For designers and other people who want to save the world.

I wrote this on my phone while heading home from the Nordes 2025 design research conference in Oslo. It is messy and not at all fully-thought-through, but it indicates a direction I hope to move in with my work, and in my life. I wrote this without any references, but it is – obviously – underpinned by a huge body of literature and a great big collective of brilliant humans and more-than-humans. It is informed by a deep gratitude for the tiresome, persistent work of those others.

Any and all comments are more than welcome.

1. As the first daunting step, we have to accept that we are bound to fail, that even when we act collectively, we are woefully inadequate. There is no saving the world.
2. But we have to try. We must try. Trying in the face of certain failure is perhaps our most crucial moral obligation as a species.
3. We are living through a polycrisis where multiple crises are intertwined, mutually shaping and deepening the difficulties of living well on this planet.
4. We, the human species, are not the centre of the universe and we must trouble all ideas of human exceptionalism. The more-than-human world was always here, and we must approach it with humility and care.
5. While the colonial empires may seem to have crumpled and withered away, their violent legacy persists. The onto-epistemological configurations of western modernity haunt us all.
6. Similarly, we may sometimes hear that the patriarchy is dissolved, yet it’s oppressive and exclusionary structures are sustained.
7. Finally, we all live in the shadow of neoliberal capitalism, where logics of competition and personal gain are dominant.
8. Things are bleak, the situation is dire, we are all overwhelmed. That is our baseline and we cannot look away.
9. Our efforts must always take into consideration these dimensions, acknowledging the severity of our current condition. While we can’t consider everything all the time, we must practice our capacity to navigate extreme complexity.
10. We need to trouble persistent narratives and deeply rooted assumptions about what constitutes knowledge and reality. Everything we thought we knew could be otherwise.
11. But there is hope, still. We can’t afford to hope everything will be ok, but merely that things could be otherwise, always. If we act, collectively, in more-than-human configurations, new worlds are possible.
12. Any such hope depends on our capacity to care deeply about and love life. Our own life and the life of everything that exists.