This document describes a fictional organization called ARK-INC that is presented as a design response to impending global crises related to peak oil, climate change, and their social and economic impacts. ARK-INC is portrayed as facilitating adjustment and lifestyle changes to help people adapt to an unstable future world. The document provides details about ARK-INC's radio broadcasts, publications, and films to communicate its message. It also describes how ARK-INC was presented as an art project or "superfiction" to explore design possibilities through fictional scenarios.

1. Exploring Design Possibilities through Superfiction
Jon Ardern, Superflux

3. The cheap energy bubble bursts;
Within 10 to 25 years we will hit peak oil production. This means: the system that controls the very
fabric of our lives is about to go into turmoil as the cheap energy that we have come to rely on
becomes in increasingly expensive. with repercussions in every aspect of our lives, including:
• A massive rise in the cost of produces and products as transportation costs rocket.
• Increased global political instability as fighting over the remaining resources becomes increasingly violent.
• A massive rise in the cost energy as the cost of production, currently predominantly carbon based, rockets.

4. Past the tipping point;
We are fast approaching, some have argued past, a tipping point in global Co2
levels, where a chain of environmental processes cause an exponential increase
in Co2 levels and its associated global heating, this means:
• Increasingly unstable weather patterns leading to a massive globe decrease in agricultural
capacity.
• Rising sea levels further reducing human carrying capacity of the earth.
• Changing in the oceanic conveyers making larger areas inhospitably cold and others dry and
arid.

5. The end of life as we know it;
The convergence of these and many other global issues will lead to a
world where:
• global political structures break down as wars over resources increase.
• global trade breaks down, the cost of transportation rockets and the means of
production drastically fall.
• massive global exoduses as large areas of land becomes unable to sustain human
civilization.

6. "... for all its complexity, contemporary society is an artificial
construct that can be moved off stage at a moments notice ..."
JG Ballard
The ‘Design’ Response:

7. ARK-INC sits...
... somewhere here.

8. The Premise:
- These events will happen in one form or another, you can’t stop them, its
out of your hands.
- A disaster is not the event itself but the impact that the event has.
- By adjusting to the forthcoming events now your lifestyle will not change
as the world does.
- ARK-INC. will help facilitate that adjustment now.

10. Post-collapse Reading

11. Disaster Tourism

14. products & services
Invoice Attention: Shem ***
Date 16/06/06
INVOICE NUMBER: 67890
TERMS: 30 Days
Description Quantity Unit Price Cost
ARK-INC. Radio, 01 *** ***
T +44 (0) 7779 340 115
FM, SW, Transmit and Data receive, model.
Jon@ark-inc.info
www.ark-inc.info Your local FM station transmits on: _________
Note our Short Wave service is encrypted and
can only be received by this device - keep your
function keys safe as they are unique to this
device.
ARK-INC Publications: 06 *** ***
FROM ABSTRACT TO INTRINSIC, calculating
value shifts in the 21st century and beyond.
CHOOSING LIFE ARK-INC, the 12 steps and
beyond.
THE SIGNS OF OUR TIME, understanding events

15. Ark Radio Short Wave

16. The short wave transmission from Ark Radio:
h"p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b3UP8MwJpQ

17. “...we have a serious problem:
America is addicted to oil ”
George W. Bush, State of the Union Address 2006

18. THE TWELVE STEPS OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have
...
Ark 12 steps:
“We admitted that our life style had become unsustainable and ultimately destructive to ourselves and the earth upon which we
depend.
We came to the realization that our collective actions had lead us to a global crisis that we were powerless over when standing
alone.
Having seen the shadows of this fate, we came to believe that we could find another way. Freeing ourselves from the past, by
finding faith in our collective common purpose.
We now endeavor to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and our lifestyle.
In light of this, we admitted to ourselves and to the Ark collective the extent and nature of our wrongs.
We made a sober decision to be entirely ready to remove, with the help available to us, all detrimental aspects of our lifestyle.
Having made an inventory of the harm we have done, we now become willing, with the help of the Ark collective, to make
amends to such harm.
We now make direct amends to such harm wherever possible, except when to do so would cause harm to ourselves or the Ark
collective.
We continue to take a personal inventory, and when wrong, promptly admit it.
Seeking through research and contemplation, to improve our conscious awareness of the earth, and the role of ourselves and the
Ark collective upon it.

19. ARK.Inc Film
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfz4-Dg4i4k

20. Ark Inc presented at the Royal College of Art, London

21. Ark.Inc as a ‘Superfiction’
A Superfiction is a visual or conceptual artwork which uses fiction and
appropriation to mirror organisations, business structures, and/or the lives
of invented individuals.
- Peter Hill, 1989

22. The project was also presented as a performance at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

23. “The Phoenix Project is about how we are going to cope with the
changes that are coming due to the depletion of the world's energy
reserves and climate change. Unfortunately these changes will not be
gradual enough to allow easy transition so some of us are going to have
to make the changes ourselves without waiting for the government to
do it for us.
The Utopia Experiment was established by Dr. Dylan Evans, a well-
known psychologist and lecturer at the West Of England University to
see how people could organise themselves into communal groups to
cope with life in the future. He then quit the project, and some
volunteers continued to build on it through the Phoenix Project.”
http://www.phoenixproject.org.uk/
As part of the ongoing work around Ark.Inc, Jon spent some time at the Utopia Experiment / Phoenix Project in
the slopes of Scotland.

25. Making bio-diesel at the Utopia Experiment / Phoneix Project

26. friendly bacon at the euptia experimant

28. Wrote a paper with Benedict Singleton that was presented at the Changing the Change Conference, Turin.

29. How do you:
Introduce critical thinking to a market driven world?
Combining commercial designs practices with critical design
aspirations, in an attempt to get under the radar?
Using ‘traditional’ design methods such as personas to expand upon the superfiction.

30. A new website is on its way...

31. Example of responses to youtube videos and one page site:
Already receiving loads of requests and letters from people who want to join the Ark Collective. Wondering how to
incorporate these requests, whilst communicating the idea of Ark as superfiction, and being ethical?

32. Some current questions:
- How real & far do you take it?
- What are the ethical implications?
- What are the legal implications?

33. Distinctions:
- “be realistic” = submit your ideals to the
consensus of assumptions about how the
world works. “this is how it is”
- “be pragmatic” = understand the consensus
reality and find ways to apply your ideals to it.
“this is how I’m tying to change it”
Some of the things students working on similar themes need to consider

34. Challenge Assumptions
- Challenge your assumptions
- Challenge societies’ assumptions
- Bash your head on them
- Look around them and what’s there.
- Turn them upside down.

35. Jon Ardern: jon@ark-inc.info | www.ark-inc.info