Space Is the Place: What Afrofuturism Knows About Imagining Beyond the System

In our design practice, we often talk about imagining new futures. But what does it mean to imagine futures from a position where your very existence has been systematically denied? This is where Afrofuturism offers profound lessons for anyone engaged in speculative design and radical imagination work.

Beyond Design Thinking

Traditional design thinking often starts with the present and iterates forward. Afrofuturism teaches us to do something far more revolutionary: to imagine from outside the system entirely. When Sun Ra envisioned space as a site of Black liberation in the 1950s, he was crafting an entirely new cosmology that rejected the very premises of earthly oppression.

This approach challenges conventional design practice. Afrofuturism prompts us to ask "What if the system itself was unrecognizably different?" The work imagines worlds where oppressive structures never existed. It builds new cosmologies from the ground up.

Artifacts from the Future

Afrofuturist artists and writers create tangible artifacts from alternative futures. Consider Parliament-Funkadelic's stage shows, which constructed entire environments complete with landing spaceships and cosmic costumes. These were prototypes of liberation, physical manifestations of alternative possibilities.

For speculative designers, this offers a powerful methodology: create objects, spaces, and experiences that make alternative futures tangible. Build fragments of those futures that people can touch, inhabit, and interact with. Make the impossible feel present and accessible.

Time as Design Material

Western design often treats time as linear. Afrofuturism works with time as a malleable material. In Octavia Butler's work, past, present, and future fold into each other. Her characters actively reshape time, understanding that transforming the future requires rewriting the past.

This suggests new possibilities for speculative design practice. We can design across multiple temporalities simultaneously. How might we create experiences that allow people to inhabit multiple times at once? What happens when we treat time itself as a design material?

Collective Imagination as Practice

Afrofuturism shows us that imagination is collective practice. From the musical collectives of Sun Ra and Parliament-Funkadelic to the shared worlds of contemporary Afrofuturist fiction, the movement demonstrates how transformative visions emerge from community rather than individual genius.

This challenges the designer-as-hero narrative prevalent in our field. Designers can serve as facilitators of collective imagination. Our role becomes creating spaces and processes that enable communities to imagine and prototype their own futures.

The Stakes of Speculation

The ultimate lesson of Afrofuturism for speculative design: imagination must be linked to freedom. Our work must actively contribute to dismantling oppressive systems and building liberatory alternatives.

This means asking hard questions about our practice:

• Who is doing the imagining in our projects?

• Whose futures are we designing for?

• How does our work challenge or reinforce existing power structures?

• Are we creating paths to actual freedom, or just prettier versions of oppression?

The Work Ahead

As designers engaged in imagining futures, we have much to learn from Afrofuturism's decades of practice in imagining liberation. The movement shows us that effective speculative design works toward imagining and manifesting entirely new ways of being.

In a world facing multiple overlapping crises, this approach is more urgent than ever. We need radical imagination that can help us envision and create fundamentally different ways of living, working, and being together.

Afrofuturism shows us that this kind of imagination is possible. More than that, it offers practical methodologies for doing this work. The question for speculative designers is whether we're ready to embrace these lessons and put them into practice.

The futures we need will come from having the courage to imagine something entirely different. As Sun Ra reminded us, "Space is the Place." But only if we're brave enough to imagine our way there together.

Want to explore how speculative design can serve liberation? Contact us to learn more about our practice.