Project by Design I/O is a huge interactive installation for children for the New York Hall of Science, featuring an ecosystem of virtual animals to play with:
Connected Worlds is a large scale immersive, interactive ecosystem developed for the New York Hall of Science. The installation is composed of six interactive ecosystems spread out across the walls of the Great Hall, connected together by a 3000 sqft interactive floor and a 45ft high waterfall. Children can use physical logs to divert water flowing across the floor from the waterfall into the different environments, where they can then use their hands to plant seeds. As the different environments bloom, creatures appear based on the health of the environment and the type of plants growing in it. If multiple environments are healthy creatures will migrate between them causing interesting chain reactions of behaviors.
Connected Worlds is designed to encourage a systems thinking approach to sustainability where local actions in one environment may have global consequences. Children work with a fixed amount of water in the system and have to work together to manage and distribute the water across the different environments. Clouds return water from the environments to the waterfall which releases water to the floor when it rains.
Scientists [in the U.S.] are currently just testing the waters with one tidal-powered generator, but if all goes swimmingly, then it might not be long until America finds more and more of its power being supplied by the ocean.
Had a dream about designing solar punk outfits for house elves and it reminded me of this comic by French cartoonist/writer Boulet (full version after the jump) that speculates on applications of Potterverse magic to environmental restoration. Seriously, though, why was eco-magic not more of a thing in HP? Hufflepuffs like myself and Sprout would’ve been all over that. (Although, to be fair, Hogwarts and its surrounding country is a sort of protected habitat for a lot of magical creatures who can’t live anywhere else in the British Isles, so maybe there’s more going on that we get to see. I bet Hagrid is involved in conservation efforts and breeding programs.)
Here’s a fun little worldbuilding thought experiment for all us writers.
Stories with post-scarcity settings - that is, settings where basic goods and services are available in effectively unlimited quantities due to replicators, robots, etc. - often propose that money would be a thing of the past, since obviously nobody would ever need to buy anything. However, this perspective often overlooks the problem of intrinsically scarce luxuries.
Formally, an intrinsically scarce luxury is something that’s inherently impossible to replicate or obtain in unlimited qualities, due to prestige, geographic barriers, or other factors. Examples include living space near particular landmarks (e.g., there can only be so many houses with a good view of Niagara Falls), possession of antiques or collectibles (e.g., even if you can produce as many copies of a particular book as you want, the number of books from the very first edition is finite, and will tend to diminish over time as copies are lost or destroyed), and so forth.
Of course, most intrinsically scarce luxuries are pretty hoity-toity stuff, so the problem is often framed in terms of something a little more relatable: concert tickets. Nearly everyone loves music, and live musical performances are intrinsically scarce because musical artists aren’t interchangeable: you don’t want to see any musical artist perform, you want to see that particular musical artist perform. For this reason, the problem of intrinsically scarce luxuries is sometimes known as the Concert Ticket Problem.
To address a couple of basic objections, it’s true that access can be maximised by having frequent performances in large venues, until the number of available seats exceeds the number of prospective attendees, but for extremely popular artists, it may actually be impossible in practice to hit that ratio. Besides, what if a popular artist doesn’t want to put on massive daily shows in giant arenas? What if they want to perform only rarely, or in smaller, more intimate venues? Certainly, as artists that’s their right.
Likewise, the problem could be obviated by having the artist personally pick and choose who gets to attend, but some artists may not care who comes to their shows, or just won’t want to deal with the hassle, so this isn’t a universally applicable solution.
So how do you determine who gets those tickets?
That’s the thought experiment in a nutshell: if you’re writing a story with a post-scarcity setting - or even if you aren’t, and just want to try it out for fun - how does your setting’s society solve the Concert Ticket Problem?
(For bonus points, if you’re aiming for a moneyless post-scarcity setting in particular, propose a system that isn’t vulnerable to being gamed or manipulated in a way that amounts to re-inventing money.)
This is kind of a lazy problem, though? I mean, even if we just look at the real world, for popular events there are always more people with enough money for a ticket than there are tickets. Hence attendance at events is often determined by a combination of luck and whether you were able to get into the online booking system within the first fifteen minutes after tickets went on sale. Some event organisers know this will happen, so they allow an unlimited number of people to request a ticket and then do a lottery to see who gets one - Wimbledon is an example of this. The same thing could be done with a limited edition new thing, of some description.
