Hope is Not a Luxury: Poetic Resistance and Situated Futures in Design Practice

This chapter explores the question of hope, interrogating its epistemological, ontological, and political dimensions especially within participatory design practices. Starting from the provocation “Hope is not a luxury,” we examine how dominant design imaginaries – shaped by Modern, linear, and extractive paradigms – risk erasing alternative ways of knowing, being, and imagining. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, and pluriversal frameworks, we critically reflect on the defuturing condition of Modernity and argue for hope as a situated, relational, and memory-bound force. We ground our reflections in practice, highlighting how participation unfolds not only through planned methods, but through presence, conflict, and care – in a reciprocal movement where our positioning and theoretical perspective inform our practice, and are in turn shaped by it. We call for a reframing of participatory design as a space for coming to voice: a collective, agonistic practice of resistance and co-creation, where hope is not aimed at assimilation or resolution, but at co-existence within plural and contested worlds.