Solarpunk Futures
Nobody has been guilted into a better future, so the workshops start from a future people would want and work back.
Our reality resembles too closely the dystopian worlds cyberpunk has been warning about since the eighties, and alarmist narratives dominate the media. The violence and injustice of the world must be shown, but not at the cost of hope. Solarpunk Futures is a touring worldbuilding format for engineers, biodesigners and students, and a podcast, Solarpunk Manifesto, that I co-host with Lola Kengen.
Universities and festivals, from UPC Barcelona to S+T+ARTS, the Biodesign Challenge Symposium and the Ateneu Barcelonès, invited the format as a way to get technical audiences past apocalypse and techno-utopia as the only two futures on offer.
The slow acceptance of biotechnology is not merely technical; it stems from a lack of compelling visions of a positive, bio-integrated future. Critical theory's list of -isms rarely reaches the lab or the classroom. Solarpunk supplies both an ethos and a logos: practical, science-based solutions with a refusal of "no alternative".
Three tested methods, scenario-building, alter-ego narration and backcasting, run with 85 engineering students at UPC Barcelona and presented at the Biodesign Challenge Symposium in New York; talks at S+T+ARTS, iGEM and the Ateneu; the first biodesign conference in Paris; a podcast whose second season is dedicated to solarpunk.
Engineers are trained to picture the world their technical choices lead to, before they make them.
A format, a podcast and a room
The workshop moves through three exercises. Scenario-building puts the group inside a plausible future and asks what is different in daily life. Alter-ego narration asks each participant to speak as someone living there. Backcasting works from that future to the decisions that would have to be made this decade. The methods were evaluated with 85 undergraduate engineering students at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, and the format adapts to half a day or a full one.
Blueprints for better epistemologies stay buzzwords
At S+T+ARTS in Barcelona I argued that the frameworks meant to rethink scientific practice, decolonisation, anti-reductionism, equity, rarely gain momentum in labs and curricula, which leaves scientists carrying anthropocentrism, extractivism and technosolutionism by default. Solarpunk was proposed as the engine to translate those blueprints into daily practice, grounded in Buckminster Fuller's principle of rendering the existing model obsolete.
The podcast is not a research output and I do not present it as one. It is where the thinking gets tested against people who know more than I do, and the networked cohort of guests and listeners is, so far, its real product.
Make room for what students want
Engineering education transmits facts and rarely creates space for students to reflect on their values, emotions and aspirations for the collective future. The pedagogical shift I proposed at the Biodesign Challenge Symposium is intentional worldbuilding inside the curriculum: linking technical problem-solving to its social and environmental dimensions through futures literacy, so that active hope and agency become skills rather than moods. The students' worlds were more specific than the field's, and that specificity is what makes them buildable.
Solarpunk as a way of knowing, with an aesthetic attached.
Solar, and punk
Solar stands for renewable energy and decentralised solutions as the exit from ecocide; punk for the rebellious spirit against the perceived logic of no alternative. Together they blend technology with nature to get past extractivism and hierarchy. The Paris conference, How to Grow a Biodesigner?, was curated on the same premise, that biodesign is a tool for societal transition only when it constructs alternative imaginaries rather than new materials alone.
Where Constructive Escapism began
The workshops and the podcast are where Constructive Escapism was worked out in public before it had the name.
What they show is that technical audiences will do the imaginative work readily when given a format, and that the worlds they build are the brief for everything else I make.