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                                                                                                                                                  Future University (2025)
Speculative design, design intervention  

 

Futuring the Body Collective uses design methods like worldbuilding, somatic storytelling, and collective imagining to prototype alternative models of the university. Rooted in ecofeminist theory and participatory design, the project centers bodies and lived experience as critical sources of knowledge. Developed in collaboration with Melanie Crean and student peer health advocates, the work culminated in a zine publication illustrated and edited by Lorraine Cruz, followed by a co-authored case study reflecting on the workshop methods and outcomes.

Creative Design Values

• Prefigurative
  

• Promoting  Agency
  

• Intersectionality & Intraconnection
  

• Somatic
  
  

Methods

• Mapping – Participants reflect on existing institutional logics, identify gaps between needs and resources, and analyze how institutional messaging shapes ideas of care, access, and bodily autonomy.
  

• Somatic & Narrative Exercises – Using guided movement, sensorial  writing, and storytelling, participants surface embodied knowledge often excluded from design processes, grounding imagined futures in lived experience.
  
  
• Worldbuilding – Groups construct speculative ecosystems, cultures, and power dynamics, using storytelling to imagine alternative institutions and test how values of care, equity, and interconnection might function at scale.
  
  
• Prototyping & Collective Imagining – Through a backcasting process, participants translate visions of future institutions into small-scale “recipes” for present-day prototypes, cultivating agency and pluralist alternatives to dominant systems.

what might a future university be like that centers bodies, all forms of bodies, rather than focusing solely on minds and profit?

How can we interrogate these frameworks so we might proactively imagine the futures that we'd like to see?






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