In a world shaped by multiple intersecting crises, we need new hybrid formats for imagining possible futures. This requires not only new narratives, but also new ways of working with and making sense of vast, abstract datasets.
This talk presents an interdisciplinary, practice-based methodology that dovetails Speculative Design and climate science to reframe complex questions and explore possible climate futures.
Echoes is a two-year research and communication project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, investigating the cascading impacts of extreme weather events in the Alps. Focusing on megadroughts in the “water towers of Europe,” it traces repercussions across ecological, geopolitical, and socio-economic systems. Building on First Encounters (2021) and Turning the Ecological Gears (2022), Echoes advances an interdisciplinary approach that pairs design with science through joint scenario generation.
Combining high-performance climate modeling and eco-hydrological simulations with Speculative Design and worldbuilding, the project produces visual narratives of ecological entanglement in a more-than-human world. Following four rivers from their alpine sources to the sea, these narratives map how impacts propagate across space and time, revealing interdependencies within hydrological systems and foregrounding the politics of water in Europe’s future.
The project unfolds as an immersive exhibition and four-channel video installation. Using cascading effects and river meanders as a narrative structure, Echoes highlights the multiplicity of futures, emphasizing that they are neither singular nor predetermined. Across these spatial and sensory formats, data is transformed into embodied experience, enabling climate futures to be sensed, discussed, and critically engaged beyond purely analytical modes of understanding.