What does precarious look like?
Image a future where limited energy and material resources lead to taxes being introduced for any resources wasted....
My project brings the climate crisis home by setting it in near-future Scotland, where extreme weather reshapes everyday domestic life. Using the kitchen as a “future-mundane” lab, I explore a post-abundance world where energy, water and materials are finite and metered. Flat-pack frames, hand-cranked appliances and scavenged steam collectors re-introduce bodily labour, asking how customs shift when boiling a kettle takes effort. By materialising these scenarios, the work turns abstract climate anxiety into concrete anticipation and invites younger generations to see resilient behaviours as both feasible and necessary.
Current Discourse
My research laid the conceptual framework for my current project by probing the sociocultural and psychological facets of climate change—especially climate anxiety, grief, and the lived sense of precarity.
Popular-culture lens: Climate references are more commonly appearing in popular cultural media, such as music interviews, showing how creative work is increasingly steeped in ecological dread and anticipatory loss. These public narratives helped position my design within wider cultural responses to instability.
Interviews with 18- to 25-year-olds: Structured conversations revealed widespread stress, grief, and hopelessness and how these feelings reshape people’s ties to place. The findings fed a user-centred design narrative aimed at weaving emotional resilience into outcomes.
Expert insight: A discussion with Karen Ridgewell, Climate Emergency & Sustainability Lead at Creative Scotland, exposed systemic and cultural hurdles to adaptation. She stressed storytelling’s power to span past, present, and future experiences of change—affirming the need for design interventions that pair material solutions with social and behavioural shifts.
Core tension: comfort vs. empowerment: Across all sources, participants wrestled with the trade-off between reassuring people and galvanising them. This dialectic now anchors my project, pushing me to craft responses that soothe climate-related distress while fostering agency and practical action.
What does it Contain?
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