To work towards a better future, we first have to be able to imagine one - or many. We need to be able to picture better futures, but also to feel them, sense them, and believe in them. I believe that the more people we have thinking about the future, and feeling curious about it and inspired by its possibilities, the better our collective futures will be.
How Sarah Housley left their lane.
After years forecasting what might happen next, Sarah Housley stepped out of WGSN to ask a different question – what futures are actually worth creating?
Sarah Housley trained in 3D design and design writing – disciplines concerned both with making things and understanding what they mean.
That combination took her into trend forecasting. At WGSN, she worked across lifestyle, interiors, innovation and technology, eventually becoming Senior Strategist for Lifestyle & Interiors and then, in 2021, Head of Consumer Tech when the company launched a dedicated division exploring how technology would reshape everyday life.
Her work ranged widely: AI and robotics, new materials, sustainability, mobility, changing homes and emerging forms of human-machine interaction. She also authored WGSN’s annual Future Innovations report, bringing developments from different industries together to understand the bigger shifts they might produce.
But forecasting comes with an important limitation.
It is very good at asking what is probable. Housley became increasingly interested in what is preferable – and in the difference between treating the future as something that happens to us and something people have agency to shape.
That question became Designing Hope: Visions to Shape our Future, published by The Indigo Press in 2025. The book explores four emerging visions – more-than-human, degrowth, solarpunk and metaverse futures – not as predictions, but as different ways of thinking about what we might choose to build. Its argument is deceptively simple: before people can create a better future, they need to be able to imagine one.
Her independent work has continued in the same direction. Through Design Intelligence, she writes about technology, ecology and design futures, while teaching Futures & Innovation at London College of Fashion. And in September 2026 she launched Timeline, a free visual map bringing projections around climate, demographics, technology, health and infrastructure together in one place – showing not one future, but the systems colliding to produce it.
Housley spent years professionally predicting what might come next.
Now she is more interested in whether we can imagine something better.
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