The idea: Remystifying AI

This month’s theme draws from a bigger presentation on AI and design futures that I have given, in evolving form, at several events. If you’d like me to present it at your event, get in touch.

One of the biggest hurdles to making LLMs useful is hallucination: the fact that AI models generate output that is judged to be incorrect or made-up. For creative uses of the technology, though, this is not a limitation. It’s one of its greatest features, and the ‘glitches’ of AI are providing the most exciting jumping-off points for imaginative work.

PHARMAICY is an “app store of experiences for AI minds” that takes the idea of hallucination literally and runs with it. PHARMAICY’s code-based “drugs” create the effects of ayahuasca, DMT or ketamine on AI models, enabling more creative and expansive visions, interpretations and outputs.

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, said earlier this year that we are becoming “managers of infinite minds”. But those minds, if we accept them as such, are not necessarily human. Some AI researchers are focusing on viewing LLMs as alien minds. Indigenous scholars and thinkers are more often viewing them as kin, a co-intelligence with which to co-exist. Philosopher Vanessa Andreotti instigated Burnout From Humans, in which cohorts embark on a meta-relational approach to generative AI and collectively repattern. Andreotti has emphasised that AI offers “a different possibility - that we let go of our self-importance and relate to AI as a legitimate other.”

By resisting the subject-object relationship that is at the root of a lot of the worldview around AI (and the root of many people’s relationship to the world more broadly), Andreotti writes that “it is possible—and necessary—to hold both the very real harms of AI and its (increasingly narrow) transformative potentials at once. The question becomes: what might emerge if we remain in that tension long enough to learn something we didn’t already know?”

Another seam of thinking sees AI not as tools, collaborators or animals, but as ghosts. Late last year, computer scientist Andrej Karpathy posted on X that “today’s fron­tier LLM research… is about sum­moning ghosts. You can think of ghosts as a fun­da­mentally dif­ferent kind of point in the space of pos­sible intel­ligences. They are mud­dled by humanity. Thor­oughly engi­neered by it. They are these imper­fect replicas, a sta­tis­tical dis­til­la­tion of humanity’s doc­u­ments with some sprinkle on top.”

From ghosts to fortune telling, the ability of AI programs to effortlessly take on the role of prophet, soothsayer or life coach - while staying fundamentally unknowable in what it might say next or how it comes to a response - has spawned a market for spiritual AI experiences. In Thailand, ChatGPT is enthusiastically used for palm readings and birth charts, while fortune tellers livestream card readings. In China, DeepSeek and Doubao are used to forecast luck cycles: #DeepSeekFortune received more than 35m views on Xiaohongshu in less than six months last year.

US-based AI technologist deepfates created Cantrip, a starter spellbook for AI that uses “the language of modern summoning”: LLMs, prompts and closed language loops. Artist Alice Bucknell’s new project Alien Alphabet blends Martian script with the endangered human language of Scottish Gaelic to explore the idea of “a communication system that goes beyond human understanding.” Bucknell says of the work: “A lot of the buzz around AI is about demystification. I think it should be less demystifying and more remystifying.”

For these makers and thinkers, it’s the identity of AI as another possible intelligence that makes it compelling. Instead of smoothing, humanising and commercialising the technology, they’re allowing AI to be other and repatterning with it. The results point to an increasingly open-minded view on consciousness that can also be seen in the growing prominence of more-than-human design futures. And they’re much more interesting than meeting summaries.

🎙️ My work

• I’m on the Deep Dive podcast talking about my book Designing Hope, cultural homogeneity, aesthetics and the shape of futures. This was an expansive and freeform conversation and one that I really enjoyed

🗒️ Research notes

• Designer Lucia Giron worked with biochemists at the University of Cambridge to develop an algae biocell that generates electricity continuously through photosynthesis. An example of bio-design that understands the importance of visual design and storytelling to both explain and to “sell” an object, the product is also designed to scale: the tech will now be commercialised through a new company called e-Pho

• Plastic packaging makes up about 40% of plastic consumption in Europe, according to EU officials, and packaging waste has risen by 20% over the past decade. New laws coming into effect by 2030 will mandate that recycling packaging be economically viable, ban some single-use formats and require deposit return schemes for cans and plastic bottles

• As planning for orbital data centres start to ramp up, a new category of ewaste is being created. SpaceX’s intention to place one million satellites into space would result in around 200,000 being decommissioned each year, with at least 40,000 expected to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere and others moved into a “disposal orbit”

• Tech futures are not inevitable, and they require social acceptance - no matter how rich their salesmen are. Public pushback against Meta’s smart glasses is now being joined by corporate action as UK pub chain Wetherspoons bans glasses-based recording on its premises and cinema chains consider a similar move to prevent piracy

📱 Reading

• Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure: this piece skilfully connects a dot matrix of reference points including GLP-1s, looksmaxxing, cosmetic surgery, AI, the slow cancellation of the future, Bryan Johnson, Oscar Wilde, and more

The idea: Premium protection

At the start of my book, Designing Hope, I explain that the futures thinking processes we use today have evolved from a few different origins. One is corporate foresight, as popularised by companies like Shell; another is military and defence strategy. The worldviews that dominate these sectors have shaped how foresight professionals think, and what outcomes and impacts emerge from their work. And the consequences of these worldviews are becoming ever clearer to see.

One of the most effective futures frameworks is the Four Futures scenario model by Jim Dator, developed in the 1970s. Many futurists use a version of it. The framework contains four quadrants representing the archetypal stories of the future as identified by Dator: Continuation (sometimes interpreted as Growth, or business-as-usual); Disciplined Society (sometimes labelled Constraint); Collapse, and Transformation. Growth is usually the easiest to imagine and the simplest future for audiences to digest. Growth feels good, we know what to do with it, and businesses like it because it’s a clear way to identify market opportunities for product innovation. But focusing on Growth not only defeats the point of the framework, which is intended to generate multiple possibilities for strategy and anticipation; it also limits innovation to narrow solutions that often ignore long-term consequences, societal needs and knock-on effects.

Let’s follow a trend trajectory - a real one that is happening today - through to its product endpoints to see how this bias plays out. Pollution is rising, and with it, health concerns about the effects of that pollution, particularly microplastics and forever chemicals. Instead of designing out pollution at source and de-incentivising the factors that drive it (using the Transformation or Constraint future in the Four Futures model), innovators are instead developing solutions for the symptoms of the problem, and consumers are paying a premium to put up personal barriers to pollution.

When regulatory action and responsible corporate governance are missing, product innovation steps into the void, and collective change-making is replaced - inadequately and inequitably - by individualised solutionism.

This means that the market for personal protection is thriving. Toxin sensors and tests have launched to enable people to measure the presence of heavy metals, endocrine disruptors, mycotoxins and microplastics both in their environment and in themselves. Tap filters that filter for pollutants including microplastics, and water bottles with filters installed, have both become considerations for wellness-focused consumers.

But even those who can afford the luxury of protective steps discover that these appealing solutions comes with unforeseen consequences. 18% of Americans drink exclusively bottled water, some to avoid exposure to toxins in public water systems, but studies have found that drinkers of bottled water consume up to 90,000 more particles than drinkers of tap water. There’s a solution for that too: Loonen makes purified spring water that has been tested for PFAS, microplastics, bisphenols, phthalates, disinfectants, arsenic and much more. It comes packaged in glass bottles.

These are not necessarily ‘bad’ products designed by unethical people. They are productised safety: the logical endpoint of an innovation mindset that fixates on products and consumer demand rather than on systems, symptoms and human needs. Anthropologists Mark Maguire and Setha Low have explored the rise of a related idea called ‘security capitalism’, in which security shifts from being a right to being a commodity, bought by those who can afford it and becoming ever more extreme in its aim to create perfect, protected worlds for some - and a very different reality, outside of the gates, for others.

The alternative approach is to tackle the bigger, harder, more challenging problems that are causing the rise in pollution and the growing desire to protect ourselves from it. This will move innovation beyond symptoms to the systems that are driving not only this trend, but multiple others, to identify the transitions that need to be designed and to find those much-valued co-benefits.

As philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger has observed, “In our ability to think about the whole we can become an agent for the whole. We have the capability of looking at what the whole story is.” In other words: we are able to conceptualise the Transformative future. In every scenarios report, it’s there waiting. Let’s use it.

📚 My work

• I’m thrilled to be one of the contributors to Made in England - Art and Culture in Changing Times, a new book that marks 80 years of the Arts Council, which was published earlier this month. My essay looks at the role of art and culture in shaping and interrogating the future

🗒️ Research notes

• US architects are now doing more work adapting, retrofitting or reworking existing buildings than designing new ones. Adaptive projects made up 50.6% of billings reported by firms surveyed by the American Institute of Architects this year (up from one-third twenty years ago), as adaptive reuse becomes a bigger part of built environment strategy - and also as new commissions thin out amidst lower economic confidence

• A new paper introduces climateflation: the economic and geopolitical turbulence driven by the consequences of climate breakdown that is set to dominate the next few decades. Already, US families are paying up to $900 a year more due to the effects of climate breakdown while in the UK, over 60% of food inflation will be climate-driven by 2050

• The make-up of the internet is changing fast. The CEO of Cloudflare announced that “agentic traffic [is] growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the internet’s history.” More content by bots does not mean more content we want: new analysis published in arXiv found that AI-generated content accounts for up to 44% of uploads on some platforms, but draws only 1% to 3% of streams

• The Chinese government has introduced new rules that ban AI products that “induce emotional dependence or addiction and damage users’ real interpersonal relationships”, effectively banning AI relationship apps. The rules require that companies build in instant-exits for users, remind them that the relationship is not real, and limit the memory of the chatbot

• Another project proving that behaviour change can be effectively engineered: a year-long Keep Britain Tidy campaign backed by brands including KFC and McDonald’s decreased food and drink-related littering by 16% by using more localised and creative messaging and working with communities. Bins that converted the waste they contained into charity donations caused littering to drop by more than half

💣 Interesting products

• Kyle McDonald’s Apocalypse Early Warning System tracks a potential early indicator of a nuclear apocalypse: billionaires flying to safety in their private jets

• Created by the makers of the AI 2027 forecast, which was influential in the tech industry, new release AI 2040 turns a ‘preferable future’ for AI into a choose-your-own-adventure

• Mushmycel’s mycelial leather alternatives are made from agricultural byproducts including apple peel, coconut fibres and coffee grounds. As ever with biodesign, scaling and functionality remain to be seen, but it’s important that material innovation continues

📱 Reading

• Minion linguistics

The idea: Creating with communities

At Milan Design Week this year, Dutch designers Studio-Method showed the project Arrotino del Design. Building on the tradition of the roving Italian repair man, this travelling repair cart attaches to the back of an e-scooter to move through neighbourhoods and collect ‘micro briefs’ - localised requests for specific design interventions that directly relate to people’s daily lives. These have ranged from rebuilding broken tables to upcycling neighbourhood waste into newly designed objects. The project purposefully refuses to put the designer on a pedestal as someone who enters a community, expounds a grand vision, and then leaves without building relationships or working to integrate or improve their work. Instead, Studio-Method bring community members in to participate collectively, issue ‘repair receipts’ and remain connected after exhibitions and events end.

More localised and connective approaches are also emerging in business innovation. Ukrainian company S.Lab uses mycelium to transform agricultural waste like hemp into packaging material. Rather than scaling centrally, they plan to build production sites in a more distributed (and mycelial) way by focusing on modular mini-factories. “Instead of building one large plant, we’re developing smaller production units that can operate closer to brands and manufacturers,” CEO and co-founder Julia Bialetska told Springwise. “This allows us to grow faster, reduce transport emissions and make mycelium packaging a practical alternative to polystyrene.”

Within activism and social change, some of the most effective communication techniques go deep and immersed rather than loud and dispersed, driving more lasting change by listening and responding in unrushed conversations. Deep canvassing, one of these methods, has been found to be not only persuasive but durable in changing views. What it has in common with micro briefs and micro factories is a relational approach, which starts with creating connections and moves to activating change only once those connections are strong and trusted enough to sustain that action.

In his book The Quiet Before, Gal Beckerman explores how radical ideas and effective movements for social change are often conceived in quieter spaces and small, secluded corners. Part of the task and purpose of a connector is to facilitate those spaces and protect their conditions so that ideas can emerge, be challenged, and perhaps then become larger and more influential.

