As designers, we are in the business of creating the future, but how many of us actually stop to truly imagine it? What does it look like, sound like, taste like, smell like, and feel like?
I recently attended the Sustainable Design Leaders Summit on Bainbridge Island, where I posed a question to my peers: imagine the ferry to Seattle is a time machine. Picture that when we arrive back in Seattle, it's the year 2050. In this future, every political, financial, technological, social, and environmental decision has been made with the goal of creating a world of abundance. The climate is showing signs of cooling, pollution and waste are non-existent, biodiversity has rebounded, inequality is at an all-time low, and happiness is at an all-time high.
Do you think the essence of the places we would all imagine, despite our diversity, would be so different? I don’t think they would be. So, how do we get there?
The Abundant Futures Design Lab
The Abundant Futures Design Lab was born at MASS Design Group in response to our research and design experience that advocated for and delivered climate and nature solutions. We believe it is our role as designers to show that these solutions are not sacrifices but transformative changes that can improve our lives. Our work has taught us that it is possible to design for a flourishing people and planet.
It starts in our imaginations, but it cannot stay there. Through the interconnected systems of materials, buildings, and ecologies, we will demonstrate that as designers, we are perfectly suited to envision and bring this future into reality.
Ecosystems: Growing Landscapes that Regenerate the Planet
Bird sounds, cool breezes, clear fresh water, and speckled light filtering through tree leaves–would these be part of your future imagined city? It seems distant from what many of us know today, but why couldn’t it be reality? Engineered systems have replaced natural ones—rain runs off pollution-covered asphalt, rivers flow through underground culverts, and shade is provided by structures.
Take the Fall Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River. Once the lifeblood of industry in Poughkeepsie, New York, it powered over 84 mills before being channelized in the 1970s, becoming an obscured and overlooked dumping ground. The creek persists, but it's channel walls, approaching obsolescence, are now a safety hazard. But what if the Fall Kill’s next life could make it an asset again?
The Fall Kill represents an incredible opportunity to think comprehensively about a regional resilience strategy in the face of increasing climate pressures. Its redevelopment will improve water quality and estuary health, provide new and accessible cultural spaces, and stimulate opportunities for gathering, creativity, and education.
MASS is working with the city on a masterplan project so individual sites along the Fall Kill can be seen as an extension of the waterfront, bringing public spaces and access to nature deeper into the heart of Poughkeepsie. We are reimagining what the Fall Kill could be—a place of ecological abundance, social connectivity, and city-scale air conditioning in an ever-warming climate. The first site along the Fall Kill is under construction.
Working with, rather than against, nature is essential, providing resilient settlements that consume fewer materials and energy. And in the process, we might enjoy life more.
Building Systems: Creating Efficient Spaces that Inspire and Improve Health
How many of us imagine ourselves in conference centers, shopping malls, or hospitals in our abundant 2050 future? Why shouldn’t a hospital—a place where we are at our most vulnerable—be a place of healing, beauty, and inspiration?
When we built Butaro District Hospital, the government of Rwanda and Partners in Health asked us to embrace the landscape and fresh air for healing purposes. Its success allowed us to replicate that inspiration across multiple sub-Saharan health facilities, including Kigali’s Nyarugenge District Hospital In Rwanda. This 300-bed hospital is located in one of the densest and fastest-growing cities in Africa, yet when you enter the site, it feels like you’re stepping out of the city.
Everything from the massing to the envelope of the buildings promotes natural ventilation, daylight, and views of nearby plants and distant wetlands. These techniques are proven to increase patient recovery, and natural ventilation is known for controlling airborne infectious diseases. If health is the hospital’s aim, we need to use nature to our advantage.
Environmental performance is enhanced by passive strategies, reducing reliance on mechanical ventilation and cooling while lowering costs and operational carbon. Facade planters integrate a trellis structure, and climbing vines help shade the building and increase privacy. Native, tropical, and biodiverse trees and plantings enhance the exterior spaces and help manage stormwater, captured and filtered on-site through infrastructure that includes permeable paving and stormwater gardens. Water is also collected from the hospital’s roofs and stored for flushing toilets and gardening, reducing demand on the municipal water supply.
The Nyarugenge District Hospital taught us that hospitals can be beautiful and healthy, use less energy for cooling, ventilation, and lighting, and be more resilient to power outages. We apply this thinking to all our global projects.
Buildings need to respond to the climate rather than rely on vulnerable, energy-intensive systems. Equally important is the need to rethink what it means for us to live 90 percent of our lives inside, especially when this separates us from the world outside.
Material Systems: Crafting Buildings that Generate Thriving Communities and Ecosystems
We surround ourselves with materials, but we often don’t know much about them—what’s in them, where they came from, how they were made, or who made them. A material's provenance is hidden by complex global supply chains gluing proprietary composites together, but what if in 2050 we could tell the story of our materials?
One of the most incredible opportunities as a designer and maker is to truly understand the materials you work with. When we designed and built the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA) campus in Bugesera, Rwanda, it was with a deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the local and natural materials available, including stone, earth, and wood.
Foundations were made from locally quarried stone instead of reinforced concrete because it has excellent compressive strength and durability, making foundations the perfect application, even in the seismically active East African Rift System.
We researched and tested on-site soils to make 2.5 million compressed earth blocks. The feasibility of earth as a building material for the large university campus required a rigorous approach to address durability and strength, particularly regarding seismic activity. Roof trusses utilize the wood available from the only Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified forest in Rwanda, where the wood is weak and only available in section sizes smaller than 50x200mm (2”x8”) and 4m (13ft) lengths. Our engineering team visually graded every piece of wood as it entered the site and then determined where in the building it should be used to maximize its utilization without exceeding its capacity.
The use of natural local materials led to a quantifiable 60 percent reduction in embodied carbon compared to a comparable building, with vast local community economic benefits. Thirty-five percent of the construction budget was given to more than 1,000 workers from the district. Uniquely, we could walk the supply chain, which let us see the impact of our decisions as a designer, as well as know the makers along the way.
This project and others have demonstrated the impact of radically rethinking our material systems. The U.S has entrenched challenges to scaling bio-regional regenerative materials, which is why I co-created the Bio-based Materials Collective. We are a network of policy-makers, architects, builders, developers, academics, students, manufacturers, engineers, educators, artists, and farmers working to strengthen relationships and remove barriers to collaboration, communication, education, regulation, and innovation.
Considering the provenance of our materials can make our buildings more beautiful, sustainable, and economic generators. By valuing our materials for all that is embodied in them, we will care for them more deeply, and a culture of tending and reuse will become inevitable.
Building Abundant Futures Together
We established the Abundant Futures Design Lab to deliver imaginative climate and nature solutions through research, convenings, and advocating for practice and policy change. We need to think big, cooperatively, and transdisciplinary. We need to heal as quickly as we have destroyed. We need to reconnect with place—where we build and grow, but also where we extract and harvest. We need to imagine and tell the story of the future that we want and demonstrate it with metrics of healing. One way or another, the future is going to look very different. But what if it was better than it has ever been? Why not?
