Hirudinea lampyris: Untangling Sustainability through Design Fiction

17
to ground your work.
While sci-fi may have
the license for wild
tangents, design fiction
needs to relate back to
the now in order to be
function rhetorically.
Later on in my studies,
I rediscovered the work
of Sascha Pohflepp and
Daisy Ginsberg.
Pohflepp’s work is
incredibly thoughtthrough.
His essay, a
10,000 year garden,
reinvigorated my
project - but it was
his 2009 project, The
Golden Institute for
Energy that gave be my
‘aha’ moment.
The Golden Institute by Sascha
insberg
Pohflepp uses a
counterfactual catalyst
to reimagine what the
present would be like.
He imagined that Jimmy
Carter beat Ronald
Reagan in the 1980 US
presidential election,
and that clean energy
became a priority in US
Government. Lightening
fields became a normal
means of energy
production, while