This year has revealed that designers must confront reality and uphold their political commitments to drive meaningful change by embracing radical hope.

The ecological crises and rising social inequality predicted three decades ago are now undeniable, and we feel their impact every day. No longer hypothetical, these threats have become our lived reality. We have just experienced the warmest year on record, endured devastating wildfires across Europe, and witnessed ocean temperatures at unprecedented highs while freshwater reserves reach historic lows. Heatwaves have decimated both farm and wild animals and killed forests. Meanwhile, a digital industrial revolution unfolds alongside soaring military expenditures that enrich the few, undermine democracies, and intensify surveillance, control, and wars. The way of life we were promised never arrived; the futures we imagined remain out of reach.

As designers, we are both complicit and victims: we finance our research activities and practices within the same inescapable neoliberal capitalist system and logics that we are suffering from. We serve the same cultural hegemony (the ruling worldview of who has media, economic, and political power) we often try to subvert through designing services, products, and technology.  Yet, history demonstrates that design outcomes are often ambiguous, and at times, even harmful. Numerous interventions, though guided by good intentions, have unintentionally reinforced social injustices, worsened environmental harm, and fueled extractive economies that exploit both people and nature. As design shifts toward societal and sustainability transitions that require new frameworks and perspectives to rethink design relationships, ontologies, and power structures and foster transformative socio-technical change (like more-than-human design, transdisciplinary practices), we can also see that our efforts often remain aspirational, rather than failing to fulfill their epistemic and political promises.

Yet the projects showcased in the Politics of Design section testify that young designers recognize the harsh reality we face, and they engage in design with a courageous, active commitment to drive change, even when the odds are stacked heavily against success.  

Resistance in design is a dynamic, generative force that challenges and subverts entrenched norms, systems of oppression, and status quo power relations. Embracing unresolved issues and seeing tensions as chances for deeper understanding can help us be honest about the complexities of co-shaping transition, which doesn't borrow time but steals our futures. Resistance becomes a joyful, imaginative, and generative practice of hope, one that not only envisions alternative futures but also builds the infrastructures to move beyond token representation of human and nonhuman. historically marginalized or excluded from decision-making.  It fosters designerly regeneration and preserves local knowledge systems. Rather than adhering to the traditional sustainability logic of merely “doing less harm,” it urges humans to take an active, participatory role within their ecosystems not as masters, but as relational beings, both embedded in and accountable to the living world around them. Paulo Freire reminds us that hope is a fundamental human necessity, a vital force that compels us to interrogate systems of injustice and strive for meaningful transformation. Hope sustains our resolve in the face of adversity, nurturing the persistence required to challenge entrenched inequalities. But hope alone is not enough; without the catalyst of action, hope withers, becoming hollow and ineffectual. It is only through the interplay of hope and purposeful action that enduring social change becomes possible.

Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, the Italian philosopher Gramsci would call it. I, as an old Millennial, call it "keeping it real and die trying,"  or better: resist and engage in radical hope. That's what we need to nurture in our design schools, and what I hope to see growing at the Dutch Design Week.