Climate Change Futures: Choosing Creativity Over Anxiety

As our planet’s ecosystems face increasing disruption, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or even helpless. How might we respond with care, courage, and imagination? What if we leaned into our collective creativity to envision better possibilities?

Climate Change Futures is a 2-hour, hands-on workshop where you’ll explore how design can help us think differently about the future. Whether you're a designer, educator, student, community leader—or just curious—this session offers a welcoming, low-stakes space to engage your imagination and your values.

You’ll be introduced to speculative design—a creative practice that helps us ask “what if?” and imagine alternative futures. It’s not about predicting what will happen, but exploring what could happen to reflect on today’s challenges and uncover new possibilities. We’ll combine speculative design techniques to prototype objects from imagined futures—tangible artifacts that bring possible worlds to life. From new inventions to ritual objects, these playful methods help us explore “what if?” and build our collective capacity to face change with imagination and resilience.

Whether you're working in design, education, technology, community organizing, policy, or beyond, these techniques can offer fresh perspectives and creative ways for navigating complexity in your own context. You might be surprised by just how relevant this approach can be to your everyday life and work! You don’t need any design experience—just an open mind and a willingness to get creative.

You’ll walk away with:

• A beginner-friendly introduction to speculative design and futures thinking
• A hands-on artifact from an imagined future, created in community
• A hopeful, creative lens on climate and systemic change

This workshop is about learning through doing—and making space for joy, connection, and curiosity along the way. Let’s explore what could be… together.

Agenda

6:00 // Opening

6:10 // Intros and Discussion on climate anxiety

6:30 // Activity on Experimental Futures and "The Thing From the Future"

7:00 // Activity on Design Fiction

7:30 // Showcase & Reflection

7:45 // HCD Lab Community time

8:00 // Dessert social @ Toscanini's Ice Cream

About the facilitators:

is a Senior Experience Designer at John Hancock, where she helps teams navigate complexity with empathy, creativity, and care. With a background in architecture and service design, she focuses on human-centered solutions that bridge business strategy and social impact.

An alum of Carnegie Mellon’s Integrated Innovation Institute, Ipsita explores how design can support climate resilience and collective healing. She’s passionate about using imagination and participatory methods to move communities from climate anxiety toward agency and hope. Outside of work, she enjoys yoga, meditation, reading non-fiction, attending music festivals, spending time outdoors, and dreaming up DIY art projects.

is a design researcher at Product Insight, a product design and engineering firm. She enjoys designing for novel technologies like XR and robotics. Her previous experience has been in tech consulting, involving a wide variety of industries like healthcare, telecoms and consumer devices. Mary’s academic background in Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction has remained a core interest and has shaped her approach to research and design, combining empathy with scientific rigour.

Mary’s interest in enabling others to use their skills for social good has led her to get involved with a number of initiatives throughout her career, from organising free programming courses for underrepresented groups to co-leading a company-wide “tech for good” group.

works as an end-to-end UX designer at Great Gray. She discovered her passion for design through engineering, realizing that the best solutions emerge when technical possibilities meet human needs. With a Master's in Engineering Design from Penn State and experience as a Senior UX Strategist, she brings both analytical rigor and creative thinking to complex challenges.

Fariha has facilitated collaborative workshops with the goal of incorporating diverse perspectives to solve challenging problems. She's particularly motivated by how speculative design can be used as a tool to envision and prepare for a variety of futures, acting as a catalyst to important conversations. When she’s not interviewing users or designing, you can find her day dreaming or playing video games.

Host or Publisher Human-Centered Design Lab