The Big O: Designing Speculative Pasts, Imagining Lacustrine Futures
Lake Okeechobee is a shallow freshwater lake in the center of southern Florida. At over 700 square miles and an average of less than 10 feet of depth, it is a giant sawgrass-filled puddle that has been poked, prodded, drowned, drained, and re-plumbed constantly over the past century. In a tumultuous collection of events, it was transformed from the highly dynamic center of southern Florida’s hydraulic system to what is today, a continuous effort to maintain the lake as a highly managed reservoir. The lake and the region face challenges of social justice, agriculture management, politics, environmental pollution, infrastructure, and so on. For all of these reasons, the Big O is a rich subject for counterfactual thought.
This studio used the strategy of counterfactual speculation (sometimes known as recasting) to imagine how alternative historical scenarios could assist in building more contextual and just futures. Instead of projecting speculative design ideas into the future, (and often ignoring insurmountable unknowns such as technological advancement) in an attempt to imagine a world we should aim for, counterfactual speculation looks backward at past events, circumstances, and contingencies and imagines what the present day might look like had these circumstances been different. Assisted by these historically tethered possibilities, futures can be co-imagined by larger groups of individuals that extend beyond the sole designer.
As a pedagogical exercise, counterfactual thinking requires a solid grasp of the past events of any given place, where other forms of speculative design thinking can, and often do, ignore them or their interdependency. Speculations are based on how things work (or worked) within a particular context, thus students were asked to develop a solid grasp of local landscape history in order to craft alternatives to it that both remain logical and serve a particular persuasive purpose. Put simply, they designed different presents, based on creatively reconfigured pasts, to inspire future decision-making.