If your society is particularly hot on both equality and surveillance, you could have a system where people who haven’t been to an event recently are prioritised when they request tickets. Or where tickets are randomly assigned and then people trade them. I’m sure other people can think of more interesting ideas, too.
Ofc there’s nothing wrong with including a money system in a post-scarcity setting. But it’s not obligatory, there are lots of other ways of solving the concert ticket problem, and in fact the chances are that you will have to think of other ways to act as a supplement, unless your world has enough economic inequality that demand never outstrips supply.
Oh, sure, the problem can be reduced to something trivial - at least in some formulations - if you assume the presence of a universal surveillance state, and further presume that this surveillance data would be used for such trivial purposes as distributing concert tickets. Those assumptions, themselves, tell you a great deal about how your setting is put together, which is the point of the exercise.
(In the absence of a universal surveillance state, of course, the lottery approach runs into issues if you want to go for the “not re-inventing money” bonus points, since most lottery-based approaches are vulnerable to clever parties gaming the system to snaffle up disproportionate numbers of tickets and using them for trade or barter.)
I think we already know a lot about distribution not based on money.
Within families or friends, the things we do or give have no financial interest, only the mutual benefit in mind (well, ideally). And with cultural events that have a huge following vs a small number of events to participate in (attending a top league soccer game, a big convention, a big concert) we have this problem and a number of ways to handle them. Yes, money is involved in the latter, but for all those who have the ticket money, we still need and have the actual distribution to manage.
I think the most interesting part of the thought-experiment needs is defining ‘luxury items’. So, in this kind of society, people would have things they need for not to die, also let’s say they have what they need to socialize and have family. In return, they have certain obligations.
There are so many very different ways to define luxury in post-scarcity societies. Maybe it’s freedom of certain obligations? Maybe it’s being in a powerful enough position to bend the rules? Maybe it’s more comfort? Maybe more sex? More experiences, more learning, more widening horizons? Maybe (very certainly, actually), it’s access where other people haven’t?
I would be so intrigued to see the whole ‘luxury as more choices’ thing explored (although it mostly likely would be linked to higher status, too, and luxury can actually limit choices, too). And the whole underlying cultural norms interest me more than the actual technical implementation.
On the other hand… how do people measure achievement in the Star Trek universe, apart from elaborate and rather pretentious testing? What does or doesn’t merit get them in a civilian context?
Yep, it is an interesting world-building detail.
“Access where other people haven’t” is one way of framing it, yes. Most intrinsically scarce luxuries can be boiled down to access in one way or another: access to cultural events that only a limited number of people can attend, access to antiques and collectibles of which only a limited number exist, and so forth. The specific types of intrinsically scarce luxuries that the society of the setting in question cares about will constrain the range of potential solutions, but does not necessarily dictate any solution in particular.
Thinking about knocking together a quick primer/guide/inspiration kit for folks writing next month on Solarpunk themes. Would you be interested in this? Would you like to contribute?
I would be interested and would love to contribute!
i’ve been thinking about trying NaNoWriMo and this would be so cool!
in a solarpunk world/future what are the politics like? how about careers and schooling? is homelessness and poverty still an issue?
i love thinking about how these things would work and if they’d be solved in this supposed ‘ideal world’
This is a pretty big question, and I think it’s kind of hard to answer in any straightforward way. A lot of solarpunks have subtlely-to-widely varying political views, though I think socialism is a pretty strong undercurrent. Ending homelessness and poverty could, I think, be characterized as a core solarpunk political goal.
It’s also hard to say what would be solved and what wouldn’t in a “Solarpunk future,” since solarpunk seeks to depict various points along the range between the present and the envisioned futures. A solarpunk narrative strongly interested in solving homelessness, set in a world 10 years out from the present, probably isn’t going to feature homelessness being solved.
Careers and schooling are both also difficult things to make definite statements about – as long as we’re talking about fiction, it depends how the individual author envisions humankind dealing with the increasing effectiveness of automation – do careers become a thing of the past? (Are they already?) Does the author imagine new jobs to take the place of the disappearing ones? Does work become a thing people do because it’s how they engage socially with their community, rather than how they prove their entitlement to the resources necessary for their survival?
