In the face of cascading social, ecological and economic crises, the capacity to imagine and articulate preferable futures has become a condition for survival, not luxury. Preferable futures describe the futures we would collectively want to inhabit—not those we expect, predict or are told are inevitable. The term resists dominant foresight paradigms that rely on linear forecasting or techno-optimistic extrapolation. Instead, it invites a shift from reaction to intention, from constraint to orientation. Within the Wangjitsu system, preferable futures are not about reaching a final state, nor are they anchored in consensus or desirability metrics. They function as critical constructs that open discursive space. In contrast to the “mono-future” promoted by dominant institutions—futures of control scale and optimization—preferable futures operate as lenses to surface hidden assumptions, reposition narratives and introduce plural imaginaries that better reflect ethical social and ecological concerns. They ask not only what is possible or probable but what ought to be pursued, protected or refused.
Epistemic orientation and critique
To understand how preferable futures operate, we must first recognize that the future is not neutral. Preferable futures emerge from an epistemological critique of how futures are constructed. Rather than treating the future as an object of knowledge to be forecasted, this perspective foregrounds how futures are shaped through power, language infrastructure and ideology. Predictive models, scenario logics and speculative ventures often reproduce existing hierarchies under the guise of neutrality. Unlike predictive foresight models that aim to reduce uncertainty, preferable futures embrace uncertainty as a generative condition—a space where new values and orientations can emerge. Drawing from complex thought, critical pedagogy and decolonial critique, preferable futures invite a different kind of literacy—one attuned to situated knowledge, dialogical reasoning and the capacity to hold tension without rushing toward closure. Futures, in this sense, are not out there waiting to be discovered; they are already embedded in institutional practices, dominant logics and the sociotechnical imaginaries we have inherited. The work of strategic design, then, becomes an act of unlearning—of loosening the grip of inherited futures and making space for the not-yet.
Design approach
This orientation toward uncertainty directly informs how the Wangjitsu system engages with design. Within Wangjitsu, preferable futures are approached as conditions for orientation rather than as fixed outcomes. Orientation, in this sense, is not about aligning around a vision or setting a goal but about creating the conditions to move with awareness care and responsiveness in an uncertain landscape. The system prioritizes early-stage, upstream moments of inquiry—phases where framings are fluid, meanings are unstable and no single interpretation dominates. Orientation here means staying attentive to how meaning is made, to who defines relevance and to which futures remain unspeakable or unintelligible under dominant logics.
Rather than using design to solve or resolve, Wangjitsu cultivates conditions in which plural orientations can coexist and inform one another. It holds space for dissensus contradiction and discomfort, allowing values in tension to remain visible. Tools such as ethnographic sensing, friction-based speculation and situated foresight are used not to generate alignment but to destabilize what appears self-evident. This orientation delays closure, resists early convergence and keeps futures in motion just long enough for alternative imaginaries to gain presence. A design fiction session with city planners might not lead to an actionable roadmap, but it could shift orientation—revealing where a city is looking from, who it centers and what it fails to question.
Political economy of future-making
Just as design frames influence what becomes thinkable, so too do political and economic forces shape which futures are made actionable. The question of which futures are imagined financed and made actionable is deeply political. Today’s dominant futures are largely produced through corporate innovation pipelines, investment strategies, defense priorities and technocratic planning regimes. These futures are optimized for growth control and market expansion, often under the banner of progress or inevitability. They are reinforced by institutionalized discourses about innovation, security risk and competitiveness—terms that shape how futures are framed and which scenarios become fundable, thinkable or desirable. Such discourses not only define preferred outcomes but also set the tempo and structure of decision-making. They stabilize timelines, designate urgency and establish who is allowed to speak on behalf of the future.
In contrast, preferable futures disrupt this alignment between prediction and power. They introduce questions about who benefits, who decides and who is excluded. Within this frame, the future becomes a terrain of struggle—not just over resources or technologies but over meaning temporality and directionality itself. Strategic design, when aligned with this awareness, becomes a method of intervention. It reclaims temporal agency and contests the extractive production of time that underpins both neoliberal governance and infrastructural capitalism.
