When did we stop dreaming of a better future? A new book presents four hopeful scenarios

'Our feelings about the future have become complicated and troubled,' says London-based design futurist Sarah Housley. 'We live in the present culturally, and when the future is mentioned it's often in the context of climate collapse or potential crises such as AI displacing jobs or slowing population growth.'

Formerly head of Consumer Technology at trend forecasting company WGSN, Housley spent more than a decade charting cultural and technological change – from the rise of lab-grown meat to our evolving relationships with robots – always probing the why and how behind these shifts.

Now, leading her own consultancy, she has authored Designing Hope (Indigo Press), a book that interrogates her field of specialism – design futures – and presents four visionary scenarios for a more hopeful outlook. Her visions span multispecies design, wellbeing economies, renewable coexistence with nature, and entirely virtual worlds. Each is grounded in real projects by designers, artists and thinkers already laying the foundations.

The book, Housley says, is intended as a 'jumping-off point' – a call to action for readers to imagine the futures they want and consider how they might help bring them into being.

Sarah Housley on designing a better tomorrow

Wallpaper*: Can you explain what is meant by ‘design futures’ and your work in this field?

Sarah Housley: I define design futures very loosely as thinking about the products, experiences and interactions that people will want and need in the future, and how these can be designed. For a researcher like me, that means tracking and synthesising the patterns of change that are emerging today, and analysing how they could come together to shape major change over the next few years or decades. Radical ideas that could alter or disrupt the status quo and business-as-usual thinking are particularly important. One of the things that makes being a design futurist different to being a futurist more broadly is that I focus on translating big ideas from lots of different areas into futures visions that feel tactile, tangible and understandable, so that designers can engage with them and imagine them more clearly.

My background is in commercial trend forecasting. I work with brands to explore a range of design futures and what the implications of change will be for them and the products they make – and how they can drive positive change. I also work with charities, NGOs and cultural institutes to think about their futures and teach them futures thinking tools and processes.

W*: In the book’s intro, you highlight 2016 – a year of seismic geopolitical shifts – as the moment when excitement about the future gave way to anxiety. Why was it important for you to write a book about hope in this moment?

SH: Our feelings about the future have become complicated and troubled. We live in the present culturally and when we do see the future mentioned, it's often in the context of climate collapse or reports on potential crises like AI displacing jobs, or rates of population growth slowing down. Outside of the field I work in, alternative futures are not often discussed, and that's made the mainstream idea we have of the future very limited and dystopian. Hope always has to come with action and with critical thinking, and that's the mindset that drives the book: I wanted to introduce creativity and possibility. Quite simply, I saw a lot of narratives about people feeling very anxious about the future and there being a crisis of imagination, and thought that I could widen out the conversation.

W*: You acknowledge how futures thinking has historically carried a WEIRD bias (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic). Can you explain why it was important for the book to consider multiple perspectives and more than one possible future?

SH: Futures visions really benefit from being co-created. As futures thinking becomes more diverse, it is becoming not only more interesting, but a lot more relevant to a lot more people. I always use the plural 'futures', for a few reasons: first of all, there won't be just one future, and to introduce that sense of possibility that is so important in design futures, we need to consider lots of different ideas, perspectives and prospects. Using the plural also reminds us constantly that the future is not inevitable; we can redesign it. We always have a choice.

W*: The book closes with a set of six practical exercises. Why did you want to include these, and what do you hope readers take away from them?

SH: I wanted the book to be really interactive and to invite the person reading it to have their own reactions and ideas throughout. The exercises at the end make that very clear and they offer a few different ways to be creative: you can write a short story, a narrative, or create a drawing or a physical object. They also encourage you to commit to a change or an action. Futures thinking has to become active to become effective: it's a way of driving change, whether that's changing someone's mind, changing their behaviour or altering their whole worldview.

W*: On a personal level, what motivated you to write Designing Hope, and has your own perspective evolved during or since the process of writing it?

SH: I find futures thinking really fascinating and partly I wanted to share that fascination and make more people aware of what people like me do and how we do it. I see futures thinking as a teachable skill – I do teach it, in fact, in workshops and at universities – and I've seen time and again how it can motivate people and excite and inspire them. I personally get frustrated by dystopia and although I'm very cautious of false positivity, there is so much innovation happening and so much to be curious and hopeful about.

Writing the book strengthened my conviction that we have the tools and solutions that we need to create more inclusive, equitable and compelling futures, and to bring them into being; that positive change is still possible and that people can come together to create it. There's so much we can do. One of my favourite definitions of hope describes it as reframing perspectives: that's what the best futures thinking does.

theindigopress.com