Exploring post-neoliberal futures for managing commercial heating and cooling through speculative praxis
🤖 AI Summary
Under post-neoliberal conditions, carbon reduction in commercial building heating and cooling has long been constrained by incremental efficiency optimization and individual behavioral interventions. Method: This study proposes a systemic paradigm shift—replacing the techno-behavioral binary—with a situated, narrative-driven future energy scenario, developed through the fictional consultancy ANCSTRL.LAB. It integrates design fiction, speculative practice, (post)anthropocentric design, and systems thinking. Crucially, it establishes design fiction as a critical research methodology, informed by post-neoliberal theory, to deconstruct market logic’s disciplinary role in energy governance. Contribution/Results: The work advances a paradigmatic transition from “energy conservation” to “rewiring energy relations,” offering LIMITS researchers an actionable, creative methodological framework that deepens sustainable design’s material interventions and transformative capacity.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
What could designing for carbon reduction of heating and cooling in commercial settings look like in the near future? How can we challenge dominant mindsets and paradigms of efficiency and behaviour change? How can we help build worlds through our practice that can become future realities? This paper introduces the fictional consultancy ANCSTRL.LAB to explore opportunities for making space in research projects that can encourage more systems-oriented interventions. We present a design fiction that asks `what if energy management and reduction practice embraced systems thinking?'. Our design fiction explores how future energy consultancies could utilise systems thinking, and (more than) human centred design to re-imagine energy management practice and change systems in ways that are currently unfathomable. We finish by discussing how LIMITS research can utilise design fiction and speculative praxis to help build new material realities where more holistic perspectives, the leveraging of systems change, and the imagining of post-neoliberal futures is the norm.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Exploring carbon reduction in commercial heating and cooling
Challenging dominant efficiency and behavior change paradigms
Reimagining energy management using systems thinking
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Fictional consultancy explores systems-oriented interventions
Design fiction re-imagines energy management with systems thinking
Speculative praxis leverages holistic perspectives for change
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