like to reflect on the value of tangible futures. Most of the speculative and critical design outcomes are based on the concept that the absorption of future scenarios should happen through direct and physical engagement with the speculative concept. Experiential futures are made by those artifacts, activities, and processes that facilitate the belief in the plausibility of those visions and consequently increase the chances to capture the viewer's attention, getting them involved, and finally, having them commit to further actions ⁸. Mariella’s installation and all its corollary activities and workshops are integral elements of the speculative process and extremely important access points to the crafted future. Way more than just logic has been put on the table; images, sound, physical prompts, and real social interactions helped the participants to immerse in Marta’s world, empathising with that idea of the future and fostering the growth of genuine opinions and commentaries.

People were invited to wear a lab coat, walk through a sensorial experience made of visuals and voice recordings, drink future water and, almost for osmosis, breathe the future of Malmö. Most importantly, the future experience didn’t stop with Marta who was intentionally just representing a small brick to that new reality. Plenty of space has been left for interpretation, allowing people to contribute to that vision; visitors and participants temporarily abandon their era and enter into Marta's world, describing what they saw and providing new clues to interpret our tomorrow that should be crowd-sourced, hyper-contextual and built on new sustainable premises.