School becomes quickly even more difficult and personal. Speaking from a US perspective, most US-schooled people have had traumatic experiences related to our education, and the nature of those traumas influence what we think is important in the future of education. I suspect that as individual writers many solarpunks hold wildly diverse views on what needs to be done to solve the problems of the existing education system, or build a functional one from scratch. In terms of the practice of change in real life, I think what we need is to be fluid about learning which of these approaches are effective, and to be ready to give up on strategies that turn out to work less well than it seemed they would at first.
Personally, I’m not interested in depictions of ideal worlds very much. I’m interested in depictions of better worlds, populated by people actively engaged in pursuing better worlds. There’s been a fair amount of discussion around rejecting the word “utopia” when discussing solarpunk settings, which I support; I don’t think it’s a bad idea to depict solarpunk settings as containing flaws. We want to look to a future that we can imagine – not just in the sense of being able to picture it, but being able to see ourselves living in it, in a future we can believe will happen. (That’s not to say solarpunk futures need to be 100 percent realistic, all the time, though. Just that they should feel like desirable futures to as many readers as possible.)
Okay, so I got a review copy of Wings of Renewal a while ago, and finally found the time to write a review. I’m going to be discussing the book holistically, both because I don’t want to single anyone out and I also didn’t take notes. A bit about me before we start: I’m a published writer, and also a prose reader for a fairly prestigious lit mag. Not telling you my name or that of the magazine for privacy reasons but yeah.
It was a strong collection; while there were some pieces I felt needed a bit more editorial work, there was nothing I felt was Bad; I liked all the stories. Each world took the idea of solarpunk and dragons in a completely different direction, from alternate history Earth to pure fantasy. It was an extremely diverse collection; when I reached the first story about a straight (though interracial) couple I was actually shocked. Lot’s of subtle representation, mentioning men’s husbands etc. That was nice. We also saw some glimpses of the solarpunk social order, some of which I saw as stemming from my ideas (or maybe not) so that was something cool to see.
There were so many different dragons: elemental dragons, cyborg dragons, regional dragons, etc. Something that came up often was dragons who derived energy from the sun, but that’s a pretty obvious conclusion to come to based on the prompt of “solarpunk dragons” so I’m not holding it against the collection.
There were also two stories with very similar plots, but they came from such different perspectives that I thought it still worked; both were equally strong. More details (with spoilers) at the bottom of the post.
Now for stuff I didn’t like.
there was a lot of monarchism which just seemed… unnecessary and reactionary… yikes!
some typical scifi overexplaination of events. I like my scifi to be light on exposition so you just learn about the world via osmosis, but w/e
integration of tech was sometimes awkward. for example mentions of 3d printers are kind of jarring in a solarpunk world–the technology would probably not be an exact analogue of what we have and it seemed out of place
a well done example of the above was a story that included cell phones but never used the word phone, which was good since it was fantasy
it was a bit long for a short story collection
Overall, I thought this was a great way to start off this literary movement!
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
The two similar stories both involved a character interacting and bonding with a witch who lived on the edges of their town. Eventually it is revealed that the witch can transform into a dragon, and the story is resolved when the witch uses her dragon powers to a. create a storm or b. keep a storm from hitting the town. first solarpunk trope maybe?
The story I’m considering writing during NaNoWriMo may or may not have a “witch” who “makes it rain”. Although, since I’m barely into the outline, that could all change.
things to consider when advocating for a tech-free, back-to-earth future:
some us need technology to learn, eat, breathe, sleep, function
removing technology does not automatically fix everything shitty in our society
cyborg people already exist with our assistive technologies/devices, to say that we are becoming less human as we become more reliant on technology is shitty and ableist
let’s not be so one dimensional ok
Thank you. If your pro-nature, pro-green, pro-DIY future is anti-me-living, I don’t really want to be a part of it, thanks. I mean, not that I would be anyway.
I think a solar punk future is not completely technology free. I envision the internet still being huge, as if everyone’s idea of humanity moving into smaller communities is true, we will be using internet as a major component of information, communication, and socialization.
