2021 ACSA/EAAE Teachers Conference

Designers will continue to create images that reach towards or even announce conditions of our near future, even while our terrestrial existence itself continues to change. The future imperfect describes scenarios for the post‐Anthropocene, wherein we imagine an image not in terms of modernity’s dichotomies between nature and science, but rather through the lens of a continual form of adaptive environmental change. Designers’ agency, in this sense, lies less in the making of a series of static marks on a page and more in the harvesting of information and signals in constant flux before our eyes. We draw in parameters, pixels, and point‐clouds; we rearrange constantly changing vectors and fields in front of our eyes, and translate that information through multiple mediums for communication, instantiation, and construction.

Climate crisis yields vast quantities of data on the near past, but we seek to document a near and likely imperfect future. Consider the next fifty years. What relations between human and non‐human, between atmosphere and geological strata, between dynamic modes of existence and the conditions of their stasis can we draw on in describing a future imperfect? We encourage the investigation of new tools and techniques of drawing that demonstrate our changing abilities as designers, architects, landscape architects and planners to simulate, model, and anticipate the ever‐changing conditions of our environment as an aesthetic matter of information. Building upon the conference’s theme on the state of design pedagogy in the face of climate change, this exhibition explores the making role of images as a form of climate agency.

Through this open call and invited contributors, we seek exemplary and original formats that image potential near futures in an era of climate crisis. While we primarily seek drawings by faculty, illustrating their work and pedagogy, we invite submissions of exemplary student work. We welcome a range of techniques that substantiate and challenge the basis of this medium.