Keynote Dutch Design Week Tommy Wieringa

All columns

During his keynote at Dutch Design Week on October 20th, Dutch writer Tommy Wieringa delivered an essay exploring his notion of optimism without hope, directed at the design and design research community, who find themselves committed to driving change amid multiple, entangled ecological, social, and political crises. This year’s 4TU.Design United 2025 theme, “Less Hope, More Action!” echoes Wieringa’s call.

Drawing on his earlier reflections written for the Week of Philosophy, Wieringa advocates shifting from an emphasis on hope, loosely defined as a passive expectation of a desired future state, toward embracing optimism as a more active and constructive orientation for engaging with challenges in the present. In our current ecological and political landscape that is resistant to change, such a deliberate stance becomes not only relevant but essential.

“Defending a few scraps of a liveable future is not much, but at least it is something.
Perhaps its meaning lies solely in the comfort of action, in blind action based on a programme of optimism without hope.
Hope may not be a good strategy for the future, but despair is even less so.
Perhaps you should just do what you think is necessary, out of blind optimism, without the hope that things will get better.
This requires a strong, flexible mental attitude, because you have to learn to deal with the sadness of losing the future.”

As designers and design researchers from 4TU.Design United and PONT, we resonated with Wieringa’s story and reached out to him. We were curious to explore how his views might spark dialogue among ourselves and help us address the emotional challenges of designing for change in the current era. Tommy’s keynote viscerally struck a cord with the audience when he critically situated his argument within the Dutch design context.

One of Wieringa’s central messages is a call to move beyond the superficial and symbolic contributions of design, even when driven by good intentions to create a better future.

Committing to change through optimism, Tommy suggests a path forward that urges us to critically reflect on our ways of working as design researchers and practitioners within an increasingly polarised political landscape. He argues that we must adopt a more activist stance: one that requires bravery and commitment.

“… in the current crisis, we must act more like soldiers, in the service of that remnant of a liveable future, whether by planting trees, gluing ourselves to the motorway or following a programme of intensified creative drive.
If the world’s leaders are at war with truth, we will have to start a hybrid guerrilla campaign against the power systems they deliberately use to produce disinformation and deceit for profit, while causing irreparable damage to the physical world.”
Standing against their power politics are the cardinal virtues of truth and courage.”

If you have become curious, the full impact and nuance of this argument can be found in this excerpt from Tommy Wieringa’s keynote text, which can be downloaded here.

Share