Ontological and temporal reorientation
This struggle over futures is also a struggle over time itself. Preferable futures signal a deeper ontological shift. They challenge the modernist belief in linear time, perpetual growth and universal progress. They make room for relational and cyclical understandings of change, for temporalities shaped by repair grief and intergenerational responsibility. Drawing on Indigenous cosmologies, ecological thinking and the ethics of care, this approach affirms that futures are not abstract projections but lived embodied and situated continuities. Within this orientation, collapse is not only a horizon of fear but also a condition of transformation. Hope no longer depends on technological salvation or systemic recovery but on the slow, collective work of making life possible in fractured conditions. Preferable futures, therefore, are not utopian designs but situated commitments to what must be defended, imagined or made habitable—especially for those rendered disposable by dominant systems.
The cultural void
These commitments are difficult to maintain in a cultural landscape saturated with spectacle. The absence of utopia in mainstream culture reinforces the narrowing of our collective imagination. Cultural industries—especially Hollywood cinema, streaming platforms like Netflix and blockbuster video games—have become saturated with apocalyptic and dystopian scenarios. Series like Black Mirror amplify narratives of surveillance, societal breakdown and technological alienation, reinforcing a sense that collapse is not only inevitable but already underway. These stories often reinforce fatalism rather than inviting agency.
These aesthetic regimes repeatedly depict futures dominated by collapse surveillance and decay, often stripped of collective agency or political complexity. While dystopias serve as important mirrors of fear and critique, their dominance leaves little space for envisioning repair, solidarity or radically different modes of living. Worse, their repetition often turns dystopia into spectacle—stripping it of its critical edge and rendering collapse as entertainment. Collapse becomes a genre, not a question.
The systemic failure to generate hopeful, grounded or emancipatory visions in mainstream culture contributes to a cultural exhaustion where even the act of imagining alternatives feels naïve or futile. Preferable futures respond to this aesthetic crisis by reopening the space of imagination, making room for stories of resilience, care mutualism and defiance that can anchor new forms of action.
Conditions for preferable futures
To become more than speculative gestures, preferable futures require supportive conditions at multiple levels. These conditions are not predictions of what will be, but commitments to what must be made possible—socially politically and materially.
At the global and institutional level, this includes recognizing planetary limits, committing to demilitarization and reparative North–South relations and transitioning toward regenerative forms of provisioning. Strong social foundations, such as universal basic services, must be treated as non-negotiable—enabling collective security dignity and time.
At the everyday level, this means reshaping how work care and time are distributed. It demands restoring autonomy over production, fostering embedded economies and defending slower, situated rhythms of life. These shifts are not simply lifestyle choices—they are infrastructural metabolic and deeply political.
Change-makers do not control these scales, but they operate across them. Their task is to surface structural tensions, create spaces of articulation and protect the emergence of pathways that remain closed under dominant planning logics.
From conquest to coexistence
These design orientations, political critiques and structural shifts redefine what it means to explore. In today’s Anthropocene era, being an explorer means embarking on a journey inward rather than outward, reaching deep into the layers of our own planet rather than seeking new horizons. The focus has shifted from global to local, from expansiveness to sustainability. The age-old spirit of boundless curiosity and discovery is now accompanied by a sense of urgency and necessity, shaped by awareness of the planet’s limitations and the consequences of capitalist activities. Twenty-first century explorers are not just cartographers of the land but also mappers of ecosystems, identifying how the human and non-human forms of intelligence and the living and non-living entities on Earth interact. Exploration today is not about conquest but coexistence, about learning to inhabit a world that is reactive to our actions and teeming with life that we’re only beginning to understand. It is about mapping not just the boundaries of mountains, seas, terrestrial continents and human infrastructure but also the boundaries of ecosystems and our place within them. For strategic designers, becoming this kind of explorer means cultivating humility, ecological literacy and the capacity to work within limits—not to control the future but to stay with the trouble long enough to shape it. The new frontier is weird and inward, where today’s explorers encounter the unfamiliar, pushing deep into our planet’s limits to imagine new ways of thriving.
Strategic terrains
Preferable futures do not resolve uncertainty, they help us sit with it. They do not optimize for growth, they call us to reimagine what it means to thrive. They invite us to inhabit futures not as singular goals but as plural territories of struggle care and possibility. Within the Wangjitsu system, preferable futures are not aspirations to align around but terrains to explore disturb and co-shape. They are where contradictions become visible, commitments are clarified and strategy becomes ethical.