Designing Your Character & Other Handy Things 2

Notes on Solarpunk

Solarpunk is a future with a human face and dirt behind its ears.

These are my notes on Solarpunk for a an overview of the genre. I have included links for where i got this information if you wish to read further into the Notes. This is not a complete list, and it doesn't cover the entirety of the genre's aspects and subpoints. Just what I found that was important to understanding the genre, and beginning a basic world build.

Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and more importantly for the generations that follow us – i.e., extending human life at the species level, rather than individually. Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have (instead of 20th century "destroy it all and build something completely different" modernism). Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk's potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.

And yes, there's a -punk there, and not just because it's become a trendy suffix. There's an oppositional quality to solarpunk, but it's an opposition that begins with infrastructure as a form of resistance. We're already seeing it in the struggles of public utilities to deal with the explosion in rooftop solar.

Solarpunk draws on the ideal of Jefferson's yeoman farmer, Ghandi's ideal of and subsequent , and countless other traditions of innovative dissent.

The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it's a mash-up of the following:

§ 1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles)

§ Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)

§ -style innovation from the developing world

§ High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs

Obviously, the further you get into the future, the more ambitious you can get.

Imagine permaculturists thinking in cathedral time. Consider terraced irrigation systems that also act as fluidic computers. Contemplate the life of a Department of Reclamation officer managing a sparsely populated American southwest given over to solar collection and pump storage. Imagine "smart cities" being junked in favor of smart citizenry.

Solarpunk is a future with a human face and dirt behind its ears.

Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto

http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/09/solarpunk-notes-toward-a-manifesto/

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Solarpunk – a plausible near-future sci-fi genre, which I like to imagine as based on updated Art Nouveau, Victorian, and Edwardian aesthetics, combined with a green and renewable energy movement to create a world in which children grow up being taught about building electronic tech as well as food gardening and other skills, and people have come back around to appreciating artisans and craftspeople, from stonemasons and smithies, to dress makers and jewelers, and everyone in between. A balance of sustainable energy-powered tech, environmental cities, and wicked cool aesthetics.

A lot of people seem to share a vision of futuristic tech and architecture that looks a lot like an ipod – smooth and geometrical and white. Which imo is a little boring and sterile, which is why I picked out an Art Nouveau aesthetic for this.