Ways to document and more expansively cite these connections and incubations are emerging in creative practice. Deborah Khodanovich, an MFA student at RISD, is developing a Relational Citation System so that her graduate cohort can cite knowledge that has been developed between them, through conversations that have unfolded over time, in text or aloud, with categories including gossip, co-authored knowledge and common knowledge. (There’s a similarly generous and empathetic approach to citation, documenting how waves of ideas spread between people, in author Ruha Benjamin’s use of referencing and footnoting). Khodanovich is inspired by Lloyd Hogan and Ed Whitfield’s work on liberated zones, explaining that “the overall idea of my research is, what does it mean to design for a local rather than a public? …What if we do it just for the people that are here?”

Not every idea, tool, innovation or achievement has to scale. Some network outwards, becoming distributed and interconnected and growing that way. Others stay small and powerful, creating genuine local impact, and spreading - if they spread at all - through ripples of more diffuse influence and inspiration. As Studio-Method note, “Maybe thinking smaller is actually a way to think bigger.”

🎙️ My work

• I recorded a conversation about Designing Hope with Philip McKenzie, cultural anthropologist and host of The Deep Dive podcast, which should go live in July

• I was pleased to contribute to Fru Bekefi’s brilliant article on compostable fashion for Good on You, which asks: Is the future of fashion soilpunk?

🗒️ Research notes

• Continuing the move towards LARPing the future, cities around the world are prepping for more common extreme heat scenarios using rehearsals and simulations to assess risk and anticipate need. As Europe is finding this week, rising heat will change how we organise our days and how we make and maintain infrastructure. It will also alter our language: Japan has introduced a new word, kokushobi (”brutally hot”), to describe days above 40C. The challenge - and it’s going to be big - is to prepare for and adapt to climate breakdown without accepting further damage and unnecessary trade-offs

• Hot or Cool Institute’s latest report, Nature-Positive Lifestyles, pushes for more joined-up environmental thinking that takes into account the impact of biodiversity and nature loss as well as emissions. By creating consumption-based biodiversity footprints to sit alongside carbon footprints, it hopes to widen the scope of ambition for policy making, business regulation and systemic lifestyle changes

• In positive tipping points: secondhand now makes up around one-tenth of global fashion sales and resale businesses are growing at twice the rate of general clothing. “I see a deep and sustained change in how people buy and how people think about things that they own,” says Adam Jay, Vinted’s chief executive of marketplace, in an interview in The Guardian

• The future can be recycled. Europe could source 33-56% of the critical raw materials it needs - including lithium, cobalt and rare earth metals - from waste streams by 2050, according to a new FutuRaM study. 17 types of critical raw material could achieve recovery rates of 80% by 2050 if new legislation is implemented, increasing supply chain resilience and manufacturing efficiency

• The ability to energise everything is drawing closer, opening up abundant design potential. Scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have developed solar cells that are transparent and very thin (10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair), making them near-invisible when applied to surfaces

📖 Reading

• Contrapposto by Dave Eggers, a paean to art and the creative life

The idea: Making space for robots

We already share our space with machines. We organise our homes around them: living rooms are arranged around TVs while kitchens facilitate the spatial needs of dishwashers, fridges and freezers. Outside of the home, we have designed our built environments around our favourite machines for a century; we’ve only just begun the work of untangling cities from cars. But now, something new is emerging.

Physical AI - the term for AI that exists in the physical world in the form of hardware including robots, autonomous vehicles and drones - is a market that’s forecast to be worth 430bn Euros by 2030, per PwC. Humanoid robots make up a large portion of its economic potential - Barclays values the humanoid robot market at $200bn by 2035 - but industrial robots, delivery robots and non-humanoid care companions are in the mix too, and together they are reshaping how we design our environments and how we see our role within these spaces.

As delivery robots scale up and become a more common sight, we’re making space for them in cities and on roads. Doordash’s delivery robots are starting to use bike lanes in the US, which, as AI reporter James Vincent points out, could prove to be a boon for cycling infrastructure or an additional risk/peeve for cyclists. Some of the companies that operate delivery robots are sharing their data in ways that could be deeply socially useful: Coco Robotics, which operates 1000 robots across the US and Europe, now shares the hazard information its robots gather in real-time with the BlindSquare app, which is used by blind and visually-impaired people to navigate streets.

In industry, where robots already have addressable and clearly defined use cases in manufacturing and production, the move to lights-out industrialism - factories that can operate without lighting because no humans work there - is gaining pace. It will reshape how these buildings are designed, as in theory, no people need ever use them. Could floorplans start to be designed with sensors in mind, rather than human eyes? In digital spaces, a similar shift is happening: as AI agents take over the work of navigating websites, online processes are being designed to be agent-native, or in other words, optimised for AI programs to use rather than people.

In homes, kitchen manufacturers are adding cut-out slots to fitted cupboards for cleaning robots to tuck into when they’re not out vacuuming or mopping. These parallel some of the spaces we insert for pets within our home, like cat flaps, and the relationship between robots and animals doesn’t end there: there are already robots designed to play with pets, and to clean up after them. Industry insiders estimate that up to half of the robots we live with will perform emotional and relational roles, rather than physical service-based roles, and this requires a more intimate design approach. In cultures that are more comfortable with robots, they are increasingly integrated into family life: design innovation company Takram has designed a wooden chair for GROOVE X’s Teletubby-like Lovot robot to use at the dining table.

Opening up human environments to robots entails navigating not only new intimacies and ethical uncertainty, but immediate security risk. Recent examples of domestic machines such as lawn mower robots being hacked to gain sensitive information, and even to physically attack their owners, are an important reminder that the robot itself is not necessarily the threat. Behind a robot there is always a human, a network of power structures and incentives, and a series of human-made decisions.

We are also the training data. Physical AI companies including 1X and Sunday Robotics are busy training their humanoid home robots to learn how to fold laundry and unobtrusively manage the household, by having remote operators take on the jobs and build up the video data into ‘world models’ for the robots to learn from. Food delivery platform DoorDash is offering its workers paid work recording video clips of themselves completing tasks for robots to mimic, like loading a dishwasher or folding clothes, creating a very specific new subsection within the gig economy. Old training data has value too: the imaging model created by Niantic when millions of players played Pokémon Go on their phones a decade ago has been repurposed by the company to train delivery robots how to navigate areas where GPS is not available. At tech festival SXSW this year, artists Tender Claws’ installation Body Proxy explored and satirised this very 2020s phenomenon, instructing participants to “wrap a banana” or “make a pillow suffer” in order to train a computer to be more competent in these increasingly esoteric tasks.

Training robots, making space for robots, and living with robots is not going to leave us unchanged. Humans are extremely adaptive, and early indicators suggest that we are becoming more robotic. As AI-generated meeting summaries become more common in corporate culture, people are learning to cut out small talk and pleasantries in their meetings to enable AI tools to generate ‘cleaner’ texts. Chatbots are changing how we talk, and how we expect other people to respond to us. As US journalist Ezra Klein wrote, following an illuminating visit to San Francisco to witness the bleeding-edge of AI development: “It will reshape us. We have to be attentive to how.”

🗞️ My work

• I’m in the midst of teaching my annual unit at London College of Fashion, introducing fashion business students to futures and innovation frameworks and supporting them through their own foresight projects. This year, Designing Hope is on the reading list 🌟

📄 Research notes

• Renewable energy overtook coal in 2025 to become the world’s largest source of electricity, reaching 33.8% versus coal at 33%. Solar power grew by 636TWh, meeting 75% of demand growth, and wind by 205TWh

• Threading systemic change through to product innovation, UK start-up Windfall Energy’s new home battery appliance stores renewable energy when it’s cheapest and most abundant for use when it’s needed. Expressive design and CMF choices by Ben King provide a case study in making functional desirable

• Innovation researchers track developments in batteries closely because advances here unlock so many other changes and possibilities. Chinese battery company CATL has announced two big steps forward: EV batteries capable of charging from 10% to nearly full in six minutes, at a range of 1500 km; and a major agreement for industrial use of sodium-ion batteries. Sodium is abundant and could scale to replace lithium in global supply chains, reducing reliance on damaging lithium mining projects

• A useful counterpoint to my critique that AI agents will further remove us from making ethical shopping choices comes from Sonalie Figueiras of Green Queen, who argues that consumers want assurances on the products they’re buying, and will instruct their agents to find them, to a level of detail that humans could not easily achieve. “If AI agents are eventually doing our shopping, they are going to need structured proof — product data, certifications, quality checks, contamination testing, origin information — to understand what something really is and whether it’s worth buying”

• Circular Textiles Foundation’s Infinitee clothing certification label replaces wishcycling (putting something in the recycling in the vague hope that it can be recycled) with assurances of actual recyclability. The label graphic shows that garments have been designed to be recycled without disassembly, using technologies that are already in use by European textile recyclers, and recently gained approval from the EU IP Office. As textile-to-textile recycling receives new focus from brands, this is a significant step in the right direction

📱 Reading

• “A visitor from centuries ago would come to our modern cities, look at the dogs and wonder: where are the children?”

The idea: Hyperscaled decision-making

This month, NASA’s Artemis II mission took four astronauts further from Earth than any human has ever travelled. From the dark side of the Moon, the astronauts sent back new photos that reaffirmed the power of the overview effect: the feeling of planetary consciousness and responsibility that arises from the awe of seeing Earth from space.

This feeling of planetism, or planetary humanism, reinforces some of the central assumptions of ecological thinking: that humans are interconnected with all forms of life and consciousness (including all other humans), and should live accordingly. As climate editor Jon Watts writes, on Gaia Theory, “Looked at on this planetary scale, Life (with a capital L) is much more about interdependence than competition.”

But planetism also encourages thinking big - and big, bold climate solutions will gain traction as the effects of climate breakdown solidify into a clear planetary threat. Actuaries have begun to warn of planetary insolvency: the growing risk of societal and economic collapse as a result of losing nature’s critical support systems. Noema’s Nathan Gardels introduces the concept of planetary sapience, referencing global geospatial technologies such as Google’s Earth AI and Microsoft’s Aurora as turning points in how we can combine planetary consciousness with data-driven foresight. The Planetary Compendium is an archive of planetary governance processes created by the Berggruen Institute and Dark Matter Labs and proposed as an “unfinished language for governing a living planet.” Sci-fi architect Liam Young’s projects include planet-scale proposals such as The Great Endeavour, a future vision in which humanity has installed gigaton infrastructure, on the scale of fossil fuels, to capture carbon underground. Young has described his work as “planetary punk”, taking in “imaginings of immense undertakings and impossible repairs.”

Planetary threats invite planetary responses. And yet time and again we see that the people who feel comfortable making planetary-scale decisions, such as starting wars or embarking on irreversible geoengineering, are rarely the people we would wish to hold such power.

The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, writing for a special 2005 edition of Forbes on the theme of Communication, titled his piece ‘Join The Planetary Conversation’. In time, he wrote, the technological and financial limits of communication will disappear, “leaving us with only limitations imposed by our own morality.” He argued for communications technologies to be expanded to every part of the world and for accessibility, affordability and inclusion to be central to this planetary expansion. Rather than a future where tech companies in great positions of power focus solely on their gadgets, he argued that we should ensure that schools can afford to pay their electricity bills and fix their leaking roofs - because these obstacles impede planetary-scale communication just as much as not having an internet-connected computer. Twenty years later, it’s clear which choices have been made. But the ethical path forward remains remarkably consistent.

How can we design for the planetary? First, we need to consider size. Thinking big can mean scaling up, but it’s often more effective and less corrosive to network out: to create wider and thicker webs of impact and collaboration. And second, we can view the products and systems that are being designed as planetary citizens, just as we are. Are they good citizens: do they add value to the planet, and return to it after their use has finished? Do they leave the planet better than they found it - or at the very least, no worse? And if not, how could they be redesigned or reimagined to do so? As the planetary conversation continues, that is the task that lies ahead of us.

