Existential Hope is a Foresight Institute program that asks what a good future with advanced AI could look like, and what we’d need to do now to get there. Its course, Worldbuilding Hopeful Futures with AI, teaches worldbuilding as a structured way to design plausible futures, through guest lectures from researchers like Helen Toner and Hannah Ritchie.
I enrolled in this course at a time when I was feeling uncertain about my role as a UX professional in an AI-driven design landscape. As much as I now relied on LLMs and Figma agents as co-designers, I also worried that the hype around these tools was pushing the field in the wrong direction. I believe UX expertise is needed where AI itself gets made, helping test and shape how models behave before anyone builds products with them.
Worldbuilding is practice for that work. It asks you to picture how a technology plays out in people’s lives long before it exists.
I completed this course in May 2026, and for my final project, I envisioned a future where innovations in AI and alternative proteins led to a more compassionate and sustainable food system. The project went on to win an award for the Best Transformed Sector in the 2026 Existential Hope Worldbuilding Contest.
Cultivating Consideration: Towards a Fair Food System for All Species
My submission to the 2026 Existential Hope Worldbuilding Competition, hosted by the Foresight Institute. Out of hundreds of submissions, this was one of six recognized winners, taking home the cash prize for “Best Transformed Sector.”
A Real Estate Listing, 2035
A property listing from inside the world, designed in Figma. In this 2035, lab-grown meat has reached price parity and U.S. farmed animal numbers have fallen from 10 billion to 2 billion. I wanted to show that shift at the scale of a single property, through the kind of listing a buyer might scroll past.
Kinfield: A 2030 Super Bowl Commercial
This is the ad that set the world’s shift in motion. Kinfield’s Super Bowl LXIV commercial used biosignal AI to show 113 million viewers what “humanely raised” animals were feeling. I wrote detailed prompts for each shot and generated 8-second clips in Google Flow. Then I stitched them together, edited the cut and added effects.