For me Solarpunk has been anything but anti tech. In fact, it’s been anit-anti-tech. The whole ‘technology has become the destroyer of humanity, robots will kill us, what is a soul when people are mostly computers in the future’ stuff is very cyberpunk and while I love that genre and I think the questions it asks are cool, it also paints a very black and white picture of what technology actually is. technology can be green. Humans use tools and develop better tools. We face the future armed with what allows us to flourish. In Solarpunk, we answer the questions of cyberpunk by saying Yes, technology can be scary, we can use it to do evil, but it’s not an inherent trait. We fund most cutting edge stuff now with our military because that is where they money is. But it doesn’t have to be. Tech might change what we think makes a person human, but to be honest, our ideas of what makes personhood are already pretty terrible. We can use tech to improve the earth rather than kill it. I think of the key ways Solarpunk is different from the Green movement is it addresses these questions and doesn’t advocate a ‘return to the earth’ that forces us to fall back 500 years of development. The answer is so much more complex than ‘tech is good vs tech is bad’.
This is why green energy is such a big part of Solarpunk. (I mean, it’s sort of in the name.) Some aspects of tech need to be completely renovated in order to stop being harmful, and we’re all for that. But a ton of tech just needs to be plugged into a power source that isn’t all about aerosolizing all the accumulated carbon from the entire history of life on earth.
The internet, mobile phones, artificial lighting, anything with an electric motor – all things that become basically carbon neutral as soon as you’re plugging them into a carbon neutral grid.
And tbh, pre-industrial styles of energy production were as bad as, or worse than, coal and oil, in terms of energy gained to greenhouse gasses emitted. The only reason they could be considered better for the environment is that they’d be basically impossible to use on an industrial scale. (Not that no one would try, which would be disastrous for forests worldwide.)
Saying we should go back to pre-industrial tech is saying it’d probably be better for the environment if we let most of the humans die. That might be true – although where we’re at it may require human intervention to undo the damage we’ve done – but I would argue that suggesting it is, basically, evil.
The only way forward that has any hope of succeeding is in the invention of new tech that mitigates and reverses the effects of the fuel of the old tech.
All true. Solarpunk is NOT a movement that is anti-tech. Hell, part of the founding idea of it was inclusion of disabled people who need tech to get through the day. What solarpunk IS, however, is a movement that wants to IMPROVE on the tech we already have. Which is why it may seem anti-tech at first glance: we do want to get rid of some of the current tech that people use, but more important than just getting rid of it, we want to REPLACE it with something that works better and is more environmentally friendly.
Here’s the thing that I’ve noticed so far, though. In our excitement about tech, especially assistive tech, we have been ignoring some of the opinions of people (disabled people especially) who use that tech. In our push make everything more green, we’ve been avoiding the question of what to do with things that can’t or shouldn’t be changed.
That’s something we need to include in our discussions of the subject more obviously, because the OP is absolutely right. If people see us talking about “everything is going to be solar-powered!”, and then they look at their assistive tech which can never be made solar-powered, it’s going to sound like we don’t want them in our future.
This came up not long ago for me when we were discussing alternate wheelchair designs. Suddenly everyone was all about tossing out traditional wheelchairs. While that’s a conversation worth having, it did make me feel alienated because I use a traditional wheelchair, and I like it, and I have no intention of switching.
So what I’m saying that everyone is quick to jump on this post saying, “that’s not what solarpunk is!”, but we really do need to step back from that initial defensive response and say, “yeah, that’s not what solarpunk is, but why is it being perceived that way?”.
solarpunk is still an infant genre and i want to kill it already because i dont want solarpunk to be a story i want it to be a reality
ok but that’s the point though. stories are how we build an understanding of what realities are possible and how we pursue them. solarpunk is fiction as activism: everyone here wants it to be a reality.
Yeah, I would say that Solarpunk has arisen from the very real dilemmas facing humans at this moment in our collective history. It’s a novel and engaging answer to a lot of very hard questions about how we’re going to live on this planet in the future, and the fact that it’s being discussed in the language of memes, and cosplay, and original characters makes it somehow more authentic because the language of social media is part of what has enabled us to have these conversations (with a lot of the filters removed) in the first place.
solarpunk is still an infant genre and i want to kill it already because i dont want solarpunk to be a story i want it to be a reality
ok but that’s the point though. stories are how we build an understanding of what realities are possible and how we pursue them. solarpunk is fiction as activism: everyone here wants it to be a reality.
