“What we learn in Johanna Hoffman’s Speculative Futures is about an evolution in what ‘futures’ (plural) means, and how ‘future’ is now a verb. We ‘future’ means we imagine, we explore, we visit, we investigate, we build possibilities. These various practices Hoffman describes in truly engaging detail, and through actual projects—speculative design, futures design, and design fiction—are laid out as kindred and symbiotic approaches and mindsets. She reminds us that they all share a goal, which is to teach us how to see adjacent possibilities and opportunities. Hoffman reminds us that we make our path. She reminds us that we need not accept the worlds we do not want to inhabit, nor contribute to the making of worlds whose purposes do not align with our values. Speculative Futures is about a mindset. It is about a kind of practice for building worlds that may be our best hope for effecting meaningful global change. This is a kind of design for the generation that is now having to imagine powerfully, thoroughly, and confidently. This is not the kind of design that decides what color next year’s gadget should be, or what user interface pattern is best to keep the heads-down public scrolling scrolling scrolling. This is not the design practice the consuming public has come to fetishize, and that has us overflowing with design-prize-winning mobile phones, car tires, plastic soda bottles, hair clippers, and vacuum cleaners. The change Hoffman writes about is change meant to lead us to a more habitable near future world. We need to imagine differently, for the planet, and independent of the demands of extractive and exploitive networks of capital and commerce. Hoffman captures the value of approaches like design fiction, reminding us that speculative futures taps directly into our imagination—the one evolutionarily critical faculty we all have that may very well be what saves us from our current existential crisis.”—Julian Bleecker, co-founder of Near Future Laboratory and author of A Synchronicity

“In order to change our cities, and the world, we need to first imagine a better future—a future we might not have imagined at all. Johanna Hoffman’s Speculative Futures is a guidebook to getting there—one that will help us move beyond the pessimism and polarization of our time, and build the better, more caring communities we need.”—Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class