A design lab for examining the stories that lie beneath our current systems — and imagining futures beyond them.

vision

Is hope possible in a world that seems to be unraveling?

The Pluriversal Futures Design Lab (PluriFutures) investigates how we can design futures that honor Earth’s web of life. 

We live in a world shaped by design. However, our ways of thinking—our collective narratives and paradigms—are inseparable from how we design. Design gives form to a society's ideals; the tools, spaces, and systems we build are simply our collective values and stories brought to life.

By identifying patterns of thought and rethinking shared narratives, we open the door to designing futures where many different ways of living and knowing can thrive.

about

why pluriversal

The pluriverse—a world where many worlds fit—challenges the belief in a single, universal path of progress. This concept emerged as a response to the interconnected crises of our time: climate breakdown, loss of biodiversity, deepening inequality and poverty, rise of authoritarianism, and so on. 

The pluriverse is a call to recognize that there is no single "right" way to live or to design a future. For decades, a "single worlding story" dominated the global imagination. Established after WWII, this narrative envisioned the entire planet marching toward a single definition of the "good life"—a future defined by the Global North and built on the production and consumption of industrialized goods and ever-increasing technological convenience. It was a world imagined as a single trajectory where everyone would eventually converge at the same destination: a life of wearing blue jeans, watching the same TV shows, and following a singular international order.

However, this trajectory ignored the true costs of such a way of life—costs borne by Indigenous and enslaved peoples, marginalized and exploited populations, and the very ecosystems that sustain us. Today, we are reaching a breaking point. The environmental crisis affects all of us, every form of life on Earth, proving that we cannot continue on this one and only path: a trajectory that is homogenizing, exploitative and nature-destroying. 

The pluriverse invites us to move beyond this narrow vision. It encourages us to embrace a multitude of possibilities and to craft trajectories that honor the profound interconnectedness of all life on Earth. At PluriFutures, we believe that by making room for different ways of being and knowing, we can design futures that are truly life-affirming.

thinking

axes

  • We explore the power of collective narratives, metaphors,  and myths in shaping how we design, the kind of future we envision, and the worlds we build. We then translate this understanding into educational videos and visual stories. 

    Our goal is to use communication design as a bridge to make transformative ideas from social theory accessible. We believe that a society only changes when common sense changes, when the stories we tell each other change. The information needed to inspire and guide social transformation must be accessible and understandable in order to fertilize flourishing, pluriversal futures. 

  • We collaborate with communities that defend alternative ways of living at the periphery of modern civilization. Our work focuses on creating tools and strategies that make marginalized and invisible ways of thinking and knowing visible and comprehensible. Through partnerships, we support the resilience of "other worlds" and their unique contributions to the Earth's web of life.