Designing Radical Futures:


a design research practice about collaboratively imagining transformed social systems



We use participatory and speculative design practices to explore collaborative ways of imagining transformed social systems: futures without capitalism, and without policing. We look at large-scale systemic change through the lens of interpersonal interactions and tangible artifacts. What might alternative futures look and feel like? What do we want, and what don’t we want, from future systems?


Currently:

  • Organizing the Making Radical Futures Lab at Smith College. The lab is facilitating the co-creation of an illustrated print map of the Connecticut River Valley in a future 100 years beyond the fall of capitalism. We are doing this with the participation of local project groups who prefigure futures without capitalism today, for example through worker co-operatives, community farms, mutual aid networks, community land trusts, etc. We host creative workshops with these groups to reflect on the values they enact in their work today, and to imagine future economic systems that grow from that work. Using drawings and fictional stories created in these workshops, we are synthesizing the group visions to create an illustration of a future Valley with a proliferation of economic modes, showing both the overlaps in our collective dreams and the points where groups diverge. The goal is both to create a process-based space for participants to reflect on their visions within and between project groups, and also to produce a print map that participants can distribute to communicate the broader effort that they are part of in the valley.
  • Foraging local clay and considering “economies as ecological livelihoods” (Gibson-Graham & Miller) by making pottery for human needs and learning to listen to the land as a member of an economic collective.


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Follow us on Instagram at @designradicalfutures or get in touch at designradicalfutures@gmail.com


Alix Gerber began this practice in 2015 as a graduate student in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design in New York City. Since then, she has facilitated imaginative workshops and projects about futures without policing with residents of Harlem, New York and Ferguson, Missouri, and developed speculative design courses where students make artifacts from futures with different social systems. Alix has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and Parsons at the New School. She is currently a Post-graduate Fellow in Interdisciplinary Design at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Collaborators include:

  • Talia Blanchard, Millie Howard, Oriana Taylor, and Laura Torraco (Making Radical Futures Lab, August 2023-August 2024)
  • Millie Howard, Mirriam Nzunda, Phoebe Kolbert, Amy Putnam, Emily Norton, Javier Puente, Kathy Guo, and Megan Lyster (Making Radical Futures Lab, summer 2023)
  • Eleni Andris (Lemonade 50¢)
  • and many more!
Running on Cargo