What comes after the ruin?

Abstract

This chapter presents a possible framework imagining and manifesting more preferable future institutions, systems or forms of governance in the form of materialised ‘feasible utopias’. Speculative design is introduced as a way of working with the deliberate materialisation of imagination and possible futures that can help us design for the university after the ruin. The imperative question of how to actually do this through designing for the arrival of more preferable and ‘unruined’ futures for the university is left somewhat unanswered. Designing for the arrival of preferable futures for the university might be hopepunk, starry-eyed and utopian but, existing within the possibility space of all possible futures, it is nonetheless a ‘feasible utopia’. In design, visioning is about imagining preferable futures and design is about how to make those preferable futures happen. Design can be seen as the deliberate materialisation of design visions, whereas collective visioning, then, is the expression of social action- and future-oriented imagination.