10 Systems Ready for Radical Reimagining in 2025
The most dangerous assumption we make is that things have to work the way they currently do.
Emergency response has to be centralized. Work has to be structured in 40-hour blocks. Food has to travel thousands of miles before it reaches your plate. Rest has to be earned, purchased, justified.
None of this is natural law. All of it was designed by someone, for a specific purpose, in a specific context. Most of it is failing.
2025 is moving fast - climate shocks, technological ruptures, social structures coming apart at the seams. We can spend our energy trying to patch what's breaking, or we can ask a different question: What if we started over?
At Radical Futures, we design for transformation. We work with communities, organizations, and movements to prototype what comes next. The following ten systems keep surfacing in our work - places where the old logic is cracking and something else is trying to emerge.
Some of these will feel obvious. Others will feel impossible. Both responses are useful.
Community Emergency Response
Climate disruptions are accelerating. Wildfires, floods, heat waves, grid failures. Our emergency response systems still rely on centralized command structures that can't move fast enough or know the terrain well enough.
Communities already respond before official help arrives. They know who needs medication, who has mobility challenges, who speaks what languages. What if we built from that knowledge instead of overriding it?
Imagine neighborhood resilience hubs that function year-round as community spaces but transform when disaster hits - stockpiled supplies, communication networks, local coordination already in place. Emergencies don't wait for bureaucracy. Neither should our response systems.
Urban Food Systems
We waste 40% of the food we produce while people go hungry in the same cities where the waste happens. The current system depends on supply chains designed for profit, not nourishment.
Cities could feed themselves differently. Vertical farms integrated into buildings. Community food forests where public parks used to be. Distribution networks that connect local growers directly to neighborhoods, cutting out the waste and the middle extraction.
The infrastructure exists. The knowledge exists. What's missing is the will to redesign a system that currently makes someone rich.
Collective Care Networks
The pandemic exposed what many already knew: our care systems are fragile because they're built on isolation. One household, one income, one caregiver drowning under the weight.
Care doesn't have to be privatized and purchased. It could be woven into neighborhoods—shared childcare, elder care, health support that blends professional and community knowledge. Mutual aid as infrastructure, not charity.
We already care for each other when systems fail. What if we designed for that from the start?
Public Rest Spaces
Cities are designed for movement and consumption. Sit down without buying something and watch how fast you're told to move along.
Rest is treated like a luxury, something you earn, something you pay for. But bodies need rest. Minds need pause. We need public space that allows genuine recovery—quiet zones, benches that aren't hostile, places designed for doing nothing.
What if cities prioritized rest infrastructure the way they prioritize parking? What if stopping was considered as essential as moving?
Time & Work
The 40-hour workweek was designed for factories. It has nothing to do with how humans actually function, how creativity works, how energy moves through a day or a season.
We could structure time differently. Schedules that follow natural rhythms instead of crushing them. Work designed for well-being instead of maximum extraction. Four-day weeks. Seasonal shifts. Time for rest treated as productive, not wasteful.
Productivity is a measure invented to serve capital. We could invent different measures.
Digital Commons
Our digital lives are controlled by platforms designed to extract attention, data, and profit. Every click is monetized. Every interaction is surveilled. We call this "free" and pretend we're not paying.
Digital space could belong to communities. Platforms governed democratically, designed for collective benefit, owned by the people who use them. Data as a public resource, not a product to sell.
The internet was built as a commons before it was enclosed. We know how to build differently. We just have to choose to.
Intergenerational Housing
We segregate age groups like it's natural. Elders in facilities. Young people in starter apartments. Families isolated in single-family homes.
This design choice cuts us off from knowledge, support, and connection that could flow across generations. Elders with time and skill. Young people with energy and questions. Families needing help that doesn't have to be purchased.
Housing could bring generations together - shared spaces, mutual aid, knowledge exchange built into the structure itself.
Repair Culture
Planned obsolescence is a business model, not a fact of nature. Things break because they're designed to break so you'll buy another one.
Repair could be beautiful. Celebrated. Designed into objects from the start. Systems that make fixing things as easy as replacing them. A culture where maintaining and mending are valued as much as buying new.
We know how to build things that last. We choose not to because it doesn't feed the growth machine.
Joy Infrastructure
Efficiency and control. Those are the values most cities are designed around. Movement without friction. Surveillance without gaps. Compliance without question.
Joy is treated as a private concern, something you pursue on your own time, in your own space, if you can afford it.
Streets could become playgrounds. Transit stops could hold libraries. Utility boxes could house art. Public infrastructure could prioritize delight, connection, surprise. Joy as a public good, not a luxury product.
Waste-to-Wonder Systems
Recycling is a distraction. It lets us feel good while the system keeps producing waste faster than we can process it.
We need to move past recycling to elimination—redesigning production so waste doesn't exist in the first place. Resource libraries where discarded materials become community assets. Processing centers that double as maker spaces and education sites. Circular systems where everything feeds back into production.
Waste is a design failure. We could design better.
What's Missing From This List?
These ten systems aren't exhaustive. They're starting points. Places where the contradictions are sharp enough that people are ready to imagine past them.
What system are you living inside that feels broken enough to rebuild? What future are you ready to prototype?
The work is starting whether we join it or not. The question is what we're willing to design for.
Want to explore how speculative design can help reimagine your community's future? Contact us to learn more about our practice.