Elizabeth Merritt, Cultivating Optimism: Signals of Hope, American Alliance of Museums, 29 April 2025
I’ve been on a deep dive into the world of optimism lately, looking for inspiration I might share to bolster our collective mental resilience in the face of massive disruptions. As I suspected, research shows that cultivating optimism isn’t just a feel-good exercise, it’s a practical tool, a prerequisite for making change. Negative thinking, however grounded in reality, has a tendency to drive us further into the dark. As futurist Fred Polak observed in 1973, “The central feature of successful civilizations of the past was that they were guided by a common positive image of their future.” But where can we find realistic inspiration for that positive image? Today I’m sharing a few of the entries into my slowly growing folder of “signals of hope.” These two podcast episodes, and one video, gave me joy and lent me strength.
Blueprints for Utopia
First up, from one of my favorite podcasts, Imaginary Worlds, the recent episode “Blueprints for Utopias.” (It makes great listening, but if you prefer to read, find the transcript here.) The focus is on architects as a community of artists envisioning better futures and bright possibilities, and opens with snippets of a talk architect Jes Deaver gave at South by Southwest. In Brave New City: Design through the Lens of Science Fiction, Jes made the case for architects and city planners embracing sci-fi as a way to boost people’s ability to visualize good outcomes. By giving us permission to throw the rules out of the window, she argues, sci-fi lets us leap over some obstacles that in current or historical fiction might seem insurmountable. This episode made me think of some of my favorite futures-oriented museum exhibits, such as when MoMA and PS1 held an architects-in-residence program to envision the New York City waterfront in the face of rising sea levels, or when the DoSeum invited kids to design what San Antonio might look like in 500 years.
The Tree Branch of Government
Next up, an Earth Day episode of The Last Archive podcast envisioning “Representation for the Natural World.” This episode models the foresight tool of “backcasting” (aka remembering the future) by recounting the history of how we arrived at a present in which non-human nature (both animals and geographic features such as mountains, lakes and rivers) have legal rights.