Designing Hope

What happened to the sci-fi golden age of the 1950s, when futurism flourished as a discipline and drove innovation? As a society, either we struggle to imagine something good for the times to come or we fail to picture any future at all. Our world is in polycrisis; we face climate breakdown, societal fracturing, governmental collapse, war, and rising inequality. The exciting outcomes we dreamed of, from the space race to the wonder material plastic, have brought contingent problems of their own.