Tehran Now!
Where we imagined the destruction of the city to come up with new “innovative solutions.”
A Collaboration with Mahan Mehrvarz
2016-2021
Tehran Now! is a project for thinking about products, services, and artifacts that may prevent Tehran’s apocalyptic futures. Tehran Now! is not concerned with solving the problems that may lead to an apocalyptic future for the city, but aims at using these unpleasant images of the future of the city as a means to push for change in ways we think of such problems and issues. As any useful idea about the futures should appear to be ridiculous, thus Tehran Now! aims for radical and ridiculous ideas, images, and artifacts.
The project consists of a series of workshops where participants first extrapolate trends into the future and find the apocalyptic images. Then they backcast those images into the present and ideate design outcomes that prevent that image.
The first step of the project is to find the problematic trends in the city. Tehran Data Narrate (TDN) workshops try to address this through data gathering/mining and visualization.
The second step is the speculative design workshop Will Design Save Tehran? (WDST?) The method used in this workshop is a combination of conventional methods of futures studies and design. In this method, we first tried to conceive the situations in which life becomes unbearably difficult and challenging in Tehran (almost-apocalyptic scenarios), and the city is on the verge of collapse. We set a horizon for this exercise: 2070 (around 1450, Persian calendar). These stories illustrate Tehran’s undesirable scenarios. After this step, each group of participants selected one of these unpleasant scenarios, and by using the “Backcasting Method” in ten-year intervals, they tried to imagine and map the sequence of events leading to the adverse scenario. Next, participants identified the most sensitive point in time that could change the direction of future events and used it as their design situation where the showed different products and services in the imaginary worlds.
