Zero.Dawn: Future Visions of the Generative Anthropocene
2023
Speculative Design, Generative AI Documentary, Photography, Publication Design
A speculative publication responding to Singapore's Green Plan 2030. Fifty documentary photographs of real Singapore locations are fed into Midjourney as style references, each generating a speculative future of that same site — calibrated to one of the plan's five sustainability initiatives. Every spread pairs the source photograph with its generated successor. An accompanying advertising campaign deploys the images across billboards, MRT station walls, and urban LED screens — framed as current public advertising, not as speculation.
The Singapore Green Plan 2030 describes a future Singapore in the language of policy: targets, initiatives, percentage reductions, net-zero timelines. What it does not produce is images. Zero.Dawn produces the images — photographically specific, tied to real locations, calibrated to the plan's five initiatives.
For more information on the initiative, see: https://www.greenplan.gov.sg/
The Method
Fifty documentary photographs taken across Singapore — fish market, mangrove wetland, expressway in the rain, public plaza, harbour waterway — are fed into Midjourney as style references using the /sref method, each anchoring a speculative future of that same place. The real photograph is not discarded. It stays on the page alongside the generated image, smaller — evidence of the distance traveled. The mangrove wetland in 2024 is a grey mudflat with exposed roots and overcast sky. In 2037, the same location is a tower of glass and growing systems, light-filled vertical stacks of greenery behind structural glazing.
The Publication
The five Green Plan 2030 initiatives — City in Nature, Energy Reset, Sustainable Living, Green Economy, Resilient Future — structure the publication. Each initiative generates its own cluster of scenarios.
A coastal park in 2035 features carbon-absorbing beach forests, genetically modified trees, and green-walled pavilions with breathing walls supporting symbiotic plant and microbial communities. A traffic interchange in 2041 integrates bio-engineered plant minds generating oxygen, maglev trains, supersonic hyperloop systems, and space-based solar arrays. A marine conservation facility in 2040 operates at depth, staffed by a diver in a biomimetic suit, maintaining bio-printed coral cities. Each scenario is described with the specificity of a technical brief — as if the facility had already been built.
The Lexicon
The prompting lexicon runs as a typeset text block through the publication: a keyword cloud spanning the plausible (phytoremediation, aeroponic, maglev, photovoltaic), the near-horizon (graphene oxide, carbon nanotubes, molecular beam epitaxy), and the genuinely exotic (Bose-Einstein condensates, superfluid helium, zero-point energy). Not a glossary — a texture. A signal about the scale of imagination the Green Plan requires, and how far that imagination has already been extended by those generating futures professionally.
The Campaign
The advertising campaign deploys the project into public space: billboards, MRT station walls, urban LED screens, each carrying a generated image alongside a direct question — Are You Prepared? End of the world, or a new beginning? TECHNOLOGY: THE LAST HOPE? The images are real enough to pass. The questions don't resolve. The work presents itself as already arrived.
Context
Ballard, J. G. — The Drowned World (1962)
Beatley, T. — Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning (2011)
Dunne, A. & Raby, F. — Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (2013)
Orlowski, J. — Chasing Coral (2017)
Robinson, K. S. — New York 2140 (2017)
Singapore Green Plan 2030 — singaporegreenplan.gov.sg
WOHA — Garden City Mega City: Rethinking Cities for the Age of Global Warming (2016)
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