Building a New World in the Shell of the Old: Co-Designing Post-Capitalist Visions

Designers working towards social change have often focused on designing discrete solutions to social problems, rather than working within the long-term world-making practices of movements. This paper examines the potential of a more embedded design practice within prefigurative movements, where mutual aid networks, worker cooperatives, and other solidarity economy initiatives are already developing alternative systems in the present. What if we could design everyday tools with these collectives to embody their transformative visions? Yet it can be difficult to design for transformation collaboratively. Collectives include members with diverse visions that can conflict, as well as different ideas about how to create change. To explore these challenges, I discuss a project that guided local prefigurative collectives in articulating and sharing their visions of a future 100 years beyond the fall of capitalism by co-creating an illustrated map. The project achieved the collaborative articulation of transformed futures, and it also initiated a dialogue on how to design for these transformative visions today. Moving forward, the project raises questions about the risks of sharing diverging visions while attempting to build coalitions, as well as the opportunity to clarify where our dreams overlap and diverge, empowering collective members to take non-normative steps with confidence.