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.

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