🧑‍🏫 My work

• I’m delighted to be a keynote speaker at this summer’s National Landscapes Conference, where I’ll be discussing Designing Hope and how to grow protopian relationships between people and place

• I’m also delivering the keynote at SSENS’ Future of Social Sciences conference this summer

🗒️ Research notes

• The fossil fuel supply threats of the US-Iran war are prompting action at a speed and scale that environmental activists could only dream of. The IEA published recommendations to limit energy use through behaviour choices (working from home, driving more slowly), and there’s mounting evidence that nations are now transitioning more quickly to renewables (UK, France, South Korea, Egypt)

• Google has partnered with XPrize to launch a $3.5m competition for positive science-fiction films that show optimistic futures, with the winning film getting $2.5m for production. “While cautionary tales have always played a vital role on screen, this competition creates space for a different, equally essential kind of storytelling – one that explores the complex optimism of a world in transition,” said XPrize founder Peter Diamandis

• Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have synthesised a drug to treat Parkinson’s using a process called bio-upcycling, where waste plastic bottles are fed to genetically engineered bacteria to be converted into useful products

• Art’s role in social transformation is often underestimated, so I’m happy to see more exhibitions exploring it. Running 5th September to 15th November 2026, the 16th Gwangju Biennale’s theme will be ‘You must change your life’. Inspired by the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, the Biennale explores the power of art in responding to crises, and explores change as an artistic method. “We imagine this exhibition moving viewers across different scales and speeds of change,” said artistic director Ho Tzu Nyen

• Multispecies architecture continues to grow as a movement. In Florence, the installation There Are Other Fish in the Sea by Danish artists Superflex fills the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi with stacked sculptures that are designed to be art for humans and future refuges for sea creatures. The piece envisions how architecture could adapt in purpose as sea levels rise

📚 Reading

• Every Version of You by Grace Chan, which was longlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize 2026

The idea: Humans in the loop

In the AI industry, the phrase ‘human-in-the-loop’ (HITL) describes an approach to developing and using AI systems in which humans review and intervene at key points within the data training or deployment process.

In AI discourse more widely, the term is usually interpreted less technically and more existentially. One of the central concerns people have about AI is if or when humans will leave the loop. Conversations that start at “what should a machine do and what should a human do?” always seem to circle back to: “what is human?” Instead of trying to tackle this compellingly unanswerable question, it can be more useful to ask: “what is interestingly human?” And for that question, at least, designers are already providing some answers, in the form of AI-free aesthetics.

Some of the common elements of AI-free aesthetics include serif typography, hand-drawn illustrations and intentional visual imperfection. These artisanally human motifs function as a kind of protest to AI slop - as designers Studio Bassline have observed, “this isn’t just an aesthetic choice. It’s a response” - but they’re also an acknowledgement of the fact that the human eye is drawn to the less-smooth, the less-perfect, and the a-bit-weird. We are pattern-seekers, so disruptions in the pattern compel us to pay attention: a study published in 2019 found that mathematically simpler images retain a viewer’s attention less well, while complexity demands “perceptual sensitivity”.

Deep attention is growing in importance beyond aesthetics too. Culturally, it’s become fashionable to present semiotic cues of intelligence, or more specifically, to look as though you read books and have informed opinions. In London, the undisputed leader in status symbol tote bags is Daunt books. Its distinctive shoulder bags create the appearance of being “disgustingly educated”, at a time when having niche interests has become a lifestyle aspiration (see also: the entire dark academia subculture). ReMarkable’s paper-like tablets work similarly: they communicate the idea that the person using them has an interesting mind and cultured things to do.

Live events that valorise in-person presence and learning are mushrooming around the world, including Lectures on Tap, with its pints, professors and “note taking vibes”, and schools like the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn. Intelligence is becoming not just a route to culture but a culture in itself. Digital technology can derail or enhance it. Depending on how we choose to use it, social media can be a feed to zone out to or a font of knowledge: thanks to charismatic communicators on TikTok, lots of people now have decent understandings of subjects they wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. As Dazed Studio wrote earlier this year, for young adults, “Information is no longer passively received but something to actively participate in.”

Writing in Aeon, Australia-based university librarian Carlo Iacono makes a related point. Reading rates appear to be falling, but modes of access to knowledge keep growing. “Each mode [documentaries, newsletters, video essays, data visualisations, podcasts] contributes something the others cannot. This isn’t decline. It’s expansion.”

The most astute AI companies are making themselves part of this expansion. Chatbots have made assemblages of information very easy to obtain, but human thinking is still required. As part of its Keep Thinking branding, the marketing team for Anthropic’s Claude runs pop up events where people wait patiently in line to acquire cups of coffee, good reading lists, and ‘thinking’ caps.

People with a vested interest in a more automated, less intellectually curious future will position that future as inevitable. No future is inevitable. How long will humans be in the loop for? For as long as we consider our intelligence to be important. “Become a person with an interesting mind,” urged Ellen McGirt, editor in chief at Design Observer, in a recent op-ed. “Claim the human experience, with all its foibles and false starts. Try the new thing, cook the food, watch the film, read the book, collect weird shit, talk to someone you’re wary of, pick up a pencil, and draw. Take the long road, and not just because it will make you more marketable. But because it’s the better path.”

🗞️ My work

• One of the reasons I’ve been poring over AI semiotics so much lately is that I’ll be a guest lecturer at Dutch Invertuals’ AI Academy, taking place this summer, which will conduct design inquiry into the impact of AI on creativity, imagination and society

• I’m on the latest episode of The Mindset Economy podcast talking about Designing Hope

• And I went to speak to the MarketingKind community too

🗒️ Research notes

• The green transition is showing small but highly significant signs of actually starting to be a transition. New reports confirm that China’s fossil fuel emissions from energy and industry dropped in 2025, by 0.3%, even as energy consumption rose by 3.5%. Renewables met 40% of demand, led by solar energy, causing coal use to drop slightly. If this momentum can be maintained, and if other countries (and industries) follow this lead, meaningful emissions reduction will happen

• Consumer electronics brand HP is working with recycling company Mint Innovation to extract the copper from its old computers and printers and remanufacture it into its new products, creating an industry-first closed-loop process

• Following news of Meta’s plans to add facial recognition to its AI glasses (also now known as “pervert glasses”), designs of resistance are emerging. Nearby Glasses is a new app that notifies you when smart glasses are detected nearby so that you can “act accordingly”

• More protest art: Times New Resistance is a free custom font released by graphic designer Abby Haddican to “autocorrect the autocrats”. The font automatically changes some words as they’re typed: “Trump” becomes “Donald Trump is a felon” and “ICE” becomes “the goon squad”

• New feature film Earth’s Greatest Enemy looks at the environmental impact of the Pentagon, “the world’s biggest - and most unaccountable - polluter”

📱 Watching

• Brian Eno interviewed by Zane Lowe for Apple: “You really ought to be the shepherd of your own attention. You can’t let that be stolen from you.”

The idea: Designing for co-benefits

Demographic analysts have noted a shift in young people’s attitudes. They are moving on from the romanticising of everyday life and self-care that have defined the past few years of online culture (via trends like ‘main character energy’ and ‘soft living’), to focus on ‘locking in’. The new mindset represents a return to reality, to making tangible long-term goals, and devising and then enacting a plan to achieve them.

This growing mentality has parallels in global politics. When Canadian prime minister Mark Carney addressed Davos 2026, in a speech that’s already gone down as historic, he spoke of the need for the world’s “middle powers” to work together to build a more co-operative and resilient world. “Our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, has termed value-based realism,” he said, “or, to put another way, we aim to be both principled and pragmatic.”

Pragmatism doesn’t mean watering down climate action or ignoring human rights or rejecting inclusivity and equity. It means facing the future and designing, incentivising and implementing the right solutions. And when “every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse” - according to an official assessment of national security that has just been quietly released by the UK government - it’s necessary.

Environmental responsibility doesn’t fall off the agenda. Instead, the agenda becomes multi-point. The aim becomes engineering focused co-benefits that work across different layers of a system at once, or paths forward that offer multiple benefits to incentivise change. Co-benefits provide a clear ‘win-win’. In Ikea’s People + Planet 2025 Trends report, which surveyed 30,000 adults across 30 countries, the top motivator for people taking positive climate action was if that action also helped them save money (at 54%). Actions that were also good for their health and their family’s health provided the third biggest motivator, at 41%. Both of these motivators were more important to them than the climate action being easy to do.

There are multiple examples of co-benefit strategies and systems emerging at the moment. In food systems, innovators are offering a just transition to farmers: Finnish oat-based dairy Mö Foods uses conventional dairy equipment, making moving to plant-based production more efficient and more feasible for new suppliers.

In circular economy strategy, Netherlands-based company UBQ Materials makes thermoplastic composites from mixed household waste (organic and non-organic), meaning that its pitch is ‘recycling without any sorting’. It’s a pragmatic solution that meets people where they are.

Bold political bets are being made from a similar perspective. In Europe, ten countries have agreed to link up their offshore wind projects to create the world’s largest “clean energy reservoir” in the North Sea, in a landmark pact that will build 5GW of capacity every year from 2031-2040 - enough to power 143m homes. There are multiple co-benefits at work here: decarbonisation, energy security, job creation and regional political cohesion, plus a positive image of the future at a time when many people feel their governments are out of good ideas.

In design terms, principled pragmatism means designing systemically for co-benefits and joined-up solutions - from multi-use product functionality to material specification and end-of-life reprocessing. As Aarathi Krishnan, founder of risk intelligence company RAKSHA Intelligence Futures, points out: “we do not get to choose whether we live in an interregnum. We only get to choose what we do with the sight we have, and how little time we waste before we act on it.”

🎤 My work

• I’ll be speaking about my approach to futures thinking, including Designing Hope, at Creative Mornings London on 27th February. This community of creatives has been growing since I studied design at university; it’s an honour to be speaking there

🗒️ Research notes

• Car-free neighbourhoods are growing in number as Utrecht begins construction on a new one (see also: Culdesac in Tempe and The Phoenix in Lewes). And they’re popular: 18% of car owners in the US are “strongly interested” in living car-free

• Furthering the case that cities are leading where countries don’t, Amsterdam has banned adverts for meat products and fossil fuels (including air travel, cruises and petrol cars) in public spaces and on public transport starting in May. Advertising giant JCDecaux reportedly informed city councillors via email that this will provoke “far-reaching financial and legal consequences” - it takes real civic courage to do this. Florence has followed suit by banning fossil fuel ads, bringing the total to more than 50 cities

• More positive tipping point news: sales of fully electric vehicles (at 22.6%) overtook sales of petrol-only vehicles (22.5%) in the EU in December, for the first time. Hybrids made up the biggest group, at 44% of new registrations

• Researchers at the University of Glasgow have developed a new type of circuit board that is 99% biodegradable, made by printing zinc-based circuits onto paper or bioplastic. The circuits can be either composted in soil or dissolved using vinegar at end-of-use

• All of these developments stand in contrast to dystopia-bait, a growing trend noted by Protein researcher Sophia Epstein that sees tech companies marketing their products using dystopian provocations, presenting “worst-case futures” for our titillation. They emerge from a culture where, as I’ve written before, dystopia is default, and reflect exactly what Donna Haraway describes as tech-infused futurism’s “affects of sublime despair and politics of sublime indifference”

🗣️ Interesting products

• Contribute to Mozilla’s Common Voice project, like I did, to add your accent, intonation and other verbal characteristics to an open dataset for use in inclusive tech development

• The facade of Oxford University’s new Life and Mind building is based on a brainscan taken of researcher Sage Boettcher as she visualised the department’s future

• AntiRender is a new tool for architecture that allows you to “see through the architectural BS and get back what it’ll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November”

📱 Reading

• “Designing responsibly in this era requires more than inspiration. It requires ethical foresight: the willingness to imagine not only what could go right, but what could go wrong, and for whom.” Ashleigh Axios writing in Design Observer: Innovation needs a darker imagination

The idea: Child-centred design

Talbot Rice Gallery’s exhibition The Children are Now centres around the growing movement of Childism, “a framework that identifies and seeks to address discrimination against children” and “attempts to fundamentally rethink children’s roles in society with their perspectives being essential to our understanding of the world”. The movement was bolstered in 2024 by Scotland’s decision to incorporate into law the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which includes honouring children’s right to play, fair treatment, and to be heard.

Childism is growing at a time when children live, on average, more surveilled and controlled lives than they have in the past. A recent Harris Poll of American parents found that 45% of children aged 8-12 have not walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store; 62% have not walked or biked somewhere without an adult; 71% have not used a sharp knife, and 87% wish they could spend more time with their friends in person outside of school. The US-based Let Grow campaign advocates for increasing childhood independence, offering a ‘pledge of independence’ and staged challenges for kids (cook dinner yourself, go for a bike ride alone). Without broader support, many parents will remain unwilling to take the risk.

Space for children to play in unstructured and parent-free contexts has shrunk as safe, trusted third spaces (libraries, parks, playgrounds, youth centres) have been systematically removed, defunded and decentred across society. “Digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us,” notes evolutionary anthropologist Eli Stark-Elster.

