Utopia for Realists
How might we imagine better futures?
Role: Co-Facilitator with Dasha Zochevsky
Facilitation about the book Utopia for Realists to engage people with the content and encourage imagination.
After reading Utopia for Realists, my partner and I were inspired to create a workshop where people imagine ideal futures. The book discusses how we all know what we are against but few of us can articulate the world we actually want to see. It is important to imagine that future so we can begin to work towards it. What would a world without poverty actually look like? What would a world with open borders look like? What would a world that prioritized leisure look like? We designed an activity to help our classmates imagine these possibilities.
Each group worked together to construct an imaginative world answering one of the questions using fun building materials. Through building with materials, instead of trying to explain- people can get out of their heads and have fun. We then facilitated a conversation about what came up and interrogated further.
For example even in a world without borders, people imaged that cultures would naturally split into their groups. It is interesting to think, why is that the assumption? why wouldn't people eventually all have a universal culture? It was fun to push agains the limits of imagination and see how we can work towards the worlds we actually want and address the fears that come with that.