Log in to star items.
- Convenor:
-
Malina Dabrowska
(Arup)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how imagination, storytelling, and design can help us rethink our role in the built environment and reimagine our relationship with nature—using speculative futures to design hopeful, regenerative worlds where people and planet thrive together.
Description
This panel explores how imagination, storytelling, and design can come together to shape more hopeful futures for our planet. In the face of the climate crisis, it asks how those of us working in the built environment can rethink our role—not just as designers, but as active shapers of the systems and relationships that connect people, places, and nature.
Drawing from practice at Arup, the panel introduces speculative and futures-based design methods that use worldbuilding and storytelling to explore what our cities, technologies, and communities could look like in the next 5, 50, or 100 years. Inspired by Leah Zaidi’s idea that stories help us make sense of chaos, it suggests that storytelling can be a practical tool for designers to imagine alternative pathways and test new ideas. These approaches invite us to ask: Who are we designing for? How can design include more-than-human perspectives? And what might truly regenerative design look like?
Alongside the panel, an interactive futures workshop invites participants to step into the year 2040. Through short future stories, visual prompts, and playful role-playing, participants will co-create and share visions of possible worlds. Each group will map the technologies, systems, and urban spaces of their imagined futures—highlighting both opportunities and challenges—and come together to define the shared principles of desirable futures.
Ultimately, this work is an invitation: to use design and storytelling not just to respond to today’s crises, but to collectively imagine and build plural, hopeful futures where people and the planet co-exist and thrive.
Accepted contributions
Session 1Short abstract
This paper explores how imagination, storytelling, and design can help us rethink our role in the built environment and reimagine our relationship with nature, using speculative futures to design hopeful, regenerative worlds where people and planet thrive together.
Long abstract
The anthropocentric mass that is the concern of practitioners in the built environment is at the heart of the current climate crisis. It is both the urgency with which we need to act to repair Earth’s natural systems and the short-term perspective of architecture and design that requires further examination. This paper proposes frameworks and methodologies for speculating about the future to reimagine our relationship with nature and use futures practices to propose tangible steps towards hopeful futures today.
Through my practice at Arup and my design work, I explore the role of critical futures studies and design futures in the context of the built environment. Within that, worldbuilding and speculation are a way of connecting possible and plausible scenarios to storytelling and allow us to explore how places and people can change in the next 5, 50 or 100 years. Leah Zaidi, in her essay Worldbuilding in Science Fiction, Foresight and Design, reminds us that “A story can be a way for humans to feel that we have control over the world.” Storytelling, then, becomes not only a tool of imagination but also a practical framework for sense-making.
This paper would explore the role of worldbuilding and speculating about futures, specifically in relation to the built environment. These approaches allow us to question why and for whom we create new technologies (like AI), how we can design for more-than-humans and how regenerative design can be brought to bear on the systems and places we design.
Short abstract
'Around the Clock Green' uses speculative methods to reimagine energy systems beyond annual net-zero toward 247 carbon-free matching. Through transdisciplinary stakeholder visioning, we explore how living in rhythm with natures availability reshapes urban ecologies, centering justice & sufficiency
Long abstract
The energy transition faces a fundamental paradox: while renewable capacity grows rapidly,
fossil fuel peaks persist during periods without sun or wind. Current Guarantees of Origin (GvO) sys‐
tems allow organizations to claim “green” status through annual matching, masking temporal
mismatches that perpetuate carbon emissions. “Around-the-Clock Green" reimagines this challenge as an opportunity to fundamentally reshape our relationship with energy as a natural, shared good.
This paper presents findings from a transdisciplinary research initiative led by Platform Energiebewustzijn, combining participatory futures methodologies with policy experimentation. Through
five expert sessions involving energy utilities, tech companies, government, civil society, and academia, we employ speculative design technique, including the “Dream & Do” visioning method, to co-create pathways toward 24/7 carbon-free energy (CFE) matching in the Netherlands.
Our approach centers temporal and ecological attunement: shifting from demand-driven to sup‐
ply-inspired energy cultures where daily rhythms align with solar and wind availability. We analyze the
relational dynamics between stakeholder promises (justice, resilience, circularity) and concerns (af‐
fordability, energy poverty, technological lock-ins), revealing that “the devil is in the details”, design
choices profoundly shape which values are realized.
Key themes include: living within Europe’s material boundaries through circularity; behavioral trans‐
formation beyond efficiency logics; multi-level governance balancing local autonomy with national
solidarity; and hourly certification systems enabling transparent energy claims.
By foregrounding values over optimization, we demonstrate how futures thinking can cultivate hopeful urban ecologies
where human activity breathes with nature’s rhythms, creating energy systems that are not only
carbon-free but also democratic, just, and regenerative.
Short abstract
In this contribution we explore threats to and conservation of the endangered European common hamster in Vienna to develop a speculative story about multispecies cohabitation in the city. We ask: how may urban futures be reimagined if non-human species are considered as full urban residents?
Long abstract
As an endangered synanthropic animal species, the European common hamster has followed the human trend towards urbanization. Significant parts of its population now live in cities, where it faces both particular urban dangers and various forms of protection. In Vienna, where a significant part of the species’ Central European population has found a home, city officials and activists have clashed over how to balance conservation obligations with ongoing urban development. While the city points to public information campaigns and resettlement efforts for hamsters found on building sites, activists point to endangerment from rodent control measures as well as the limitations of formal (legal) protection.
At the heart of this controversy appear to be different interpretations of the extent of protection owed to nonhumans in the urban environment. In part, these differences link to diverging imaginations of cities as primarily human or more-than-human spaces. What, then, may such different imaginations suggest about more inclusive urban futures in times of ecological crises?
Our contribution is rooted in a study of the aforementioned controversies around hamster conservation in Vienna. Yet we take our analytical insights as the starting point in formulating a speculative story on how urban futures may be reimagined if we take the fate of endangered species seriously and give them full consideration in thinking the city. How can different imaginations of urban development account for endangered species as urban residents?
Short abstract
By comparing visions, needs, and goals expressed by current but also future generations during deliberative workshops held in two locations in Poland using the IFG method, I predict our future behavior and outline the future we want to create in 2060.
Long abstract
The climate crisis has raised numerous questions about what kind of future awaits us as a society. To manage the impact of these changes on the environment and human communities, many significant social, political, and economic changes can be implemented for current but also for future generations. Although the role of future generations has been noted, there is a lack of research on the procedural use of the category of future generations in the design and prediction of future human behaviour. Is it even possible to gain insights into the values and worldview of future generations?
The Imaginary Future Generations (IFG) method proposes creating imaginary groups that represent future generations (not yet born) and negotiate with representatives of the current generation regarding visions of the future and related decision-making processes. In this way, future generations could become one of the stakeholders in the deliberation process.
In my presentation, I’ll show the results of the application of the IFG method in deliberation about green transformation policies (energy, housing, food, and transportation policies) in Poland, comparing visions of the future and the needs and goals expressed by the current and future generations during participatory workshops conducted in 2025 and 2026 in two municipalities. In the workshops, young adults and elderly persons envisioned their future and what they could and want or could not and want not do in the future, in the context of the climate crisis. I analyze their statements qualitatively as a way to predict future human behavior.