Sustainability in an Imaginary World

The latest issue of the ACM’s journal Interactions features a short article I wrote that describes my postdoc project. Here’s the first paragraph:

What if our environmental crisis is as much a failure of our imagination as it is a moment of reckoning with the material consequences of modernity? What would technologically mediated public engagement with sustainability look like, if instead of discussing gallons of fuel or water consumed, carbon dioxide parts-per-million, or dollars spent and saved, we collectively explored visions of possible futures? These are the questions that motivate Sustainability in an Imaginary World, an interdisciplinary project funded by a three-year Insight Grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Initiated a year and a half ago, the project involves faculty members and students from The University of British Columbia’s arts, design, and social science communities, including theater, visual arts, sustainability, scenario analysis, and human-computer interaction. What we are building together is an interactive multimedia experience.

If all goes well, the installation will be open to the public in January, 2016.

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