Building Utopia

Building Utopia is a toolkit that was created to help people consider more radical visions of the future, especially in terms of counteracting historical marginalisation. To do this it incorporates ideas from Afrofuturism.

The Building Utopia toolkit is available from the project's website.

Building Utopia is available as a workshop guidebook and card deck, allowing anyone to try out the approach.

This is intended for participatory design projects with community groups and will be of interest to anyone setting up participatory projects that wish to explore justice.

The research articles and theory associated with the project have an even broader appeal and will likely be relevant for anyone, particularly scholars and researchers, interested in inclusive speculative design and futures.

Even the creation of the toolkit adopted a participatory approach. To explore collective needs, workshops were run early on to help inform what would go into the toolkit.

This resulted in several Afrofuturist approaches providing the theoretical foundations. Once created, the card deck was evaluated via interviews.

Demonstrating how to use Design Research approaches to engage and represent communities is one clear contribution of this work.

Moreover, Design Research, in common with many aspects of our society, carries with it a history of marginalisation. This is not exclusive to marginalisation based on race but may also include gender, sexuality, class and other characteristics.

Society is learning to undo and counteract many structural injustices and inequalities. This project provides a practical toolkit that can help to do this in a Design Research context and an introduction to the related academic theories.