Anna Bertmark

Imagining Sustainable Futures by Inviting New Perspectives

Anna My Bertmark is a Swedish design researcher with a professional background in film sound, and a first degree in music technology. She has a particular interest in design futures, economies of care and systems-shifting design. The project outputs comprise of three narrative artefacts that interrogate the globally entangled and inequitable systems for meeting needs and desires that has long distorted causalities. Institutions of consumption are taken for granted as effective providers in the West, but deny us relationality, planetary feedback and responsible choices. Remedial strategies for mitigating negative externalities produced by these systems have promoted technological innovation and individual responsibility over systemic change. This project explores how narrative design methodologies that seek to provoke disorienting dilemmas and transformative learning, may trigger epistemic change toward more equitable lifestyles. The project aims to serve designers, entrepreneurs and citizens who identify as “caring consumers” and seek guidance for living well within planetary boundaries, and what innovation and culture could look like in this context. I engage research through design by making and collaborating, as well as utilising empirical research for steering the iterative processes. I utilised literary reviews for researching into current design theory and practice, and the surrounding themes of inquiry. Radical design modes and sensorial methodologies are developed to create systemic objects and narrative artefacts for encouraging epistemic and systems-change beyond rational and scientific sense-making. This project predominantly responds to work by Unknown Fields, Donella Meadows, Mathilda Tham, Stuart Candy and Dulmini Perera. References cited are mainly from a Western standpoint, as the contextual issues emerge from this worldview. I acknowledge that this influences the resulting insights for (re)designing a Western understanding of the world. Cited research encompasses transdisciplinary viewpoints of the explored topics, and although I make reference to Indigenous philosophy, I do not seek to appropriate these as Western solutions. I measure the project’s success through whether and how it invites curiosity from participants who engage with the outputs, the exhibition, and how it may open up opportunities for future design explorations. I hope this work to be a catalyst to undertake an MPhil research project or gain a design research residency to further explore systems-shifting design and post-rational design methodologies.

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