Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have (instead of 20th century “destroy it all and build something completely different” modernism). Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and... See more

Faced with climate change and other interconnected existential crises in the twenty-first century, it is quickly becoming a cliché to say that there is a strong need to “imagine better futures.” But such a statement hides many questions and challenges. Who gets to imagine these futures? Who feels safe and supported enough, economically, politically... See more

(6) This worldview of a single reality and a single world is profoundly defuturing, to invoke Australian design theorist Fry’s (1999) concept. To recover the ability to imagine other possible futures requires going beyond the modernist ontology of separation and toward an ontology that acknowledges the interdependence of everything that exists.

... See more

At the same time, imagination must be decolonized. The dominant modes of imagining the future—technocratic, extractivist, growth-driven—are not universal. They are specific to white, masculine, WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) subjectivities trained to equate imagination not only with control, scale and optimization, but... See more