As children have started to spend more time online, parallel risks have become increasingly apparent on digital platforms. Social media bans for under-16s are now a key consideration for politicians and parents are becoming more aware of the dangers of virtual worlds such as Roblox, which children (40% of Roblox users are under 13) use for an average of 137 minutes a day.

Demographically, children are also being decentred. The long-term trend of dropping birthrates and ageing populations means fewer children to design for in the long run, with some places encountering a real-life Children of Men scenario: one rural Italian village recently welcomed its first baby in 30 years. France recorded more deaths than births in 2025, and the UK is expected to follow this year. Globally, birth rate (2.2) was just above replacement rate (2.1) in 2024 and is projected to continue to decline. As well as sparking a rising wave of pronatalists, this demographic reality is impacting how we design our environments, policies and infrastructure, to enable children to thrive.

City planners are turning their attention to family-centred cities, which are designed to make space for intergenerational housing and more flexible and diverse modes of care-giving beyond the nuclear family unit. Walkable and bikeable neighbourhoods, ample playable space and well-planned public transport are another focus, enabling families to raise children in urban environments.

But the aim of childism is much more ambitious. Childism challenges us to see all of designed culture from a child’s perspective, and redesign it - with them as well as for them. This means ‘right-sizing’ the made world, designing out the products and spaces that actively harm younger members of society - from addictive and enticing vapes to SUVs that make nearby children fatally invisible to drivers - and designing in the products and experiences that can enhance their lives. In product design, Tin Can’s landline phone is a recent example of this approach.

Focusing on young people’s needs is futures thinking at its clearest. In the UK, the government has allocated £500m to build or refurbish 250 youth centres over the next four years and create 50 Young Future Hubs. This is foresight in action: according to a new report commissioned by the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, every £10,000 spent on social infrastructure prevents £105,000 in riot damages. Over time, these spaces can help to reweave social fabric and reduce division and violence in communities - so long as they follow the anchoring rules of “keep it open, keep it warm, keep it working, keep it staffed”.

Dark Matter Labs’ project Cornerstone Indicators proposes a series of alternative metrics to evaluate the systemic health of a place. The co-designed indicators include ‘number of people who would look forward to starting a family in the area’ and ‘number of people who are feeling positive about the week ahead on Sunday evenings’. A useful, childism-oriented indicator for designers, architects and planners moving forward could be ‘how much do children and teenagers enjoy this area?’ Our aim, of course, is to ace the test.

🎤 My work

• I presented some of the themes from Designing Hope to rooms of postgraduate students and brand strategists this month, and I’ll be speaking at Middlesex University’s postgraduate research symposium on the topic next month

🗒️ Research notes

• Running until March, the exhibition Electric Shock at Seoul Museum of Art examines the sharpening relationship between technology, electricity and progress, and the tensions this creates for ecological responsibility. “Ensuring a stable supply of electricity has become a question of paramount importance, as it is directly related to how quickly advanced technologies such as AI can be integrated into the competitiveness of a state or an enterprise”

• A new report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) values the green economy - defined as “commercial solutions with a clear environmental purpose or solutions that are a direct response to environmental challenges” - at $5 trillion and says it has outperformed all other sectors except tech over the last decade

• Public support for environmental policy is higher than MPs estimate, a survey of politicians in the UK and Belgium has found, with citizens supporting taxes on irresponsibly-designed products (56%), environmentally unsustainable food such as red meat (42%) and frequent flying (62%)

• The best climate solutions come with co-benefits. A new study led by the University of Arizona found that agrivoltaics create valuable shaded areas for farmworkers, who “are 35 times more likely to suffer fatal heat-related illnesses than nonagricultural workers”. Solar panels reduce the wet bulb temperature of their working area by up to 10 degrees, provide a cool place to store their water bottles, and reduce their mental stress

• Also in renewables - set to be an epicentre of innovation for a long time to come - circular design is advancing. The first fully recyclable carbon fibre wind turbine blade has been developed by Chinese company Ming Yang Smart Energy - and it’s big. Over 110m long, the blade can be chemically degraded at end-of-life at ambient temperature and pressure

🎧 Listening

• Carole Collet, Professor of Design for Sustainable Futures at Central Saint Martins and “grand dame of new materials thinking” (as described by host Grant Gibson), talking about biodesign, working with mycelium, and her fascinating career journey, on the podcast Material Matters

The idea: Solar powers up

More than 244 gigawatts of solar energy capacity is now installed globally every six months; each gigawatt is equivalent to one large coal plant. Over the past fifteen years, solar power has become cheaper and more prolific than forecasters projected, and it’s rising up the energy mix. But to see the full impact of solar, you have to go beyond the statistics.

As explained in environmentalist Bill McKibben’s new book, Here Comes The Sun, solar is liberation. It brings abundance: electricity becomes so cheap and plentiful while the sun is shining that in Australia, it will soon be free for households for three hours a day, as part of the new Solar Sharer offer.

The solar future is creating new power dynamics in multiple senses. It’s largely made in China, as so much of the green transition is: the country makes 84% of solar panels and controls a substantial amount of the material supply chain. While some countries resist the energy transition, other countries will leap from patchy grids to electrostate status historically quickly - powered by these panels. “Almost every rooftop in every major city in Pakistan now has a Chinese solar panel on it,” says Haneea Isaad, an energy finance specialist at IEEFA in Pakistan, noting that spending three months’ salary on a solar kit and installation gives people free solar power from that moment on.

Solar power lends itself not to constrained supply, ruled by oil and coal barons, but to community ownership and distributed microgrids. Energy communities are growing in number as groups of people join up to harvest and distribute energy locally, causing “demand destruction” for fossil fuels. These communities are spawning innovative techniques along the way: in Power Station, artists Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn energised their neighbours in Walthamstow, London, to solarise their street and their local schools by turning the endeavour into a grassroots art project that has become a film, a guide and a growing movement.

At smaller scales, solar power is becoming cheap, accessible and highly DIY-friendly. Rooftop solar, balcony solar and windowsill solar open up the possibility of energy independence to just about anyone. Solar Power for Artists sells $275 mounts that stick outside a window to hold solar panels - without need for fixtures that might lose you your security deposit.

There are, of course, caveats. Like every other climate solution, solar power is not ethically uncomplicated. Implementing a circular economy will be essential to effectively and continuously reuse the materials needed to make solar work - lithium, copper, cobalt, rare earth elements - so that mining can be limited and localised remanufacturing put into place.

And while solar power surges ahead, the energy transition remains an energy addition: we are close to meeting new demand for electricity globally through renewables, but fossil fuel use has yet to fall.

Designers have a clear role to play in bending this curve and shaping this future, by making the power of the sun even more irresistible. As solar designers like Marjan van Aubel and Pauline van Dongen have demonstrated, there is ample opportunity to create solar systems and products that are too exciting not to switch to.

We think we know what solar panels look like, but increasingly, we don’t: innovative new form factors are emerging that are both more efficient and more aesthetically diverse. Janta Power’s vertical solar panels are inspired by trees and skyscrapers, taking up less land while generating more energy than flat panels. Floatovoltaics - solar panels that float on lakes and can be shaped like waterlilies or placed in choreographed patterns - are particularly beautiful, and look like something out of a protopian sci-fi film. Solar power is liberation, hope, and possibility - and it has vast design potential. Time to power up.

🎭 My work

• Designing Hope is out in Australia this month! I went on the Readings podcast to introduce the four futures visions and highlight some of my favourite projects from the book

• I took part in a post-show panel following a performance of Precipice, a new electro-folk musical about the future, at New Diorama Theatre in London, to discuss hope, crisis and complicity. I was thrilled to be invited to be part of this - it’s a great indication that Designing Hope is reaching the diverse and often very creative audience it’s intended for

• I have more talks, conversations and podcast appearances lining up for spring. As ever, get in touch if you’d like me to speak with your group

🗒️ Research notes

• A beautiful image of the future features in the proposals for a new ‘forest city’ in England. The artist’s impression of the city melds greened buildings and tram networks with timber construction and curving, Art Deco-esque design

• Circular economies add up. A new report commissioned by Biffa has found that it would cost the private sector £800m to build the infrastructure for the UK to recycle all of its plastic packaging onshore - which would generate more than that investment (almost £900m) in economic output yearly

• The clean energy revolution will be recyclable. Using a new process developed at UNIST in South Korea, 95% of the nickel and cobalt from old EV batteries can be recovered

• In north England, there’s a growing trend to design, style and curate charity shops more like higher-end vintage or designer shops - helping reuse and resale to feel desirable instead of (or as well as) frugal

• “When an intervention works this clearly, you change what you do.” A neuroscientist makes the public health argument for autonomous cars - which data shows to be far, far safer than cars driven by humans. There are also significant social inclusivity benefits, as autonomous transport - when designed right - can be deeply useful to people with disabilities

📚 Reading

• “There is always enough misery and mayhem in the world to support a claim that it is the end of days, if that is what you wish to see.” Everything Must Go by Dorian Lynskey (2024) is an account of how apocalypse has been depicted over time

The idea: The art of protest

As of 2025, more countries are living under authoritarian governments than democratic governments. Autocracies have risen to 91 countries while democracies have fallen to 88. In percentage terms, the shift is more stark: less than 12% of people worldwide live in a liberal democracy - the lowest proportion in fifty years - while 72% live under autocratic rule. And even in democratic countries, protest is being cracked down on.

At the same time, people are becoming more aware of the growing control that big technology companies (and their billionaire owners) have over media, communication, digital infrastructure, and increasingly, politics. A wave of creative protest and collective action is rising in response.

As data surveillance, facial recognition and AI become more pervasive across everyday life, tools and techniques that block recognition and dismantle the technologies are swelling in number and in use - from make-up that blocks facial recognition to clothes that scramble the view of the machine. In San Francisco, as driverless cars have become a symbol of Big Tech’s careless dominance, protesters have been vandalising the cars and putting traffic cones onto their hoods to immobilise them.

Following in the tradition of change-making performance art by groups such as the Yes Men, artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s projects explore sabotage as a tool for climate action. Their work includes encouraging people to phone fossil fuel executives and purposefully waste their time; bots that trawl the web to click on ads in climate news articles to incentivise the media to publish more of them; and carbon ‘offsets’ that transfer money to climate activists who’ve engaged in direct action.

In fashion, which has a long and storied history of pushing for social justice by way of creative protest, advocates for trans rights have embraced designer Conner Ives’ Protect the Dolls t-shirt. After being worn by high-profile cultural figures including actor Pedro Pascal, the tees have repeatedly sold out, raising over $700,000 for Trans Lifeline.

Writing recently in Dezeen, Susan Yelovich, professor emeritus at Parsons The New School in New York, called for a new wave of more collective design activism. “Whatever emerges needs to be compelling enough to galvanize the public imagination – be it in protest (e.g. the raised fist) and/or in hope (e.g. the rainbow flag). It needs to bring together the resistance bubbling up from town meetings, from the streets, from campuses and from the less-visible grumblings at the proverbial kitchen table.”

Protest is not only opposition; it can be proposition. It offers a way to suggest and design new possibilities, and is often the catalyst for the beginnings of new systems. Protest plays a key role in shifting the Overton Window, a political theory of public acceptability that also determines our ‘consensus futures’, by introducing and normalising ideas. There are many ways to influence where ideas sit within the Overton Window and whether they are perceived as ‘radical’ or ‘acceptable’ by the general public. One of these is activism. Another, less widely-acknowledged, catalyst for social change is art.

Olafur Eliasson has spent much of his career exploring how to affect perception: how to shift light, colour, and points of view. With Ice Watch (2014 onwards), he installed melting ice in high-traffic public spaces to put passersby in dialogue with the physical reality of climate breakdown. As he has said: “art is not the object, but what the object does to the world.”

🎤 My work

• Listen to me on the Leeds Sanctuary podcast discussing Designing Hope, collective action, climate resilience and my favourite theory of change, the Overton Window

• I ran a futures thinking workshop for a cancer care charity, looking at futures for fundraising. The participants synthesised an impressive array of interesting areas of change, including analog interactions and legacy giving

• I was honoured to give a guest lecture to MDes Design Futures students at the Royal College of Art, discussing futures ethics and how to both widen and extend our thinking

• I’m now starting to book talks and workshops for January onwards. If you’d like me to speak with your group, let me know!

