Energy Economy
Speculative Design & Discourse
Role: Design Researcher, Visual Designer & Facilitator
Team: Anna Pierce + Ella Rocker
Partners: Times Square Alliance
Year: 2022
Situated in the year 2063, our team brought a pop-up experience at the heart of Times Square that invited people to sign-up for a free seven-day trial of the Energy Economy.
A technology that intends to harness your excess thermal energy to offset one’s cost-of-living expenses.The core of the Energy Economy experiment was the belief that simply existing qualifies you to access the goods and services necessary to live a full and joyful life.
Constantly iterating over the futures wheel, and signal scanning, we speculated the implications of our idea. We started to construct a future where our pop-up experience could be as immersive and realistic as possible. We wrote scripts, rehearsed them, came up with potential duty roles, and designed relevant artifacts to embody this world that we were building.
Our idea for the service was simple, once a client enrolls, they are free to choose five living costs to put their Eons (the currency from their harnessed energy) toward housing, climate stabilizers, healthcare, groceries, intergalactic wifi, etc. Any remaining Eons would automatically be deposited into their Energy Reserve, and when they are no longer needed, they can be passed along to future generations.
Energy Economy in the making!
We put together almost 100 sterilized kits with a tattoo and an alcohol swab each.
In action! Anna, our Energy Agent, gave a spiel about what the product was and how it worked. Ella, our Energy Doula, guided people through selecting their utilities and introduced them to an addendum they could add to their will. And I, an Energy Engager, installed the device (temporary tattoos) through a painless procedure and activated them (with Icy Hot) for energy collection.
Our professor once said, “In an experience, you want to be the bartender, not the waiter.” What he meant was to make people eagerly come to you, rather than you going to them. People were attracted to our pop-up simply to get a temporary tattoo. But by going through the entire process before getting a tattoo, they actively absorbed the experience; they asked us all sorts of questions that we had not even thought about, had curious smiles on their faces when they went away, and some even brought back more friends to see it! What I take away from this project is the understanding of how powerful speculative design can be as a method for thought-provoking discourse, deriving deeper insights, and a form of critique. One cannot force people into a future they don’t understand, we can only try to bring them closer to one of the possibilities through world-building and storytelling.
