The Inclusion Zone: Grounded Speculations in Chernobyl

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 inspired this pictorial, which weaves together a number of technologies to tell a story about life in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in the aftermath of the nuclear meltdown. The artifacts included here run the gamut from functional to speculative and focus on how humans, plants, and animals can cope with the challenges of living in a disturbed landscape. They are designed to inspire conversation about the larger world to which they belong. Grounding speculative design in Chernobyl invites us to revisit the relationship between technology and ecology in sites of exclusion and abandon. What happens if we return, or are forced to return, to these hitherto excluded sites? What is it like to live in the aftermath of a disaster whose invisible effects continue for thousands of years? What are some of the technologies that might be seen in such a world and how do they facilitate cohabitation between the humans, plants, and animals of the Zone, and radiation? These questions blur some of the boundaries that can sometimes become too rigid in design fictions, such as the fixed present vs. the flexible future, or diegetic vs. speculative vs. functional prototypes. Moreover, while the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is in many ways unique, Chernobyl is by no means the only Exclusion Zone. It is joined by a growing number of abandoned spaces, from shuttered reactors like Fukushima Daiichi, to nuclear waste sites like Hanford, US, and toxic e-waste sites like Agbogbloshie, Ghana. We propose that grounding speculations in such exclusion zones can contribute to more than human-centered design and post-humanist discourse.