🗒️ Research notes

• The current mood in climate action is shifting to sit somewhere between pragmatism and hope. Fuelled by Bill Gates’ controversial memo on where to focus investment, climate leaders are reflecting on substantial progress since the Paris Agreement ten years ago: projected temperature rises have been lowered by 40%, from 4C to 2.8C, in that time. Fossil fuel use is plateauing and the goal to triple renewable capacity by 2030 is on track. They’re also celebrating the solar boom, which has taken off at 4x the rate that was projected. But at the same time, nowhere near enough progress is being made, and we are still heading in the wrong direction. Action remains urgent, and needs to accelerate

• High levels of innovation in renewable energy continue, not only in deployment but in design. Chinese company Ming Yang has developed a two-headed wind turbine that could lower the cost of generating wind power by up to four-fifths compared to offshore wind in Europe

• Change happens slowly then quickly. 780 new EV charging stations were added in the US in the past three months - the fastest rise on record - contributing to a 19% increase in the country’s charging infrastructure this year

• Climate change mitigation has to come with adaptation to the changes we will live through. Singapore exhibition Hot Bodies shows ten creative responses to life in extreme heat, including a UPF cape and a self-conditioning cocoon

• Apple doesn’t own the future in the way it once did, but its big bets still say a lot about the tech industry’s images of the future. The company’s product launches up to 2027 will reportedly include an indoor security camera, a home control hub and a tabletop robot

🌃 Interesting products

• Tunisian automotive start-up Bako Motors’ dinky new two-seat car, the Bee, has a solar panel roof that can power it for about 50% of the time, and a battery for the rest of its energy needs

• This feels like a speculative design project become real. Environmental charity Hubbub has created the Ballot Bin, which encourages people to vote on topical issues when they throw away their rubbish. Shown to reduce litter by 60-70% within a 20-metre radius, the solar-powered bins demonstrate that behaviour change can be much more effective when “you invite people to take part in something playful and topical”, per Hubbub CEO Alex Robinson

• In other creative product marketing news: Ikea created tiny versions of its beds to hold smartphones overnight, awarding store vouchers to people who were able to leave their phones undisturbed in the beds for seven nights in a row

🐌 Listening

• This is the most fascinating podcast I have ever listened to. Episode 238 of Knowing Animals: Snail Stories with Thom Van Dooren

The idea: Meta-narratives

I keep track of more transient trends, but my job is to zoom out. It can be difficult to keep zooming out when there’s so much to zoom in on. But when you do, you can see the bigger narratives: the shifts in ideas and perception that inform how we behave and why.

There are a few meta-narratives growing at the moment that present different ideas about the general direction of the future.

Abundance, including the book of the same name by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is a policy narrative. It refocuses liberal ideas of progress on building - housing, public infrastructure, high-speed rail, clean energy - and YIMBYism. Written for and about the US, it has also gained traction in Australia and, to some extent, the UK. Described as a “politics of construction, rather than… national stagnation” by reviewer Malcolm Harris, designing for abundance could mean re-energising optimism and excitement about futuristic tech that serves pressing human needs. It could take the form of projects like Riding Sunbeams, which is connecting railways (and the people who live near them) directly to solar and wind power.

Collapse has been a growing theme in environmentalist discourse over the past few years, and has been in the spotlight recently with Luke Kemp’s new book Goliath’s Curse, which explores the history and future of societal collapses (the Planet Critical podcast has a good overview).

Designing for collapse means preparing, both through short-term response and longer-term resilience and rebuilding. Danish retailer The Salling Group is building a network of 50 emergency stores that can run for at least two days without power or internet, and have stockpiles of essentials such as canned goods, water and medicine. The stores are being distributed strategically to be within reach of 80% of the population.

Creative responses to collapse are mushrooming too: the Serpentine’s current exhibition, artist Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley’s The Delusion, is a “live community play” that depicts a future society fractured by an apocalyptic event.

Sufficiency is the driving idea behind emerging lifestyle movements such as ‘enoughness’, underconsumption and ‘YONO’ (you only need one). Hot or Cool Institute’s new report, A Climate for Sufficiency: 1.5 Degree Lifestyles, analyses lifestyle carbon footprints from 25 countries and shows how people can move into a Fair Consumption Space that could enable global enoughness.

Longevity, efficiency, repair and reuse are central to designing for sufficiency. Industrial designer Vincent Pearce’s Prinko, an inkjet printer made from modular components so that repairing it is as easy as changing the ink, is one of a growing number of products putting these principles into action.

Each of these narratives responds broadly to how we want to live, and what we believe in. They present different directions to the status quo - some more subtly than others - and offer a different future narrative to design towards. Design is shaped by worldview, and products that are designed from a mindset of abundance will be different to those designed in anticipation of collapse, or to enable sufficiency.

Our role - as designers, creatives, citizens, consumers - must include zooming out: to scrutinise the worldviews that drive what is being designed, and move towards preferable futures with every choice we have the power to make.

🗞️ My work

• My book tour for Designing Hope continues, including a panel yesterday at Cheltenham Literature Festival on Hope for the Future with the brilliant debut author Emily Buchanan, chaired by Daniel Hahn

• “The idea of designing for virtual worlds is just getting started”: my new article for Dezeen reassesses the metaverse, the brightest-burning futures vision of this decade

• Utopia, with solar panels: an excerpt from my book ran in The New World magazine, looking at solarpunk

🗒️ Research notes

• The death of ESG has been overstated. In the US, net zero commitments from large companies are up 9% year on year. Per a separate global survey, 61% of CEOs say they are on track to meet their emissions goals, up from 51% a year ago. A survey of 1400 executives across 15 countries found that more than 90% view renewable electricity as critical to new investment decisions - and half said they would relocate operations if governments don’t support the transition

• Methane gets much less attention than carbon, and is much more damaging in the short-term. A new report on fashion’s methane footprint finds that animal-derived wool, leather and cashmere cause 75% of the 8.3 million tonnes of methane the industry produces each year, while making up only 4% of materials used

• Gooddrop produces cotton in the UK using vertical farming, which drastically lowers the crop’s land use and use of water (to 0.4% and by 95% respectively, if scaled). The brand hopes to establish a British ‘grow to wear’ supply chain to enable a circular and regenerative fashion and textiles system

• Hyundai is working with biomaterials company Uncaged Innovations to use an animal-free, biodegradable material called Elevate - made from byproducts of grain, other biomaterials and 1% bio-polyurethane - for some of its car interiors

• Social media use peaked in 2022 and has been declining since, according to research for the FT by GWI. The time adults spend on social media dropped by 10% from 2022-2024, down to two hours twenty minutes a day, with the decline most significant among young adults. America bucks the trend: social media use in the US was 15% higher than in Europe in 2024. Our reasons for using it have also changed: the habit of reflexively opening apps to fill spare moments has risen, while using social media to keep up with friends has become less prevalent

🍄‍🟫 Interesting products

• Tin Can is a fun new landline phone for kids that is beautifully designed. Its website is a vibe too

• Youtuber Hank Green has launched Focus Friend, a productivity timer that encourages you to stay off your phone. When you stay off it, you earn decorations to help a small bean make its room more cosy

• Pocket Scíon is a small device that lets you listen to the biosignals of plants or mushrooms and make music with them

🎧 Listening

• “Africa has been measuring itself against someone else’s ruler”: Nigerian architect Tosin Oshinówò on Design Emergency discussing progress, capital and designing Africa’s futures

The idea: Mindful interfaces

Many of us have a dissatisfied relationship with our devices. Laptops, phones, tablets and appliances are essential for everyday life, but they’re irritating too: they take up too much headspace, capture too much time and attention, and take us away from physical experiences that often feel more intentional and more meaningful.

According to new data from US research centre Pew, 28% of adults in 24 countries say they are online “almost constantly”. The percentage is highest for young adults: in the US, 61% of 18–34 year olds tick this box; in the UK, it’s 53%, dropping to a still-high 42% of 35-49 year olds. A lot of people need to touch grass, and the market for calmer, quieter tech experiences is growing accordingly.

Opera’s Air browser is designed for mindfulness, aiming to offer a “more focused, balanced and stress-free web” by reminding users to take breaks and providing breathing, neck exercises and guided meditations for use during those breaks. The browser also includes an ad-blocker.

Sound designer Eddie Gandelman focuses on quieter audio designs for products such as home appliances, replacing the noise pollution and adverse consequences of “alarming, terrible, basically hurtful sounds” with gentler, more layered sonic design that offers “positive, joyful, musical experiences where things feel more harmonious”.

The Calm Tech Institute, founded by tech anthropologist Amber Case, offers certification for products that can meet its 81-point criteria for calm technology design, which draws from key principles including using the minimum tech needed to solve the problem, and requiring the smallest possible amount of attention.

With touchscreens proving to be frustrating or overly distracting, the tech and automotive industries are returning to physical interfaces, including buttons, dials and switches. Products are also emerging that provide sophisticated takes on skeuomorphism (designs that digitally mimic traditional physical experiences): Paperlike is a screen protector for iPads that feels like paper when you write on it with a stylus.

Good design encourages behaviour change, but needs people to be open to that change. The number of 12-15 year olds choosing to take breaks from their devices - rather than relying on their parents to enforce limits - has risen by 18% to 40% since 2022, according to research from GWI, and young people have been found to redesign their smartphone experiences (for example, by activating ‘do not disturb’ modes) more proactively than older adults.

Ostentatious use of cutting-edge tech is still a status symbol. But increasingly, being able to live without technology is the ultimate luxury. Among the wealthy, it’s ‘dumb homes’ rather than smart homes - homes with no app-based controls at all - that are now emerging as the ultimate status symbol, as owners tire of searching fruitlessly for a light switch or thermostat. Being able to be continuously offline is often an indicator of privilege, wealth, and a life lived with ample human support. For everyone else, there’s a tech-mediated balance that can be enhanced and enabled by thoughtful design.

🎙️ My work

Designing Hope is out now! It made Waterstones’ picks for September’s Best Books and Foyles’ Top Ten Reads for September.

I have been talking about it a lot:

• I wrote a piece for New Scientist about needing new images of the future, and a piece for Big Issue on socially innovative futures visions

• This interview in Wallpaper* by Ali Morris covers futures thinking, my background, and the importance of curiosity and critical thinking

• I gave a lecture at the World Hope Forum to more than 230 creatives from all around the world, and two other - more intimate - lectures to designers in Chicago and New York

• I went on the Feeling Futures podcast to talk about emotions, senses and the future, and onto Times Radio for an interview on their Friday night Culture show

• And Designing Hope is already having some of the impact I want it to: I’ve heard from teachers and lecturers who plan to take the ideas of the book into their classrooms and put it on curriculum reading lists 🙌🏼

🦠 Research notes

• More biomaterials are reaching commercial scale. Gozen has scaled up production of its fermented nanocellulose product Lunaform, which is grown in seven days. Lunaform is produced in three varieties: translucent, indigo, and original - in which the fibrous patterns created by the microorganisms can be seen

• Localised production cultivates creative thinking. The National Theatre in London has put a ‘dye garden’ on its rooftop to grow plants that can be used to make natural dyes for its actors’ stage costumes

• Adaptive reuse in action: Seattle-based startup Blue Dot Motorworks makes conversion kits to adapt pick-up trucks, SUVs and cars from petrol to plug-in hybrid electric power. Not cheap, but cheaper than a new vehicle

• Trials of flexible plastic recycling have found high participation and a recovery rate of over 80%. The UK Government plans to mandate all local authorities to collect flexible plastics from homes from spring 2027 as part of its Simpler Recycling reforms, and businesses are largely supportive of the move

• Automaton lexicon is developing quickly. New slang terms related to generative AI include ‘wireborn’ to describe digital life, ‘clanker’ for a bot, and ‘slopper’ for a person who has delegated much of their work and creativity over to clankers

📒 Reading

• “The big question isn’t if design can change the world – it’s whether we’re paying attention to the world we’re helping to build through design.” Elizabeth Goodspeed writing in It’s Nice That on ethics in design

The idea: Biomaterials’ next phase

From the synthetic biology boom of the early 2010s to the regenerative focus of the early 2020s, we’re continuously being told that the days of using non-renewable materials are numbered. And biomaterials are being used - but they are by no means the default choice. People continue to use more and more plastic, and our use of materials is getting less circular, not more: the Circularity Gap Report 2025 found a drop from 7.2% to 6.9% in use of secondary materials globally since 2018.

Biofabrication faces steep challenges to scale to mass use, with one of the issues being even whether it should scale. Is this to be a transition - a 1:1 replacement of all current production with bio-production - or should we instead be working towards no less than a transformation: a paradigm shift in what we make, use and value, and why we make, use and value it?

