Future Now / Chapter Two

“Everything Is Connected”

As architects, visualizers, and 3D artists some of us surely feel a kind of paralysis when it comes to integrating measures against the Climate Change. We are still going to work every day, drive our cars, fly our flights. No emergency yet announced in Zurich, no letters calling for restrictive water use, no electricity cuts… not yet. (Interview by Daniel Ryser / reporter at magazine REPUBLIK and ETH-Klima­forscher Reto Knutti)

But while we still have the chance to go to work the way we used to do, we could ask ourselves “How can we integrate active measures in our daily life to protect us, our families and friends, what we love and what we love doing ?”

In the first step we need to reset our thinking, our awareness. For our brain to love the familiar and denies the unfamiliar (Marissa Peer), we need to collect, share and spread the right doses of information in a way that makes the problem directly connected to us. Arid Zones and Climate Refugees are sometimes still too far away for us, too abstract. The problems have to touch us emotionally, they have to interrupt our daily habits and living areas and speak to our hearts. Otherwise, we won`t be able to absorb it fully and we won`t feel any need to act. If we look outside the window everything looks normal here in Zurich, or Cologne or Rome… except some FridaysForFuture demonstrations calling for our attention and staying on the ball.

It touched me emotionally. Flipping through social media, I came with more and more articles, people and organizations across, dealing actively or passively with the climate and biodiversity emergency. It was not only the content, but it was also how it was communicated to me. The more the informations encroached my personal life (especially via words and visualized images like “When Sea Levels Attack”) and spoke to my heart (like the short film “Up At Night – a film by Nelson Makengo”) and the closer the scenarios reached me, the stronger the need for an action grew: to lead through mentally and reset some of my life areas and to find creative ways to act. For everything is connected and for we are all in this together, we need to reset everywhere together and change our everyday habits.

Now from a companies` perspective, you can break it down to this: For saving what we love doing (in our case for more inspiring architectural visualizations) we need to bring what we know now into our daily actions and habits. And we need new concepts.

“How we are gonna translate what we know into what we do?” Olafur Eliason on his project “The Glacier Melt Series”. We need to do something now for tomorrow, but tomorrow is already here. Let`s do it. Future Now.

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