Innovation needs a darker imagination

In contemporary design and technology spaces, innovation culture often values imagination that is overwhelmingly optimistic — imagination that see futures as faster, smarter, more efficient versions of the present. Friction disappears. Scale solves problems. Progress moves in a straight line. When harm appears, it is treated as an edge case or an unfortunate but unforeseeable side effect.

We’re told we need bolder ideas, more optimism, and a greater appetite for the future.

But optimism isn’t what’s missing. What’s missing is a darker, more historically grounded imagination — one that takes seriously how systems fail, how power concentrates, and how harm propagates.

Science fiction as warning

Designers and technologists already borrow enthusiastically from science fiction for inspiration and fuel for invention — interface metaphors, aesthetic cues, speculative prototypes. But that approach alone misses the genre’s deeper opportunity: warning.  

At its best, speculative fiction is not about predicting the future. It is about extrapolating patterns already present and asking what happens when they are allowed to run unchecked.

Works like Parable of the Sower, The Dispossessed, The Dream Hotel, We, 1984, Gattaca, and Minority Report did not invent climate collapse, surveillance states, bioengineering ethics, or predictive governance. They traced familiar logics — scarcity, control, optimization, exclusion — to their plausible conclusions.

Speculative fiction, particularly in its more contemporary forms, narrows the distance between imagined futures and lived reality not by predicting what will happen, but by extrapolating systems already visible in the present. 

Pattern recognition, not prophecy

This is why science fiction so often feels prescient in hindsight. It isn’t prophecy or magic. It’s pattern recognition.

The ability to recognize patterns of harm, however, is unevenly distributed — and unevenly valued. People from historically persecuted, marginalized, or traumatized communities often anticipate risk in new systems more readily, not because they are pessimistic or intuitive, but because they have lived inside repeating cycles of harm.

Surveillance technologies, resource extraction, behavioral control, and exclusionary systems rarely arrive as something entirely new. They echo earlier forms — chattel slavery, totalitarian regimes, Jim Crow, the privatization of essential resources — updated, automated, and accelerated. The mechanisms change; the logics persist.

Innovation culture frequently misreads this foresight as resistance, negativity, or fear of change. For example, researchers tasked with identifying ethical risks in emerging technologies are often treated as obstacles to progress when their findings slow deployment. Despite the fact that anticipating harm is precisely the work they were hired to do.

In reality, it is expertise shaped by lived and intergenerational experience. When these voices are excluded from design and decision-making spaces, it’s not because they lack imagination, but because their imagination for consequences challenges the assumption that innovation is neutral, benevolent, or equally experienced by all.

Storytelling has long been one of the primary ways this knowledge is preserved and transmitted. When societies are unwilling or unable to confront certain realities directly, those realities often surface in narrative form. Science fiction, dystopian literature, and speculative film become containers for truths that cannot yet be spoken plainly or adequately held to aid collective understanding.

This is why, when audiences encounter stories like The Handmaid’s Tale or Avatar, the response is so often recognition rather than surprise. Communities affected by these dynamics have been articulating them all along — just not in registers mass audiences or those with institutional power were prepared to hear.

Imagine, don’t just consume

The danger arises when innovation culture encourages its participants to consume these stories without absorbing their lessons. Dystopian fiction becomes entertainment, aesthetic, or cautionary spectacle — content to watch, not something to reckon with. Optimism remains unchallenged, and imagination remains pointed in only one direction.

Optimism, untethered from history, is not neutral. It narrows the range of futures we are willing to consider. It trains designers to ask how quickly something can be built, not who it might harm. It enables systems to be deployed before their consequences are fully understood, then justifies those consequences as unforeseen. We didn’t imagine this outcome becomes a familiar refrain — often despite the fact that someone did.

Their voices are being missed because the cost of these failures is rarely felt by those with the power to both imagine and implement these futures, but instead by those made to live inside them.

Designing responsibly in this era requires more than inspiration. It requires ethical foresight: the willingness to imagine not only what could go right, but what could go wrong, and for whom. It requires engaging with speculative fiction not as escapism, but as an archive of warnings — many of them written by those who have learned, through experience, how harm takes shape.

Explore Ashleigh Axios’s recommended reading list for cultivating a dark imagination. Proceeds from book sales on our bookshop.org storefront support local booksellers and our editorial programs.