Our Story.

The idea for Building Utopia began in the fall of 2020 after seeing a need for design to have a response to the way the world was changing politically, culturally, and the importance of community building. As designers, educators, and community organizers, we sought to use our knowledge of design and liberatory practices to create a tool that would be accessible to anyone who wanted to envision how our world could look if we center the voices of the most marginalized. Using a Healing Justice framework learned from Black Womxn Flourish and motivated by the work of groups such as Creative Reaction Lab, Design as Protest, and ChiByDesign, we cultivated a resource that integrates liberatory design tenets into the act of futures speculation and planning. After over a year of testing we introduce an Afrofuturism-inspired speculative design toolkit that we hope will help us shape the world around us and our relationship to the communities we love.

Our Mission.

Building Utopia’s mission is to make designing for Black liberation and marginalized communities appealing and accessible. By sharing ways to speculate and cultivate new futures, we aim to reclaim design for the communities that should be at the forefront of change. Through a series of card decks and a guidebook, the Building Utopia toolkit introduces audiences to envisioning exercises as well as design speculation and methods that might lead us to more liberated futures. Our hope is that Building Utopia will be a resource for community and organizational planning and thinking about the futures of education, community development, environmental sustainability, among many others!