The future is vibrant, hopeful, and filled with dragons!
Dragons are primordial forces of nature—beautiful and dangerous, just like it. As legendary beasts, they are incredibly well suited for solarpunk, a science fiction genre centered on sustainable and hopeful futures. Whether they irrigate dry terrain or serve as spaceships, are mythic creatures come to life or biomechanical creations of man, these dragons show us a world where renewable energy overcomes gas and oil, and cooperation replaces competition.
If you want a change from dystopian fiction or gritty fantasy, Wings of Renewal is the perfect anthology for you! So hop on solar wings and dive in these breathtaking universes. All you have to do is follow the link and choose your provider!
Short on cash? Think this looks awesome? Help us out and signal boost the heck out of it. Wings of Renewal is a labor of love, and we’d love to reach as many people as possible!
I’m reading it now, and there are so many great stories in this anthology! It’s amazing how the writers have taken the genre and the prompt in so many different directions. There’s something here for pretty much everyone! Definitely worth the purchase!
Followers, please signal boost this! All of the stories are amazing, and so are the authors and the publishers! Support these great people! ♥️♥️♥️♥️
We’re getting ready to print the zines for the next set of “Everything Bagel” Patreon rewards, and we wanted to let you know that today is the last day to get Issue 2 of Solarpunk Press’ zine!
Our goal is to become sustainable at $200 per month so that we can keep publishing Solarpunk fiction past year 1.
The future is vibrant, hopeful, and filled with dragons!
Dragons are primordial forces of nature—beautiful and dangerous, just like it. As legendary beasts, they are incredibly well suited for solarpunk, a science fiction genre centered on sustainable and hopeful futures. Whether they irrigate dry terrain or serve as spaceships, are mythic creatures come to life or biomechanical creations of man, these dragons show us a world where renewable energy overcomes gas and oil, and cooperation replaces competition.
If you want a change from dystopian fiction or gritty fantasy, Wings of Renewal is the perfect anthology for you! So hop on solar wings and dive in these breathtaking universes. All you have to do is follow the link and choose your provider!
Short on cash? Think this looks awesome? Help us out and signal boost the heck out of it. Wings of Renewal is a labor of love, and we’d love to reach as many people as possible!
i also see a lot of solarpunks like “sew all your own clothes! factories are bad!”
i don’t get why a factory that runs entirely off solar power would be bad. factories are what allow us to make plenty of food for our population, clothe our entire population, etc. the means of production isn’t necessarily evil. thats not to say it doesnt need to be rethought but seriously, your theoretical solarpunk societies tend to have absolutely no means of production.
zero-emission solar factories for solarpunk is good. maybe reducing the amount of factories for things like clothes is good (to maybe help revitalize the garment industry and create more jobs?) but… still…
Clothes mostly aren’t made mechanically in factories – they’re made in sweatshops, because handling fabric and thread is still beyond our ability to mechanize affordably.
The question of where clothes should come from is a super complicated one, and definitely deserves a lot of sophisticated attention. But at our current technological level, mechanized factories aren’t an option.
Another issue with factories is that mass production of uniform parts is inherently wasteful: T-shirts that come in 5 sizes produced in enough surplus to always be available means we always make more T-shirts than are actually needed, that virtually all T-shirts use a bit more fabric than is needed, and because all T-shirts are slightly mis-fit, they wear poorly and need to be replaced more often than tailored clothes would be.
Making your own clothes isn’t necessarily always an option either: it’s a huge investment of time, and while it doesn’t take a huge amount of skill to make better clothes than you can get off the rack, it’s still a non-trivial investment in experimentation and learning.
I recommend Charles Stross’s blog post “The revolution will not be hand-stitched,” for an in-depth exploration of possibilities for a future of mechanized clothing construction. But on shorter timescales the answer to “How do we stop relying so heavily on sweatshops” has to be, at least in part, “Make some of our own clothes or make clothes within the community.”
