What happened to the sci-fi golden age of the 1950s, when futurism flourished as a discipline and drove innovation?

As a society, either we struggle to imagine something good for the times to come or we fail to picture any future at all. Our world is in polycrisis; we face climate breakdown, societal fracturing, governmental collapse, war, and rising inequality.

The exciting outcomes we dreamed of, from the space race to the wonder material plastic, have brought contingent problems of their own. We haven’t yet developed mainstream and accessible new narratives to replace these failures, and if you ask someone to imagine ‘the future’, they’ll probably still picture flying cars.

Designing Hope resets expectations. Through the lens of four emerging futures, Sarah Housley shows us visions of hope that inspire action and critical thinking about how we’ll live in the decades to come.