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Short 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.