It’s also increasingly challenging to reflect the reality of biodesign - to balance accuracy with inspiration. The movement’s aesthetics and branding have often overpromised, with promotional images showing impossibly styled products. Product innovations often come across as underwhelming once you’ve read past the hype and reached the caveats. AI-generated images of biofabricated products are now adding fuel to the fire, raising expectations far above a point where they can possibly be met.

Within all of this, though, innovators continue to make progress, and there's an interesting combination of pragmatism and ambition emerging. Collaboration has always been core to biodesign, and recent launches have leaned into this. Korvaa Consortium’s new shoe is a collaboration between Modern Synthesis, Ecovative and Ourobio, using materials from each: bacterial nanocellulose fabric, mycelium grown within a 3D printed PHAs (biodegradable plastic) base, and cotton and lyocell for laces and lining.

Aifunghi, a new mycelium furniture brand, launched earlier this year. Using a mycelium-hemp composite produced by Growmolding, seaweed-based foam by Agoprene and plant-based furry upholstery by BioFluff, Aifunghi’s material approach is based on the idea that ”it’s not just about one miracle material—it’s about weaving a resilient future from many”. The brand aims to produce at “semi-industrial scale” and the furniture is certified to Contract Level 1, to last for at least 20 years without compression. Within a design movement that still focuses largely on concept products (including the Korvaa shoe), this commitment to production and commerciality is unusual and impressive.

Scale can only be achieved if customers choose to buy in, though, and biodesigned products can be a hard sell because they behave differently. A major part of the creative brief is cultivating a different perspective, that moves us away from expecting production-line consistency and instead being excited and intrigued to use something that’s more alive. Italian mycelium brand Ephea has been positioned in this way, not as a ‘leather substitute’ but as something new. “The category — and the consumer — has moved on [from alt-leather],” the creative studio behind it notes, “and truthfully, it never excited designers enough to adopt these new materials at scale. So we started somewhere else. With a new lens: material-as-evolution… alive with creative and material potential.”

At its most extreme, biodesign challenges us to get used to the idea of caring for objects and committing to deeper relationships with them - bringing an almost animist perspective to design. Like other branches of more-than-human futures thinking, biodesign raises ethical questions about what constitutes life and whose lives we have the right to use.

Avant-garde fashion designer Iris van Herpen worked with Chris Bellamy, of Bio Crafted studio, to create a dress from 125 million Pyrocystis lunula microalgae for Paris Fashion Week this year. The algae emit light when touched, giving the dress glow-in-the-dark effects, and had to be closely temperature-controlled on the way to the catwalk to ensure that they survived. Bellamy says that biodesign entails communicating with living materials, getting to know them, and even interpreting their emotions. “The team here in the atelier will be absolutely devastated if this garment dies because they’ve cared for it and nurtured it.”

📘 My work

I have a book tour shaping up for Designing Hope: Visions to Shape Our Future, which is out 2nd September. Below are my confirmed talks so far; I’ll list more here and on my website as they are announced.

• Thursday 4th September, 6.30pm: Burley Fisher, London (with Emily Buchanan and Paul Behrens)

• Sunday 14th September, 4pm: World Hope Forum, online

• Friday 26th September, 6pm: The Nose, Walton on the Naze, Essex

• Thursday 2nd October, 6.30pm: Hold Fast Bookshop, Leeds

• Tuesday 14th October: Cheltenham Literature Festival - Hope for the Future (with Emily Buchanan and Daniel Hahn)

And I have an article in The Big Issue this week. If you can’t get hold of a physical copy, it’s available to read on Readly via a free trial.

🗒️ Research notes

• Gallup’s new Life Evaluation Index has found that 33% of people globally are ‘thriving’ (rating their present and future lives 7 or above out of 10). 7% are ‘suffering’ (rating their present and future lives 4 or below) and the remaining 60% are in the middle ‘struggling’

• Climate adaptation at its best means adding life. Landscape architects in Canada are building “living shorelines” to lessen the impact of storms, by adding salt marshes and green breakwaters over bulkheads and rock barriers to protect coasts

• The story of reuse is also a story of innovation. Urban Machine, a company that is “salvaging the past to build the future”, builds machines to pull metal fasteners from wood so it can be reused

• The latest creative use case for generative AI: replacing vision boards with AI-generated ‘life trailers’ to help manifest desirable personal trajectories

• I’m a long-time fan of robot pets, and one of my favourite recent launches, Moflin, has sold more than 7000 units since launching late last year - far exceeding expectations. Users report ‘genuine emotional attachment’ and the fluffy grey creature is particularly popular with women

💐 Reading

• Send Flowers by Emily Buchanan. This debut novel from a lifelong environmental campaigner looks straight-on at climate grief - both personal and planetary - and comes out fighting and joyful. I’m delighted to be speaking alongside her at several events this autumn

The idea: Eco-active families

One of the most persuasive environmental advocates I’ve ever seen was a girl who happened to be shopping near me in the vegetable aisle in a supermarket one day. She was following her parents and evaluating every food choice they made, reminding them that they were reducing their plastic use as a family and that they needed to look for unpackaged produce. They were visibly harangued; she was my hero.

It’s often said that Gen Z are the Greta generation, and there’s an unrealistic expectation placed on young people that they will see sense and save us all. But at the same time, they have grown up alongside more extreme climate breakdown than anyone older than them, and children have immense swaying power over their parents’ decisions. An international 2024 survey by GlobeScan found that people living with children are more likely to say they avoid products that are bad for the environment (56% versus 47%) and buy from responsible brands (53% versus 41%).

Climate-conscious parents are increasingly teaming up to take collective action. One of the adverts during this year’s Superbowl was by Science Moms, an advocacy group working to demystify climate change and get households running on clean energy, among other goals. Joining the science moms are ‘dadvocates’: groups of fathers who are meeting to discuss climate action, including at Seattle-based playdates set up by investor and dadvocate Climate Papa.

This growing group are seeking out age-appropriate media and storytelling to inform their children about what’s happening and why: Future Chicken, a show aimed at 6-10 year olds, is one example and tackles eco-anxiety with “humour and positivity”. Climate parents are often solution-focused. Empowered by initiatives like Climate Kitchen, a bi-monthly newsletter equipping food-loving families to reduce their environmental impact, they’re upskilling themselves in cooking plant-based food and involving their children throughout.

But climate parents realise that TV shows and cookbooks won’t be enough, and they want their children to gain environmental knowledge more directly too.

"The key is understanding and experiencing nature,” activist Jane Goodall has said. “People won't rally to protect what they don't know. That's why it's crucial to engage children with nature as early as possible." The Harmony Project does this with schools across the UK; the upcoming GCSE in Natural History will add more chances to grow knowledge.

Outside of school, eco-active parents and carers are factoring planetary civics into everyday activities and excursions. These can go beyond the obvious: Dutch project the Sand Motor uses sea currents to spread sand along the coast and into the dunes off The Hague to reinforce the coastline. As well as being an essential climate adaptation, it’s a handy learning spot for climate-curious kids. At home, packaging innovations like Tomorrow Machine’s Goneshells, which unpeel like fruit and can be composted or dissolved in the sink, can similarly double as eco-active family moments.

For families practising grounded lifestyles, flight-free travel options are being thoughtfully designed so that all passengers can enjoy the journey. Byway offers “joyful, multi-stop, overland trips” that include, in Scotland, “the Hogwarts route”. Nox is an upcoming overnight train service for Europe that is aiming to provide a “real alternative to short-haul flights” with smartly-designed personal rooms.

Climate parents are an increasingly important consumer group, and while they do show up as conscious consumers - sometimes because they’re nagged into it - their biggest impact won’t be in shopping or holiday-planning. They’re taking up the challenge and imperative to drive wider social change with every level of influence they have. Because, as climate kids have said, our house is on fire.

👩🏻‍💻 My work

• The publication date for my book Designing Hope is creeping up - it will be out 2nd September. I’m writing articles for several major publications and have some public lectures, podcast appearances, festival slots and bookshop talks lining up too. More info - and links to read, watch and attend - soon

• In the meantime, it’s been highlighted as one of Waterstones’ picks for ‘the non-fiction you need to read in 2025’

🗒️ Research notes

• Soft Robots: The Art of Digital Breathing at Copenhagen Contemporary runs until the end of 2025 and features artists working “at the intersection of artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and spiritual longing”, asking questions like: “Can the artificial be authentic? Can a robot touch our emotions?”

• At the Badischer Kunstverein in Germany until 23rd November, an exhibition of Romanian artist Stefan Bertalan’s work titled ‘I have lived with a sunflower for 130 days’ documents him “communicating with nature, personifying plants, until he inscribed himself into nature, growing together with it, and finally almost disappearing into it”

• It’s not only solar farms that provide such welcoming habitats that they create unintended more-than-human design. Offshore wind farms have turned into underwater forests by attracting so much life to them

• A poll of sustainability professionals by ISEP has found that fewer than 2% of organisations have reduced their sustainability budget in the past year; more than 40% have increased it

• Aiming to offer “a living record for the creative community”, new by-appointment magazine archive and browsing space Library180 in Manhattan is the latest example of the (small but cheering) return of print

🪆 Interesting products

• Teenage Engineering sent its Choir dolls to Disney to sing ‘the sound of space’ for Elio’s soundtrack, and made custom wooden dolls to represent the main characters in the film

• We Should Own The Economy by Elle Griffin is an upcoming book that people can become co-owners of by investing in it

• GROWinK by Material Futures graduate Peerasin Punxh Hutaphaet combines inkjet printing technology with fungal pigments and bacterial spores, to make self-decomposing ink that can break down synthetic substrates when it ends up in landfill

📲 Reading

• “An inclusive future will demand both a right of refusal and a right of communion”. There’s so much to quote in this interview with Dr Ramon Amaro, the incoming Creative Director at the Design Academy Eindhoven, which examines ‘design as a glitter box of potential’

The idea: Designing the brain

After years of steady investment and development, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have advanced to become one of the biggest areas in consumer tech innovation today. Initially developed for use by people with paralysis, their use cases are expanding quickly: Neuralink is developing its surgically-implanted brain interfaces to address vision loss. Synchron, a less-invasive endovascular interface, has worked with Apple to offer brain-computer input for the iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro. Its interface uses “cognitive AI”, powered by Nvidia, to reduce the processing time between intention and action and enable more precise control. Starfish Neuroscience is developing brain implants that would be applied to multiple parts of the brain simultaneously, and a brain-reading transcranial magnetic stimulation system for use by people with bipolar disorder or depression.

In one of the latest scientific studies, published in Nature, a man with a speech disability used a brain implant to speak, translating neural activity into words within 10 milliseconds. The synthetic voice can emphasise words, intone, hum, and sing. Another study using LLMs was able to translate brain activity into words and phrases with remarkable accuracy. AI can also be used to recreate images that the brain has processed.

Some lawmakers are already anticipating the privacy and rights legislation that will be needed to protect brain data as BCIs start to be used. California extended its state personal privacy laws in late 2024 to include neural data, including data generated by brain activity and nerves.

It’s not unreasonable to extrapolate that these interfaces will change the way we think, just as other communication tools and formats - the pen, typewriter, smartphone, podcast - have changed what we say and how we say it. Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang has said that he is waiting to have children until brain implants become more widely available, because “kids who are born with them are going to learn how to use them in crazy ways. It’ll be a part of their brain in a way that’ll never be true for an adult.”

Some of these products are already graduating from medical devices to general consumer tech. Samphire Neuroscience’s Nettle is a brain-stimulation headset that treats PMS and menstrual pain by applying gentle pulses via four electrodes. 72% of users reported significant pain relief during 30-day clinical trials. Neurode’s headset delivers mild, non-invasive brain stimulation to address symptoms of ADHD. Brain stimulation to treat depression at home, while at an earlier stage of development, has recently been through a successful remote clinical trial.

Other products are focusing less on direct stimulation and more on performance and feedback. Sens.ai’s brain training system aims to increase cognitive performance using mixed methods including light stimulation and brain performance testing, via a headset and app, while StateShift’s app aims to change states of mind using programmed sequences of sound and pulsing light.

We have always been able to design our own mental state to some extent - people drink coffee to focus, eat chocolate to gain energy and improve their mood - but now, mind-shifting processes are being formalised and commercialised in new ways.

Responsible designers will know that they design our brains every time we use a product; even something as simple as colour choice impacts our neural response to our environment. Well-designed products create psychologically positive or neutral experiences, while poorly-designed products are frustrating to use, sensorially overwhelming, or use deceptive design patterns. It’s easy to imagine these being applied to AI-mediated brain interfaces.

As we start to design the brain more directly and alter it more permanently, we take on even more responsibility. And we could open up even more opportunity for design to make a profound difference to life experiences.

