Utopia Build-a-Box
Designing Futures Workshop, 2024Working towards a better future means taking a proactive approach, shaping it everyday. It takes radical action, empathy and guts. Speculative design is a useful tool to explore the impacts of our present day choices and their long term consequences. Creating more vivid pictures of those better futures we wish for, utopias even, makes us aspire higher, think broader and strive towards a more inclusive path.
For that, it sometimes takes stepping outside our lived experiences to challenge our perceptions and assumptions about the future. A change in perspective, be it performative, like pretending to be a non-human life form, can enrich us with insight outside of ourselves. Applying the findings (or questions even) from such explorations to your everyday can help us in shaping a plural, ecologies-based future.
Even small-scale design exercises can help illustrate your personal beliefs and open you up to others. They not only serve as a means of self-expression but also facilitate communication with others and can guide us towards novel notions of problem-solving and communicating. Through imagined, lived and designed experiences, we can gain gratifying insights into the re-evaluation of our prevalent anthropocentric, human narrative.
Together with Angela Neubauer and Johannes Felix Lotze, we held a 3-hour workshop on speculative futures through roleplay and storytelling. Crafting alternative narratives for collective futures, through stepping outside our everyday lives.
To tackle the fear of uncertainty that the future holds, we need to lean into it - change up the narrative, starting by stepping outside our everyday realities and ideas of what is possible. Engaging, challenging, discussing and discovering along the way.