Reorienting design futures with hope

This paper reorients Design Futures through hope as a situated, anticipatory, and actionable practice for working within postnormal conditions marked by uncertainty, systemic crisis, and defuturing. Bringing together futures studies, feminist epistemologies, and decolonial perspectives, it argues that design can help imagine and enact alternatives through situated interventions. The paper develops a conceptual and reflexive methodology that synthesizes three strands of literature; hope, hope and design, and hope and futures, and formulates three tactics for operationalizing hope in design practice: hoping as present-tense praxis, hoping otherwise, and projectual hope. Together, these frame hope as an ethical and political orientation that works through care, critique, imagination, and collective worldmaking. The paper positions uncertainty as design material and shows how hopeful design can expand what counts as imaginable and actionable within plural futures. In doing so, it proposes an ecology of hope in which design sustains the not-yet as a shared responsibility.