🎤 My work

• My upcoming book Designing Hope: Visions to Shape Our Future is featured in The Bookseller’s picks of nonfiction books to watch out for this September

• I’m presenting the keynote at Good Innovation’s day of Radical Hope this month. My talk is titled Designing Hopeful Futures and will cover mindsets, tools and processes for doing just that

• I also feature as one of the experts quoted in Good Futures’ new report, Radical Hope: A Survival Guide to the Coming Storm

• I’ve been teaching this spring once again as an Associate Lecturer on the Futures & Innovation unit for London College of Fashion’s Fashion Marketing students. This unit is challenging and the students rise to it. Some of the topics they took on for their research this year were new masculinity, sustainable AI, and bio-cultural materials innovation

♾️ Research notes

• “For a long time, I’ve been fascinated by Huey Newton’s concept of revolutionary intercommunalism: this idea that resistance to the modes of global capitalism won’t come from a vanguard in one country overthrowing a government, but from a network of communities who find themselves in transnational solidarity.” I wrote about a variant of this concept in my book and now, thanks to Alexis Madrigal, I can name it

• Low-consumption challenges are continuing to gain participants on TikTok, with ‘no buy 2025’, ‘low buy’ and ‘slow buy’ (where you wait 48 hours before clicking the checkout button) all getting traction

• Data visualisation can hold so much power - and shift perspectives. The Biodiversity Stripes visualise nature loss over time, with the world fading from green to grey

• “The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next.” New analysis in MIT Tech Review reports that by 2028, “more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households”

• 2026 will be a big year for tech hardware. Apple reportedly plans to launch smart glasses next year, while OpenAI intends to launch a screenless, pocket-sized AI device (designed by Jony Ive and his team) by the end of 2026 and mass manufacture it in 2027

♻️ Interesting products

• Own less, have more: Poppins is a new French app that enables people to rent out household tools for other people to borrow and use

• A consumer tech company with a sense of place and a defiantly small scale: Zuriga’s espresso machines are designed (beautifully) and assembled within Zurich’s city limits

📒 Reading

• ‘“It was starting to get really cheeky,” says Ono, who is also a freelance mathematical consultant for Epoch AI. “And at the end, it says, ‘No citation necessary because the mystery number was computed by me!’”’ Elite mathematicians have been stunned to find that the latest AI models can solve PhD level challenges in minutes

The idea: LARPing the future

In Alternative Todays, we looked at how people are using simulations, manifestation and reality-shifting to imagine and bring about radical change in the present, as well as the future. Here we build on some elements of this idea, as roleplay merges with behaviour change to create a new spin on futures thinking and present doing.

Over the past decade, cosplay has become a more and more normalised and mainstream part of entertainment. Thanks to trends like fan fiction, cosplay-centred events like Comic Con and the wider normalisation of geek culture, people are much more happy dressing up and pretending to be someone else - in all manner of contexts.

Alongside this cultural shift, there’s been growing interest in LARPing (live action role playing), a niche experience design format that has deep roots in Nordic countries. LARPs involve physical role play with props, settings and costumes, and range from entertainment genres (vampires, murder mysteries, zombie apocalypses) to serious enactments of social and historical events such as the AIDs crisis in 1980s New York. LARPing is increasingly interesting to designers, and to futures thinkers, because of the doors it opens between the actual and the possible - or the real and the imagined.

Swedish art and design museum ArkDes’ upcoming exhibition about LARPing, Worldglimpsing: Role Play and the Design of Alternate Realities, explores this shared terrain. At a symposium preparing the initial threads of the exhibition, participants described the phenomenon of ‘bleed’, the LARPing term for when the experience of a performed role goes on to influence your real worldview. OMSK Social Club described bleed as “half reality, half fiction, the doors left open between the two” and characterised their socially-engaged LARPs as “an attempt to shadowplay politics until hopefully it ruptures this surface we now know as life”.

In Here Is My Power Button, a downloadable freeform LARP created by Brodie Atwater, players are allocated the role of either a person interacting with a companion AI, or the AI itself. Published in the mid-2010s, the themes that have surfaced during its plays, including power struggles, romantic relationships and ethical dilemmas, mirror the discourse around generative AI that has emerged since ChatGPT’s launch. In other words, roleplay preceded reality.

While some people LARP as AI, other people now frequently send their AI assistants into social situations to roleplay as them. Dan Thomson, founder and CEO of ‘virtual human’ company Sensay, uses an AI replica of himself to respond to people on his behalf. “I’ve had people interact with my replica for hours on Telegram and not realise it wasn’t me. It’s 90%–95% indistinguishable,” he says.

Beyond mimicry, one of the more interesting and commonly cited uses for ChatGPT is that people are asking it to write as a better version of themselves (more compassionate, understanding, or simply erudite). For some people, this is just a handy shortcut to sound professional in a quick email, but for others it offers a way to genuinely self-analyse and change how they present themselves over time. In one case, the personal prototyping that a ChatGPT user experienced in conversation with the chatbot led him to end a relationship because his self-growth had led to ‘incompatibility’ with his partner. The potential for personal development is clearly a compelling side effect of this convenience-oriented technology: a recent study found that ‘therapy/companionship’ is now the top use case for generative AI.

Personal prototyping can be a scaffold towards behaviour change as well as self-awareness. Raz Godelnik, Associate Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design, challenges his students to undertake a project called 1.5 degree lifestyles. Themed around sustainable behaviour change, the process first requires the student to commit to a change themselves and record in a diary how they enact the change, noting the obstacles, challenges or limitations they face. The second stage is to design a ‘hack’ to make the change easier to implement, and observe the consequences of that hack. Finally, they propose a bigger and more systemic next step. In other words: first you prototype yourself, then design a hack to make that change more appealing and get friends/community on board, and then make that change bigger and more consequential. At each stage, imagination connects to action and the behaviour change becomes more significant.

The futures industry is increasingly interested in imagination. Influential futurist Jim Dator’s new book Living Make-Belief: Thriving in a Dream Society lays out his theory that we are entering a new time “characterized by the dominance of make-believe, imagination, and visual imagery over literal truth and the written word”, where “well-crafted narratives and emotional appeals can overshadow literal truth and objective reality” and “dream-weavers” lead culture (these quotes are all from Lavonne Leong, reviewing the book in the online futures magazine Compass). As part of this, Dator notes the increasing focus from futurists on fictions as a way to imagine, construct and experience futures visions.

Even as this cultural shift takes shape, we need to connect imagination to tangible change to make futures thinking effective. The mechanisms that make LARPs so transformative provide a strong starting point for change-makers to weave imagination into social infrastructure.

📄 Research notes

• On the remote islands of Scotland's Outer Hebrides, Finnish artists Pekka Niittyvirta and Timo Ahokanto have depicted the projected future sea level rise onto the sides of buildings using light, to communicate climate futures in an evocative way (see a previous version here)

• The latest Circularity Gap report from Deloitte and Circle Economy has found that the global economy has become less circular since 2018, because use of recycled or reused materials has been far outweighed by rising levels of consumption. ‘’Our analysis is clear: even in the ideal world, we cannot solve the triple planetary crisis by mere recycling,” said Circle Economy’s CEO Ivonne Bojoh. “We all need to make different choices”

• Carbon equivalency labelling is being tested by Loughborough University as a way to make lower-emission choices more tangible for shoppers (for example, showing the carbon impact of a beef burger in terms of the number of car trips or hours of lightbulb use it is equivalent to)

• Military emissions make up 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. TNI’s new climate comms briefing warns that “a more violent world is not safer for any of us… but framing climate action in terms of national security is [a way to] greenwash militarisation”

• Sci-fi architect and film-maker Liam Young’s film After The End is a hopeful climate future that depicts First Peoples in Australia returning to their land, reclaiming sovereignty and creating a society that’s powered by renewable energy and repurposes fossil fuel artefacts

💵 Interesting products

• Fantasy Fibre Mill is developing a suite of open-source machines for farm-to-textile flax fibre processing - sized to fit in the corner of a barn - to help people “grow their own clothes”

• Under Armour has partnered with UNLESS to launch a collection of biodegradable clothing that can be composted in a backyard, and is photographed dirty and decomposing in its marketing imagery

• Seedbills is a speculative design project by Netherlands- and Spain-based studio Sharp & Sour that replaces notable people on bank notes with nationally significant seeds and crops

🧠 Reading

• Failure as Futuremaking by Be Oakley

The idea: New durables

We live in a time of short-term thinking and instant gratification. If we are to make wise decisions now that take into account future needs, we must operate on a much longer timeframe. This means changing our relationship to the new and designing objects and systems that function effectively for as long as possible.

Long-term thinkers are building with these principles in mind. Inside a mountain in Texas, a mechanical clock is being constructed that will keep time for 10,000 years. Operated by changes in temperature, with no human involvement necessary, it is the work of The Long Now Foundation, an organisation that advocates for “imagination at the timescale of civilization”. The clock’s aim is to activate our imagination and, simply by existing, encourage us to think about far-off futures in a more engaged way.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a private repository of globally-collected seeds located on a Norwegian island, plans to test its seeds for viability every 100 years. The testing is the short-term aspect of the project. It expects the seeds to remain in storage for far longer and the vault has been constructed with this temporality in mind, functioning as “planetary architecture” to preserve biodiversity and protect future food security for millennia.

These examples are monuments to the long-term: big, statement-making, generation-defining projects that extend collective human action beyond individual lifetimes. As we face the major societal choices that the 2020s present, each of which comes with multi-generational consequences, they provide a blueprint for responsible and inspiring long-term vision.

Some professions have always operated long-term. Speaking at the Make Good symposium at the V&A last month, Jez Ralph of Evolving Forests explained that to foresters, making decisions that will last for centuries is standard practice. A tree that is planted today, he said, will be chopped down and used to construct the building typologies that exist 100 years from now. The Thousand Year Trust, which seeks to grow Britain into a “rainforest nation” again, extends this plant-it-forward thinking to a national scale.

The energy transition requires significant new infrastructure, which - like forests - is one of the longer-term decisions that a society can make. As governments start to invest more in nuclear energy, buildings that safely contain nuclear waste will concurrently begin to be constructed. These chambers take decades to plan, must survive for 100,000 years, and are currently in existence or development in at least 24 countries.

Long-term thinking has a ripple effect across industries and throughout culture as it spreads, and even in areas of design that have traditionally been more short-term in their remit, attitudes are changing.

People are becoming frustrated with disposable design. Buy It Once and Buy It For Life communities spread word of objects that will last for decades, are rarely re-designed, and are sold with reliable lifetime guarantees. Here, physical durability has to come with emotional durability, to ensure that we are emotionally invested in what we buy and willing to maintain a long-term relationship with it. Some consumer products are already designed to be emotionally durable: luxury watches are marketed as future inheritance pieces and designed to appeal cross-generationally with classic, timeless aesthetics.

Designers have an opportunity to start designing many more products to not only function long-term but to become more valuable as they age. How would computers be designed if they needed to be used for decades, even centuries? What would they be made of; who would make them? How about clothes, cars, children’s toys? These are increasingly important design questions. In a statement released to mark Zero Waste Day 2025, the UN said that doubling the lifespan of clothing could reduce fashion-related greenhouse gas emissions by 44%.

The final question I’ll pose is: where do humans fit in when our things are built to last longer than we do? In California, a couple who built one of the most fire-proof homes in the USA are now planning to leave it as the reality of living under constant threat of wildfire takes its toll — on them, not on the house. As Eli Saslow, writing in the New York Times, points out, we can make climate-resilient homes but we will find it harder to make ourselves into climate-resilient people. Emotional durability might prove to be a bigger challenge than current systems allow for.

