Reimagined Visas
The Project
Academic ⎮ Nov - Dec 2018
This project is a critical enquiry into the possible alternative dimensions of visa policies, these reglementations ruling human mobility around the world. The outcome is a design fiction framework, a Visa for Mars, questioning the relevance of visas’ current format through an investigation of their possible future.
The Process
The project started with an exploration of visas : the different systems in place, their reason for being, current uses (migration, tourism...). This quickly led us to expand our interests to human mobility in itself, rather than solely its reglementation through visas, as we understood that, to improve the visa experience, multiculturalism, national identity, integration and assimilation were important topics to dig into.
Here my economics background played a key role in updating everyone on the topic of migration and its problematics. We also
focused our attention on four case studies : Canada’s, Australia’s, Denmark’s and Sweden’s visa system, to understand these hot topics through practicality.
We narrowed down our insights to 8 goals our proposal needs to achieve for visas to be better for all. One of our important insights was the lack of common basis through disciplines and cultures to consider visas in their entirety. As a consequence, we decided to create this common understanding from scratch, by developing a design fiction.
The role of a design fiction is to take a debate out of its actual reality to project it onto a more imaginative yet plausible context to call into question people’s perception of the debate.
To develop our fictive context we worked on scenario planning, identifying current mega trends that could challenge the future of visas systems. Our choice of scenario, interplanetary mobility, was guided by the richness of situations we could illustrate and the ease with which people could identify with the situation. From this scenario, we designed a completely new visa experience imagining solutions to our difficulties with the real system and triggering reflection.
The Design
We positioned our reimagined visa system in a world where everyone is a migrant as Earth becomes slowly inhabitable ; a world where there is no such thing as a traditional national identity of the host country because this land, Mars, has no human past. Everything is yet to be built, including what it means to be "a Martian" and what defines the "Martian identity". Yet, this land has to be
protected, for it is the only solution and its physical equilibrium enabling life is fragile.
The experience we built is based on four pillars : its is a matchmaking process ; more than a stamp, a visa allows integration ; it is an evolutive status and lastly, nationality means responsibility.
Reflecting on the difficulties to have a visa system that takes on board both countries’ sovereignty and a human approach, we turned the migration process into a matchmaking process.
To echo the inefficiency of the visa systems in being a tool for integration, we imagined visas as a service, enabling clever human mobility through three levels of guidance : choosing the host country depending on your own profile, knowing what to expect and getting integrated. This way, visas are much more than a stamp.
Ultimately, a visa should be a passport for citizenship, not a precarious long term status that benefits neither migrants nor host countries. A system of successive evaluations assesses one’s progress as a member of society and grants upgraded status when integration standards are met. There is no such option as living for the long term with a migrant status, it is the responsibility of all to support constant progress.
The way a country’s vision of its nationality is defined influences the country’s migration policy success. In a world facing a turning point in its history, we imagined that belonging is not about having a common history or about looking like each other, but rather about objective alignement regarding the future and having the same culture of responsibility toward this vision.
This project was realised with Jonathan Wang, Brandy Yu, Ishika Mukherjee and Di Wu.