Core77

One of the most narrative installations in the Eco City Lab pavilion of the Saint -Étienne Design Biennale 2008 was Franççois Jégou's Sustainable Everyday installation--a series of small LCD screens with an array of personal stories displayed on each. Here's François:

What are more sustainable ways of living? What would the daily life of a family, a student or a pensioner be like if all the sustainable initiatives, projects, and ideas presented at the Biennale International Design were available now in Saint-Étienne?

To try to answer this question, we asked some people from the French city to imagine themselves in a more sustainable society, to imagine their current life using solutions that reduce our impact on the environment and regenerate the social fabric around us.
Emma, Gabriel, Marie, Margot, Martin and Paul have brought us their "slice of the everyday" to inspire us and show us how we too can imagine ourselves living a more sustainable lifestyle.

The resulting series of images are like little 'photo-novels' which together present several solutions and a multi-faceted vision from the users point of view. These stories, told by Saint-Étienne residents and photographed in their kitchen or in the streets, are the kind of exercise of scenario co-design with users that we develop at Strategic Design Scenarios; in which visions are built up and visualised, creating tangible proposals for ways to transform our society and prompt the social conversation on our future. These visions are realist and pragmatic: they show solutions that already exists in Saint-Étienne, imminent projects or solutions that exist elsewhere. Together they form "hybrid realities" that are realistic enough to make us question our own lifestyles, but still sufficiently open-ended for us to be able to adapt them to our own lives. The very fact that visitors are not sure if they are reality or fiction means that they are likely to happen soon.

These visions also illustrate various promising scenarios for transition towards sustainable development: a 'quick scenario' based on developed public services offering standard and easy-access sustainable solutions; a 'slow scenario' based on "enabling systems", allowing 'amateurs' to improve their performance and achieve higher quality result; and a 'co-op scenario' based on collaborative networks and mutual assistance. Each of these three scenarios constitutes a different strategy to guide design for sustainable development.

More at www.sustainable-everyday.net and www.solutioning-design.net.

>> View all Saint-Étienne Design Biennale posts here.