Designing a Just Future

Many of the objects in this exhibition invite you to consider a history of environmental and social struggles that echoes across decades and centuries, deep into the past. Documenting and understanding the legacies of what came before us is necessary if we want to work towards a future that corrects these mistakes and rights these wrongs. In this case, you’ll find a rotating collection of contemporary designs that seek to put issues like climate resilience, decarbonization, and ecosystem diversity into a close dialogue with movements for justice. Designs for the human landscape have always reflected the political concerns of different people in different periods. Here, the next generation of designers are imagining a future world where people from all walks of life will have more, rather than less, in common.

Can you envision a plan for making Boston’s environment better by taking into account the legacies of injustice that you’ve learned about in the exhibition?

Currently on display

• Claire Ahn, Daniel Flinchbaugh, Hannah Bonestroo, Huiyi An, and Billy Fleming, Appalachia from the Designing a Green New Deal III Studio at the University of Pennyslvania