Wildland fires are a natural process from nature. Even though they are natural, humans inherently fear them and started to suppress them until recent years successfully. More and more countries are seeing unprecedented fires all around the globe. Emergency response agencies are struggling to keep up with wild and forest fire response due to significant and fast-spreading fires. During the research phase, I not only conducted interviews with people who have experienced wildfires but also experts from the frontlines. Also, I made a scan of the literature to find valuable studies regarding this topic. I discovered that the current wildfire problem is deeply rooted in the social aspect of how we, as humans, are placing us above nature. Nature needs wildfires and forest fires to have healthy forest ecosystems. Sadly humans have been suppressing wildfires for the last decades that lead to the fact that we created a bigger problem than before. This project is set right in the center of this change. It challenges the paradigm of how we interact with wildfire so we as a society can move from having a war with fire to living with fire. I used design fiction and speculative design methods to visualize this systemic change and give it a platform of provocation for good. The project describes a future in which humans are in coexistence with wildfires and are part of the ecosystem again. During the world-building process, to probe and verify ideas with experts and wildfire survivors, different creative methods have been used. All the factors which are influencing the preferable future and outcome are built upon findings from the research phase and repeated interviews I conducted during the project. The year of the created preferable future is 2025, when the world experienced massive wildfires and has arrived in the pyrocence. In this preferable future, the introduction of a new season happened: the 5th season - fire season. The outcome is a proposal for how FireGuardians are conducting their work and what tools they are using. It displays a new uniform, a soft robotic enhanced exosuit, and an advanced information system to plan and coordinate large-scale prescribed burns.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-172614 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Thaddäus Pfuner, Elias |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Designhögskolan vid Umeå universitet |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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