Theoretical solarpunk societies usually trend, not toward “no means of production” as you put it, but toward distributed means of production: gift economies, widespread 3D printing, skillshares, etc. A lot of stuff either already doesn’t, or won’t for much longer, need to be industrialized: for example, anything made of plastic that can afford to be wrong on the scale of micrometers. (Think Command Hooks.) Or anything that can be produced in small batches given known chemical processes. (Think the sticky parts of Command Hooks.) As long as the amount of time it takes to make something is equal to or less than the length of time it would take to order it on Amazon Prime, we mostly don’t need to already have thousands of them on shelves in stores all across the country.
Centralized factories also mean environmental costs for transporting goods. It’s possible for this to be the most environmentally economical approach, but under the current circumstances, it never is: trucks and planes emit a lot of carbon, and trucking does a lot of long-term damage to our infrastructure. Whenever something’s manufactured in small batches in walking distance of the place it’s needed, we save on that.
Factories are a solution to the problem of providing sufficient resources given limitations that are less and less relevant: custom machines are less and less necessary, specialized knowledge is less and less specialized, and we become aware of new reasons just about every day that generalized solutions to individual life problems are often harmful as much as they’re helpful.
We likely couldn’t have gotten to where we are globally without factories. That means both things like the internet (which I’m strongly in favor of) and things like global climate change (which is, like, the opposite of the internet in terms of how I feel about things). Whether we should or shouldn’t have done all the stuff that’s already happened is a moot point, but we can choose to find better ways to solve the problems that we’ve solved in crude, generalized ways in the past.
Art Nouveau fonts struck me as really similar in appearance to fonts designed for people with dyslexia, like OpenDyslexic. Like, they bulge in different places and stuff, and that’s a really big deal when it comes to these fonts, but the point is that it looks like it’d be easy to take the principles of accessible font design for dyslexia and apply them to graphic design for a new generation of Art Nouveau inspired work — like Solarpunk.
I love the thought that an aesthetic movement could have accessibility baked in like that — not placing aesthetic over usability, or even working accessibility in despite the aesthetic goals — I mean using the art style as the mechanism for accessibility.
Art is, at least partially, about taking up space in the world to make room for human experience as a priority. In this case, with this movement, that could be very literal.
And that got me really excited, because Solarpunk is so obviously equipped to be totally all about that — I love the idea of Solarpunk planners and designers and architects keeping in mind as a real priority making their spaces deliberately pleasant, comfortable and helpful for people with disabilities, not just tolerably navigable to meet code. I love the idea of a basic principle of Solarpunk design being ”Every human is worth the effort of significant care in design choices.” The idea that accessibility is a form of beauty that the Solarpunk art movement prioritizes.
And it fits right in with the punk part of the movement, because it screams “Disability is what happens when you build a city to use its people, not for the people to use the city.”
(Edited shortly after posting because the last sentence was confusing)
I found this in one of my notebooks when I was looking for some paper on which to graph. It turns out, it’s really hard to photoshop graph paper out of the background of an image that was drawn on graph paper.
Anyway I found a solarpunk doodle from before I had even considered starting a publication (I now co-edit Solarpunk Press) and I thought that was kind of cool. And since I’m going through a creative dry spell I wanted to post something on here. Also, the absence left in the paper after I pulled the doodle out looked cool so I put that in as well.
Every time winter rolls around I start getting super sleepy…but the second the snow comes then I almost immediately drop into full-feral-solarpunk-activist mode and begin mass scheming for the coming spring and following growing season. There’s just something about everything outside looking like a big empty canvas that throws my brain into “must fill this expanse with life and positivity even if it kills me” ya know?
Steampunk without commentary on the exploitative machinations of imperialism is not steampunk.
Cyberpunk without commentary on capitalism’s efforts to buy the world out from under us is not cyberpunk.
Solarpunk without commentary on how to grow a brighter future for everyone instead of submitting to gloom is not solarpunk.
These three make a trifecta of how capitalism took over, what can happen if it continues, and how to prevent it from doing so. What was, is, and still could be.
![Scientists [in the U.S.] are currently just testing the waters with one tidal-powered generator, bu](https://64.media.tumblr.com/6af8ca5150f9238abcaa910f2cca8467/tumblr_nradkn4YPH1ua3t28o1_640.jpg "Scientists [in the U.S.] are currently just testing the waters with one tidal-powered generator, bu")
