PREPARE: Critical design for collective resilience

Disruptions to electricity, water, heating and food supplies place new demands on everyday life. Yet people’s capacities to prepare differ. What financial resources, domestic space, physical abilities and social support does current preparedness advice assume? And how is responsibility distributed between households, those shaping the built environment, and public institutions?

PREPARE uses design to investigate these questions. Through designing and making prototypes, the research team works with two design gestures: unpacking prevailing norms and material demands, and opening up other ways of living and organising resources. A series of critical prepper furniture designs explores what happens when the promise of security through consumption enters domestic interiors and preparedness becomes a permanent feature of everyday life.

Alongside this work, speculative proposals explore shared resources and local, circular flows. Moving across the scales of furniture, homes and neighbourhoods, the research examines how everyday practices involving water, food, heating and waste could connect immediate crisis preparedness with lasting collective resilience.

The proposals are explored in relation to particular social, spatial and institutional conditions. In Borås, Sweden, the research examines three housing typologies: garden city neighbourhoods, housing from Sweden’s Million Programme, and contemporary dense urban development. Prototypes, architectural plans and representations of possible futures also support dialogue with practitioners and public agencies, including Boverket, the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning. Through this work, the research develops knowledge about how existing residential environments can support both preparedness and more sustainable everyday lives.

Project period: 2024-2027

Project manager: Loove Broms

Funded by Energimyndigheten