Climate change and issues associated with the diversity of races, cultures, and settlements worldwide present significant challenges to science. Design research complements science and extends the capacity of research to connect with people, address wicked problems, project desirable futures, and build new worlds. This book provides a guide for students, faculty, practitioners and their collaborators, and outlines how design research is different and especially suited to address climate catastrophe. It also presents a set of design research tools to connect with people, demonstrate drawing and model as tools of inquiry, understand landscape change, and collaborate across disciplines. Finally, through the work of 24 contributors, from landscape architects, architects, educators, students, geographers, and anthropologists, among others, Design Research for Uncertain Futures explores the real and often untapped power of design research—intentional future making and worldbuilding. Throughout the book are provocations for action, as design research results in proposals for change.

Coeditor Ozayr Saloojee is a South African-Canadian designer and associate professor at Carleton University’s School of Architecture and Urbanism and codirector of the Carleton Urban Research Lab. He serves as affiliate faculty in the Institute for African Studies and chair of the MArch Program. Saloojee recently began tenure as associate editor of design for the Journal of Architectural Education. He studied at Carleton University  for both his undergraduate and graduate work in architecture theory and culture and earned a doctorate at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. His teaching and scholarship investigate questions of power, equity, and spatial politics, and a recent design studio on the extractive landscapes of Johannesburg was awarded one of Architect magazine’s 2020 Studio Prizes. He has presented and published work in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Japan, and South Africa and was part of a team shortlisted to represent Canada at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Coeditor Jamie Vanucchi is an assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University, and a partner with the Great Lakes Design Labs. She is interested in “strong sites,” where existing site processes and forces push back at the designer and disrupt notions of landscape as inert medium. She has a bachelor’s in landscape architecture from Virginia Tech and a master’s in landscape architecture from Cornell University, and nearly two decades of experience teaching at Cornell University and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. She is cochair for the Resilience and Climate Action track for the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture. Recent publications include a chapter titled “Adapting Inland Floodplain Housing to a Changing Climate: Disturbance, Risk, and Uncertainty as Drivers for Design” in the forthcoming Climate Adaptation and Resilience Across Scales: From Buildings to Cities, edited by Nicholas Rajkovich and Seth H. Holmes (Routledge, 2021).