In Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby highlight a crucial shift in the role of designers within society: “Designers often find themselves on the wrong side of the table, contributing to the creation of products and systems that reinforce the status quo rather than challenge it”.[1] This observation challenges designers to rethink their role—not merely as creators of objects but as catalysts for societal change. As Dunne and Raby suggest, design can evolve into a more critical practice, one that pushes boundaries and reimagines what is possible on a societal scale.

The starting point for the blueprint presented here is the belief that, to create a more sustainable future, we must not only take leaps in innovation but also in imagination and consciousness.

Drawing inspiration from the discipline of speculative design, we propose a planetary dreaming workshop as a form of social dreaming, which helps us think beyond the immediate constraints of our current systems and opens up possibilities for a more regenerative, imaginative future.

The proposal is to establish dreaming circles within potentially any sector or field, with a focus on new ways the world can be shaped and seen. In doing so, dreaming circles can take on a social and possibly political role, combining the fantastical and the progressive through the application of excessively imaginative thinking to large-scale issues.

The idea is that dreaming circles can act as a form of systems acupuncture, helping to crack the hardened structures of our thinking and revealing that the world could look fundamentally different if we are able to dream and create it differently.

If these circles grow in number, they could form networks of intervention within existing systems, catalyzing ripple effects of transformation.

Below is the playbook for the process design used when the first circle of planetary dreamers met on March 21st, 2024.

The playbook offers a record of the presentations and details the evolution of the process throughout the four-hour workshop.

We hope that the playbook, slides, and methodology will inspire you to create your own circles and events, with a focus on social dreaming.

[1] Dune, Anthony & Raby, Fiona (2013). Speculative Everything. Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press: 159.

The materials:

The actual playbook comes in two different formats.

• Make a google docs copy, you can start writing in right away (you need a google account to use this).
• Download a word-document, that you can work on, on your computer.

Exercise slides also comes in two versions

• A google slides copy, that you can edit (you need a google account to use this)
• A PDF, that you can download and use at it is.

Tools for print

• Instructions for- and download of The ‘Star of the universes’-tool
• Download the ‘Reflection cards’
• Download the ‘Storytelling-sheet’
• Download the ‘Most important thing to pass on’