Blue Marble

An interactive and speculative exhibition challenging us to reimagine global cooperation architecture.

WHERE IT HAS BEEN SHOWN
UN Summit of the Future, UN Headquarters, New York. September 2024. Istanbul Innovation Days, Istanbul. March 2025. Future Days, Lisbon. April and May 2025.
The physical installation was modular, designed for venues from 4 by 4 metres upward, with linear, semi-circular, and clustered layouts. The physical exhibition has now been retired. The digital experience and content live on at bluemarble.world.

MY ROLE
Creative direction and content development as part of the UNDP Strategic Innovation Unit core team (now the Digital, AI and Innovation Hub). I worked on the conceptual framing, experiential design, and narrative architecture, and hosted guided walkthroughs of the exhibition at each of its showings.

CREDITS
Blue Marble is a collaboration between UNDP and the UN Futures Lab, with mentorship from the UNDP Strategy and Futures Team. Funded by the Governments of Denmark and Türkiye, with particular thanks to Denmark for a decade-long investment in UNDP's innovation work.
Experiential design: Henrique Nascimento, João Delgado, Tiago Nunes, Simone Uriartt, Kal Joffres, Parima Suwannakarn.
Physical exhibition design: WithCompany
Content: Simone Uriartt, Milica Begovic, Marco Steinberg, Parima Suwannakarn, Xoan García, Ida Uusikylä, Kal Joffres.
With inspiration from a community of practitioners including Giulio Quaggiotto, James Bridle, Indy Johar, Liam Young, Keolu Fox, Jayne Engle, Alberto Cottica, and many others.

Read more: Introducing Blue Marble

In his 2023 address to the UN General Assembly, Secretary-General António Guterres said: "We cannot effectively address problems as they are if institutions don't reflect the world as it is."

Blue Marble takes that diagnosis seriously. It imagines an international cooperation entity from the future, built on three principles: multi-species justice, radical transparency, and agency. A compact between animals, plants, past and future generations, and humans of today.

The exhibition is an act of imagination, not a delusion. Every element of Blue Marble is extrapolated from signals of change that exist in the world today, translated into the architecture of a new institution. When the 2024 Nobel laureates in economics argue that the form of our institutions explains a large part of the income gap between societies, Blue Marble takes that seriously and asks what other forms are possible. When AI starts to decode the names that elephants give each other, or a slime mold reproduces the Tokyo rail network, or a Madagascar professor opens a bank account for a coral reef, Blue Marble asks what an institution built on those signals would actually do.

How Blue Marble works

For Blue Marble to function this way, much of the current logic of multilateralism has had to be retired. The exhibition makes the retired logic visible too, as a relic of the past, found to be too restrictive for engaging with the full set of intelligences needed to produce a common good.

Governance

Blue Marble is governed as a compact across species and generations. A multi-species translator allows animals, plants, ancestors, future generations, and humans to communicate and contribute perspectives on the issues at hand. Top-down hierarchy does not work in this kind of body, so the rules of engagement are flat and decentralised.

Collaboration

The mycelium network provides real-time data on the health of the system, drawing on the underground fungal communication that already connects forests. Blue Marble stores its own data (images, text, decisions) inside the DNA of plants, a working example of digital and organic symbiosis.

Finance

Blue Marble is not financed by money flowing from rich countries to poor ones, or from global north to global south. It is financed on the basis of planetary health. Companies and countries that act in ways that nurture the planet's health receive investment. Those that act in ways that harm it receive the bill. An uncertainty fund tracks activity over time, Nature has a bank account.

Blue Marble Council

A simulated council meeting where dragon monkeys warn of a coming earthquake, ancestral elders advise on historical precedent, and future generations weigh in on long-term consequences. Visitors join the deliberation through a mobile interface, voting on proposals and contributing ideas of their own.