Book

Designing Hope: Visions to Shape Our Future is out now

Buy from Waterstones here, or directly from The Indigo Press here.

A book is shown on a purple background, with its pages just visible. A picture of a computer desktop with a file open sits beneath the title of the book, Designing Hope.
 

When did we stop dreaming of a better future?

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. We haven’t yet developed mainstream and accessible new narratives to replace these failures, and if you ask someone to imagine ‘the future’, they’ll probably still picture flying cars.

Designing Hope resets expectations. Through the lens of four emerging futures, Sarah Housley shows us visions of hope that inspire action and critical thinking about how we’ll live in the decades to come.

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Talks & Events

Sunday 14th September: World Hope Forum, online

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

Thursday 2nd October: Hold Fast Bookshop, Leeds

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