I’m tired of living in the white-men’s limited imagination, aren’t you? My entire career, spanning over two decades in design, has been centered around designing systems that never existed before. A daunting and lonely task at times, often a mine-field of criticism and derogatory comments: that is, until the work becomes popular and suddenly all the critics come back and were always supporters, they say.

I’m not designing for the world we inherit — unequal, extractive, frenetic — but for the world so many of us hold quietly inside: a world built from care, from equity, from justice, from the ancestral knowledge that refuses to disappear no matter how hard the present inequities try to erase it.

Today I’m sharing something that feels like a continuation of that lifelong work:

I’ve signed a world-rights deal with Hachette to publish my next book, Designing Possible Futures, coming in Fall 2027.

This book is a manifesto, but also a blueprint of the past two decades of my work in designing for the real world.

This book is a call to action and a map towards real tangible scenarios in a near future that we get to design. This book is for designers, leaders, elected officials, artists and parents.

It is an invitation to expand design beyond things — beyond objects, beyond aesthetics, beyond the capitalist engine — and into a living strategy for liberation.

Because the truth is: design has always been political. And designing for liberation has always been a communal act.

How This Book Was Born

This book didn’t start today with the announcement of my partnership with Hachette. It didn’t start with an announcement. It didn’t even start with the 9-week course I created that shares its name last year with over fifty students enrolled in the first cohort. It started decades ago, with displacement. With growing up in the throes of war. Watching my family rebuild again and again. With absorbing the ways my grandmother archived our stories in her body, in her kitchen, in the land. This book is informed by A Woman is a School and the continuous work of radical imagination. With learning that design is not a technical tool — it is a survival tool. A cultural tool. A tool for remembering who we are when the world tries to make us forget.

Those early lessons shaped everything I’ve built since:

Slow Factory, our cultural laboratory.
Everything is Political, our independent media platform.
Open Edu, the peer-to-peer online school that hosted over 200 classes and seminars, with thousands of people coming together to learn outside the walls of institutions.
The salons, gatherings, and collective study spaces.
The design frameworks we continue to develop — Design for Liberation, Waste-led Design, Design for Disassembly, Garment-to-Garment.
The work is happening now in Lebanon through Mother Tree, my new initiative based in Beirut.

All of this has been part of one long, continuous project: to build cultural infrastructure for a world in collapse. To answer a fundamental question: If this world as we know it built on inequity and injustice is on fire, then what is your proposition for change? What are you imagining, designing and building that reflects your values?

Because designing is an act of decision making and taste. Something we all have. Taste isn’t just in aesthetics but in ethics as well. Having good taste doesn’t reflect what one wears or decorates, but how one behaves in community. That, in my culture, is a reflection of your taste as well. So in my worldview, and in world-building practice, I consider all of us designers.

What Design Must Become

The crises we are living through — political, ecological, economic, existential — are not design failures. They are design choices. And if something has been designed, it can be redesigned.

This book argues that we must expand design into a collective practice:

a way of archiving our stories
a way of imagining otherwise
a way of rebuilding relationships to land, to community, to memory
a way of designing systems of care
a way of building freedom

Design is not the final product. Design is the process of becoming.

The Future We Are Building Together

Designing Possible Futures is for the communities that have shaped my life and my work — the artists, designers, journalists, elders, organizers, students, diaspora children, and everyday people who continue to imagine even when the world tells them not to. But it’s also for the C-Levels, leaders, elected officials, politicians, lawyers, accountants, teachers, strategists and anyone within this broken system we constantly complain about. This book is an invitation to do something bold and different about it.