In her fiction work, the afro-futurist novelist Octavia Butler details new possibility models for living lives full of intention, even when the circumstances seem unsurvivable. In one of her journals she declared she wanted to “Tell stories filled with facts. Make people touch and taste and KNOW. Make people FEEL!” 

This workshop —like Butler’s work— situates speculative fiction as a tool for building a world full of more healing and joy. Living in 2025 Brooklyn means navigating unending sociopolitical and environmental crises. We have access to more information and news than we’ve ever had before; with this comes greater mass consumption and even less collective action. This workshop addresses that disparity, calling on each of us to design for healing and joy in an era of largely collective passivity. How might connection counteract chaos? How might care and play supplant anxiety? How might we anchor in possibility, rather than past harm?

Overall, we provide participants with the space to practice radical joy, inclusion, and hope, and create our collective vision for a more liberated world. 

Drawing from Equitable Design Research and Trauma-Informed Social Work practices, this session introduces and models tangible practices and mindsets to employ self determination as the most necessary design principle, within very real political and societal constraints.

This workshop is done in collaboration with Harmonie Coleman of withHarmonie Studio.

Next workshop: November 15, 2025 in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn.