What can designers learn from SolarPunk?

A few months ago, I started to dive into SolarPunk narratives by mere (happy) accident. SolarPunk as a genre is not really new, as it has existed for more than a decade, but, as the term “punk” suggests, it is a sub-culture and, to some extent, it offers counter-mainstream-narratives if not criticisms of our current societies.

Introduction to Solarpunk

SolarPunk is deeply interesting to designers as it proposes an optimistic hybridisation of technology, nature, diversity, and a sense of “finding back a form of purpose and meaning” and a form of “harmony between individuals, societies and nature” by regaining autonomy against eco-socio-technical challenges we are facing. In other words, it offers to think beyond the current ecological, societal and economic constraints and struggles by providing liminal spaces for opportunities and adjacent possibles, not necessarily through futuristic narratives but, counter-intuitively, by being grounded in a form of present, of “now”.

Before we dive deeper, it has to be said that SolarPunk (Solarpunk) isn’t a cohesive single-narrative, object, or proposition. It is a coherent yet diversified and possibly contradictory assemblage of ideas, ideologies, concepts, movements, arts, etc. It is often associated with a sci-fi writing genre that emerged in the 2010s, but it is important to clarify that it is not bounded or limited to it. So, in this series, I will refer to SolarPunk as an umbrella term for all those things unless specified or stated otherwise.

Origins

It is assumed that “the term was coined in 2008 in a blog post titled ‘From Steampunk to Solarpunk’ in which the anonymous author […] conceptualises a new speculative fiction subgenre with steampunk’s focal point on specific technologies but guided by practicality and modern economics” (Wikipedia, 2023)…