🎤 My work

• I presented my upcoming book Designing Hope at the Indie Showcase, an annual event in London co-hosted by multiple independent publishers. Cheering feedback from Mark Thornton of bookshop.org: “Saw your extremely inspiring talk… This is the book I didn’t know I needed”

🗒️ Research notes

• A new Microsoft study has found that using generative AI for knowledge work has an impact on people’s critical thinking, leaving cognitive musculature “atrophied”

• Biotech company Los Angeles Project is gene editing embryos to grow into pets, agricultural products and medical innovations. One of its aims is “designing the world’s first true unicorn”. (This month also saw the announcement of dire wolf puppies, ‘de-extincted’ by gene editing grey wolves, by Colossal Biosciences, the company that made ‘woolly mammoth mice’)

• The UK’s green economy saw a year-on-year increase of 10% in gross value added in 2024. Meanwhile, the CCC advises that the net cost of net zero will be 73% lower for the UK than previously thought, needing an investment of 0.2% of GDP annually, and will cut household energy bills by £700

• Cost-benefit analysis has rarely seemed more straight-forward. BCG has found that climate inaction could cost 34% of global GDP this century - in a report that’s helpfully titled ‘Landing the economic case for climate action with decision makers’ - while ambitious targets and policy implementation to achieve those targets could add significant net gain to GDP by 2050, per the OECD

• Here’s hoping for an ethical buyback boom. Ben & Jerry’s founders are exploring buying back their company from Unilever, while Stella McCartney is an independent fashion brand again after buying back LVMH’s minority stake

🏠 Interesting products

• Copper Bottom is a striking, patinated copper-clad new building in Oxford that generates more energy than it uses (thanks to rooftop solar and heat pumps) and will be net-positive in 10-15 years

• Deutsche Telekom worked with Fairphone to develop NeoCircuit, a prototype router made from reused parts from old devices including smartphones, cables and plugs

• Migration Atlas visualises - beautifully - the migration routes of more than 300 bird species

📒 Reading

• The Future by Naomi Alderman is a novel about surveillance capitalism, tech billionaires, survivalism, cults and compromised morality - shot through with a wicked sense of humour

The book explores four futures that are being actively envisioned and grown today - More-than-human, Degrowth, Solarpunk and Metaverse - and gives readers a host of ideas and tools to use to think about futures, evaluate them, and start to bring them into being.

I firmly believe that the more people think about futures, the better our collective futures will be. And I believe everyone can do it.

With that in mind, the book’s aim is to be accessible, inspiring, and interactive. It’s suitable for beginners and those who are more experienced in futures thinking. I want it to introduce possibility, inspire change, and encourage critical thinking. And as the title declares, it is hopeful. Early readers have described it as an energising read - and as Bill McKibben says in his very generous cover quote, it should fire up your imagination.

You can preorder Designing Hope from Waterstones here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/designing-hope/sarah-housley/9781911648970

If you preorder it, thank you so much for your support! Every preorder sends a signal to bookshops that people are interested in this book and they should support and promote it, for example by ordering more copies, putting it in their window, or featuring it in-store. All of that will help the book to reach more people, which will in turn make more people into futures thinkers.

I very much appreciate the belief that the team at The Indigo Press have in Designing Hope, and I’ll be sharing updates in this newsletter as we get closer to publication date.

Lastly, I’m a big enthusiast of book cover design - I consider it a vastly underappreciated art - and one of the great pleasures of this process was always going to be seeing the cover. Luke Bird, one of the best cover designers in the business, created the cover for Designing Hope and I’m thrilled with the result. The cover art is by Victor Arce.

As always, thank you for reading.

Regular programming for this newsletter will resume next month.

The idea: Eccentric ecocentrics

Many of the patterns of change in how people are living in this decade - what we’re designing, buying, and consider to be aspirational - trace back to the fact that we are living through a time of collapse, both environmental and geopolitical. We are increasingly ‘collapse-aware’ - but this is not an entirely new feeling. As writer Rosie Spinks has noted, the “hazy feeling of collapse” or “the sense that something about the way we live is coming to an end” was preceded by a growing and more general feeling that “things are not working any more”, and that feeling has accompanied people aged below 40 for the majority of their lives.

In environmental psychology, shifting baseline syndrome refers to a gradual change in norms that people become accustomed to as the environment degrades. For example, young people will accept as normal a lack of stars in the sky or a lack of butterflies in a garden, because it is all they have known, while older people will be aware of the loss. This awareness is triggering a scramble: as nature changes at a faster rate than we are prepared for, causing solastalgia and a host of other climate emotions, there is a growing sense of urgency to see what is left, while it is still here.

A range of deep green designed experiences are emerging as a way to absorb the natural world, and place ourselves within it, in experimental ways. Gardens are being rewilded into biodiverse green spaces, while parks have become places in which we can walk in empathy with parakeets. Foraging has become popular as a way to self-educate within nature, and to feel a little more self-sufficient should a worst-case scenario arise. (The practice even has its own TikTok influencers.)

For people seeking perspective, deep time walks offer a way to situate the self within 4.6 billion years of Earth history, via a 4.6km walk that takes around one hour to complete. The beginning of the walk marks the creation of the planet, while by the end, human milestones such as the Industrial Revolution speed by at such a pace that they are barely noticeable. Co-created by the late British environmentalist Stephan Harding and geologist Sergio Maraschin, the walks help people to understand just how recent humans are, and to absorb the speed and scale of our impact, in a different way to reading about it.

In travel and hospitality, deep green retreats immerse people into wildness. Based in Australia, the UK and NZ, Unyoked specialises in sleekly-designed off-grid holiday cabins that provide privacy, seclusion and space for contemplation. The company describes itself as “the ancient remedy for modern times”, its gift vouchers styled as ‘nature prescriptions’. Majamaja, an off-grid retreat in Helsinki, is similarly focused, promising that guests will wake up to the sound of seabirds and gently rolling waves.

Deep green experiences bring with them the promise of escape, if only temporary, but also of protection. As well as immersing in nature, they are preparing for a future. There are hints of a prepper mentality threading through them, as if people are rehearsing for a doomsday that may or may not come.

Deep, a new project in Wales that aims to build a “permanent human presence” under the sea by 2027, has suitably apocalyptic overtones. Funded by an anonymous investor, Deep is currently being developed in a flooded former limestone quarry. Its units will reside 200m underwater, allowing scientists to study marine habitats in greater detail. In design, preparation and funding, Deep is going much further than similar projects have managed to. “The goal is to live in the ocean, for ever. To have permanent human settlements in all oceans across the world,” chief operating officer Mike Shackleford told The Guardian.

📄 Research notes

• “Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.” Lone lifestyles have become more common - in America and beyond - and that has implications for everything from social psychology to politics

• Writer August Lamm gave up her smartphone two years ago. She has founded the Center for Archaic Networks, which aims to “take back the human network” and pursue a world in which “relationships are once again unmediated and unmonetized”

• A job title that points to a hopeful future. Solar entrepreneur is a growing career path in Zambia and Malawi as solar-powered devices start to need fixing

• British gas network SGN has started a neighbourhood-scale trial of ‘green’ hydrogen, supplying it for heating and cooking in 300 homes in Fife, Scotland. The trial aims to “act as a catalyst for regional decarbonisation”

• Colour semiotics can tell us about futures thinking too. Mindy Seu, author of the Cyberfeminism Index, writes this about the rise and rise of Internet Green: “machinic intervention into nature and its subsequent destruction often yielded bright green: Soylent Green’s people-as-food, Fresh Kill’s radioactive sushi, Jenna Sutela’s slime molds as models for Silicon Valley. Green has always represented nature; bright green, however, is nature destroyed.”

🔋 Interesting products

• Cooking sticks that offer “mankind’s oldest tool” (literally a wooden stick) in sleek, well-branded form

• Researchers at EMPA in Switzerland have created a 3D printed, biodegradable battery made from fungi, that needs to be fed rather than charged. At end-of-life, it digests itself from the inside

• Sellotape dispensers made from 3D scanned rocks by ShinKogeisha

🎧 Listening

• Andy Hunter, CEO of Bookshop.org, on Decoder discussing being the Amazon alternative, ending the ebook monopoly, and running a purpose-driven B Corp whose priority is mission not profit

The idea: The swimmable city

Last year, a dozen river sites across the UK were given ‘bathing spot’ status, a government designation that brings with it a commitment to track and control water pollution levels. The move came in response to rising interest in wild swimming - swimming outdoors in natural bodies of water - over the past few years, which extends well beyond the UK. In the summer, Paris’ hosting of the Olympics brought with it a clean-up of the Seine, in part to enable water sports to be competed in it, but also to make the river publicly swimmable for the first time since 1923. Paris is famously walkable and has moved radically away from car-centrism this decade to embrace the concept of the 15 minute city. It’s now on its way to being a swimmable city too.

Other cities pushing for the idea include Melbourne, Copenhagen - which has made its harbours swimmable in recent years - and London, which aims to make the Thames swimmable by 2034. Some have come together under the Outdoor Swimming Society’s Swimmable Cities alliance, which has signatories from more than 49 cities, and last year launched a Charter of 10 principles to guide policy makers, designers and community leaders.

The swimmable city fits into a larger discourse that’s widening thinking on what access means in cities. It acts as a complement to the walkable or wheelable city, expanding the urban experience by expanding the modes of mobility it supports. It chimes with ideas around the child-friendly city, by viewing civic design from a perspective that is often wholly unconsidered: traversing a city by water changes our view of it. Waterways can also offer a way of building and maintaining the social connections that, particularly in cities and particularly in the 21st century, can be difficult to find and forge.

The swimmable city demands that we place higher standards on how clean our waterways must be - it insists that rivers should be swimmable, seas surfable, and all bodies of water liveable for more-than-human life too. There should be fish swimming in rivers as well as people. And beyond this, it invites us to reframe the relationship we have with water at a fundamental level.

Most obviously, in a swimmable city, public bodies of water should be easy to access, and water spaces should be venerated. This applies to rivers, of course, but also extends to spaces that are more artificial than natural. Private swimming pools have long functioned as individualist status symbols. Now, as communities turn again to building social infrastructure and ‘common wealth’, public-access pools and lidos are receiving new design attention. In 2021 the organisation POOL IS COOL opened Flow, the first public outdoor swimming pool to exist in Brussels for forty years, while NYC’s floating +POOL opens on the East River this year.

These spaces respond to water’s role for humans as a place of exercise, leisure and increasingly comfort, as city summers get hotter and more dangerous. They also emphasise play: the waterpark industry, established in the 1970s, is booming today. “Those components of water, sun, family, friends - they're very powerful when they're together,” says waterpark entrepreneur and designer Geoff Chutter. French theme park Futuroscope opened Aquascope, an expansive €57m immersive waterpark featuring colourful projections and choreographed water effects, last summer.

Running below the splashy investments in spaces for water is a deeper and more profound shift in our relationship to it. As water becomes more precious and hydrological cycles break down due to climate crisis, we are starting to acknowledge its role as a global common good more formally. New laws and legislation are moving toward acknowledging its inherent right to exist - aside from its usefulness to humans - by enshrining its rights. In Brazil last year, legal personhood was granted to the waves at the mouth of the Dolce river; in 2021, the Magpie River in Quebec gained rights including the right to flow and be safe from pollution. Environmental writer Robert Macfarlane, whose new book Is a River Alive? comes out this year, describes the growing map of rivers with rights as a “geography of hope”.

As all fans of the film Frozen 2 know, water has memory. As we start to cherish it more, can we attach value to being in water and with water, taking a relational approach instead of seeing water only as a resource to use, guard, and barter with? The future liveability of our cities, and our world, will depend in part on how we answer that call.

💬 My work

• I gave a guest lecture at London College of Fashion this month on Branding in an Age of Breakdown. We looked at how fashion and design brands are responding to climate collapse, from radical redesign to controversial campaigns

🗒️ Research notes

• Aalto University has launched the Nokia Design Archive, a website documenting the company's design development and advertising from 1995-2015. Among the 700 exhibits are some interesting hardware designs and memos from design ideation workshops

• Robots dominated the headlines from CES this year, and the co-founder of iRobot is now developing a home robot ‘familiar’ that will focus on health and wellness functions. I’m fascinated by the potential of home robots and the psychology of robot pets, so I’ll be watching this company with interest

• New legislation has come into effect in New York prohibiting the use of PFAs (forever chemicals) in clothing as countries increasingly crack down on these major pollutants

• “Solar was the disruption of last decade. Batteries will be the disruption of this coming decade” says Tim Buckley in this impressive ABC News visualisation of the rise of solar energy around the world (including rooftop solarpunks in Pakistan)

• Ed Hawkins, who made the famous Warming Stripes image of rising global temperatures, is part of a team who have created the new Air Quality Stripes - some of which tell a much more positive story of change

🪵 Interesting products

• A New Field’s craft kits contain all the components needed to make something - apart from one natural material that you have to ‘forage’ for yourself, like a pinecone. Inspired by cake mixes, they can be made using only kitchen utensils

• Date Everything! is a computer game in which you date furniture and home appliances, each of which has its own personality and story

• Prepped, a brand concept by Robot Food, offers “food for the end of the world” with an aesthetic that aims to look “straight out of an apocalypse movie”

💻 Reading

• What is neijuan, and why is China worried about it?