Visions to Shape Our Future
One aim of this readable and useful book is to revive people’s interest in future visioning. Sarah comments on the current sense of ‘future fatigue’, which is probably understandable given how many alarming possibilities the future holds. I share her view that we need to explore the positive potentials of the future more actively, and this book can help us to do so.
In fact, there is quite a lot of future exploration going on in the world of fiction: this includes sci-fi, dystopian novels, and a genre which is new to me: protopian fiction: this is an exploration of future conditions which are at least somewhat better than the present. Examples of protopian fiction include Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, and Becky Chambers, e.g. A Psalm for the Wild-Built.
Creating four scenarios enables a lot of diversity in the view of future possibilities: often the conclusion is to aim for a combination of best features from more than one scenario, but the process also brings a lot of clarity about conditions to be avoided.
In the world of work, scenarios are one of the most popular ways of exploring the future. Typically these involve picking a time frame, e.g. 10 years, and a terrain, which might be geographic (e.g. UK, Europe, Africa) or a sector (e.g. health services, education, society in general). Often four scenarios are created to show different futures for this terrain at the end of the chosen time period. There are some good ways to bring future scenarios to life, for example short videos, or a collage of images. Years ago, when I was working with a startup mobile phone network on futures, I created a fake issue of the Daily Telegraph, 10 years ahead, showing the managing director receiving a knighthood for his services to society. It certainly brought the future to life for him!
Four Scenarios
In Designing Hope, Sarah offers us four future scenarios, which offer some original and thought-provoking viewpoints. Whilst she is not specific about time frame and scope, they are broadly relevant to both the UK and global situation over the next 10-20 years.
All four of the scenarios she describes are trends or directions which have been in existence for a few years or more, and she includes useful case studies and statistics to give them substance. Although the book was published in 2025, it hardly refers to the proliferation of AI and rise of right-wing politics. Here’s a brief summary of her four scenarios:
1. More-than-human: This picks up on the growing interest in the sentience of non-human life, such as trees and animals, seen in novels like The Overstory (blog here). In this scenario, humans learn from nature, by experiencing life as non-human species do, and create environments which are far more human-friendly.
2. Degrowth: This depicts a society which has embraced lower levels of material consumption, and faced questions like “how do we self-actualise if we cannot shop?”: one answer is Re-Use superstores like the one in Berlin. There is some appeal to this scenario, as it highlights in-person community contacts and localism as better sources of wellbeing than material consumption.
3. Solarpunk: She describes this as a “genre that portrays equitable society sustained by renewable energy and living in harmony with nature… a combination of natural systems, social action and high-tech ingenuity”. This offers some interesting ideas, such as ways to make sustainable technologies accessible to DIYers, ways to raise community resilience such as local ‘mesh’ communication systems, and ideas about integrating nature and technology, such as fungal computers, and bioluminescent plants.
4. Metaverse: This is “a global network of large-scale… interactive worlds that people can inhabit together”. It offers an immersive experience that people can actually occupy and work in for extended periods, using advanced versions of Virtual Reality. She admits that there are downsides to the Metaverse, for example extensive users of VR have difficulty distinguishing actual reality from virtual, and computer vision syndrome.
Choose your own?
One potential benefit of this book is that it may provoke you into thinking up your own scenarios, and the appendix offers techniques to explore them. Here are the four which I came up with from a 15-minute brainstorm:
1. Dream Ticket: In this one, everything goes right. The Greens sweep to power, sensible limits are enforced for AI, social media, etc. Material consumption is managed down as people find more joy in personal connections and communities. Agro-ecological food growing improves health, restores wildlife, and creates satisfying jobs.
2. Devil’s Brew: This is a nightmare that I worry about, and it might already be happening. It’s a convergence of several malign trends: right-wing governments combine with tyrannical mega-corporations to use AI extensively to monitor, control and suppress civil liberties, keeping people distracted through addictive social media and gaming.
3. Eco Meltdown: This scenario would work through the consequences of the widely forecast collapse in ecosystems, habitats, and species extinction. It would include big drops in agricultural outputs, but would explore communal eating, synthetic foods, diet changes and other radical ways to respond. And in the longer term, hopefully habitat restoration.
4. The Ecotechnic Future: This is the title of a book which offers a plausible scenario of chaos and decline leading to a reshaping of society: see my blog here. It may be right that a lot of loss and pain is inevitable over the next 20-30 years, but this book highlights what we can do now to create future recovery, for example, developing intermediate technologies and expanding small-scale sustainable agriculture.
If this has inspired you to try out scenarios for yourself, there are plenty of online guides, such as this one.