Designing Hope, by Sarah Housley – A greener life, a greener world

By Jeremy Williams

In 2021, a survey asked 10,000 young people in ten countries how they felt about climate change. 75% said the future was frightening, and 55% thought humanity was doomed. “People are not excited about the future any more,” notes design futurist Sarah Housley, and that has consequences. Without a vision for the future, it’s hard to summon the will to change what’s broken and create anything better. There’s an Old Testament proverb that captures this: “Where there is no vision, the people perish”.

Future possibilities and trends

Designing Hope demonstrates some of the possibilities. It’s packed with ideas and inspiration, and I enjoyed it immensely. It’s not a book of predictions – that’s a word that makes futurists roll their eyes. It’s a study of trends and a projection of where they might go, how ideas grow and accelerate and either take hold or wither away. The book looks at four broad directions, or stories if you will, of what the future might bring: more-than-human, degrowth, solarpunk, and metaverse.

Each of these is an umbrella term for a wide number of ideas. More-than-human is a shift towards more holistic and ecological thinking, and it includes rights for nature, regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and plant-based diets. It includes breakthrough science around fungi or the ways that trees communicate, political ideas and art. It composts old hierarchies and places humanity within nature, the kind of environmental empathy that might just help us out of our current predicament.

The chapter on degrowth covers similarly diverse territory, and is of course a line of futures thinking that I’ve invested a fair amount of time into myself.

A lot of future studies are oriented towards economic growth, and brands and corporations are more likely to commission trend forecasting than anyone else. But there’s a growing movement with a much more nuanced view. It takes in B Corps and sharing platforms, minimalism, the circular economy, and public affluence. Not all of these things would identify themselves as degrowth, but as Housley writes, “the overall goal – of rebalancing wellbeing and wealth, and replacing consumerism with creativity and community – is finding a wide and engaged audience.”

Ideas told through art and literature

Each chapter shows how ideas emerge, are prototyped in art and literature and find their way into the material world. Solarpunk originates in Brazilian sci-fi and found early fans online. It can be seen in things like the art design for Wakanda in the Black Panther movies, or the gentle world-building of Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot books. The end result of such things is the plug-in solar and balkonkraftwerk that I was writing about last week.

As well as imagining future worlds, Designing Hope also equips readers to interrogate them. Are these the futures that we want? And it is futures, plural – all these things are possible at once. Who is telling (or selling) these visions of the future? Facebook was so keen to be associated with the metaverse that it renamed itself Meta, for example. What does this tell us about who gains and who loses from such a future?

We aren’t powerless, Housley suggests. The future is open to our imagination, and if we can learn to read and evaluate the stories about the future that we’re being told, we can live more deliberately into the ones we prefer. It’s conversations about this, as demonstrated in Designing Hope, that might begin to reverse those depressing statistics among young people.

First published in The Earthbound Report.