7 Steps for Designing the Next Civilization: A Call to Action for UX, Interaction, and Human Factors Designers
By Julian Scaff
In my article Futurecasting: How Civilization Will Drive Off a Cliff in 2040, I lay out the growing scientific consensus that the dominant model of extractive capitalism, coupled with the myth of infinite growth, is leading us toward a catastrophic collapse of global civilization. By around 2040, compounding crises such as ecological overshoot, climate breakdown, economic instability, and social fragmentation are expected to converge into what some scholars are now calling a polycrisis. This isn’t speculative fiction; it’s a trajectory supported by systems modeling, ecological data, and global trends in inequality, biodiversity loss, and institutional decay.
What follows collapse, however, is not the end, but a fork in the road.
In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, a secretive group of mathematicians/psychohistorians work to preserve human knowledge and minimize the length of a predicted dark age. They do this not by stopping collapse, but by designing the foundations of a future civilization. We, too, are standing on such a precipice. But in our era, it’s not just scientists or philosophers who hold that potential, but also designers.
Interaction designers, UX/CX professionals, and human factors engineers are among the best-positioned actors to shape the next stage of human society. Why? Because they sit at the critical interface between people, technology, and systems. They translate abstract ideologies into tangible experiences, everyday habits, and behaviors. If our current trajectory leads off a cliff, then these designers must become the architects of a bridge to the future.
Here are seven ways they can help build the civilizational foundation for the next thousand years:
1. Designing for Degrowth and Sufficiency
Rather than designing for engagement, scale, and consumer satisfaction, we must begin designing for enough. In a post-growth world, convenience is not a virtue. It’s a trap. Designers must create experiences that slow users down, that reward repair, and discourage waste. Instead of accelerating extraction, design can become a force for restraint, consciousness, and care. We must abandon metrics that measure “success” by clicks and conversions and embrace indicators like ecological impact, user resilience, and system health.
2. Embedding Circular Economy Principles
UX and service design can make circularity not just possible, but intuitive. This means reimagining product ecosystems so that reuse, repair, remanufacture, and regeneration are embedded at every touchpoint. Human factors engineering can ensure these systems remain safe and usable at scale. Interfaces can show users where products come from, where they go, and how to keep them in circulation. Circular systems already exist in nature. Designers can help human systems remember how to behave more like forests than factories. In her book Doughnut Economics, economist Kate Raworth outlines how to build a sustainable future economy.
3. Human Factors for Post-Growth Infrastructure
Designers and engineers must optimize for resilience over efficiency in transportation, housing, agriculture, and energy. They must create tools that work in low-power, decentralized environments, especially for communities facing climate shocks, resource scarcity, and disrupted supply chains. Think modular solar tools, intuitive micro-mobility systems, and distributed water purification kits. Human-centered doesn’t just mean intuitive for consumers; it means viable for communities and ecosystems.
4. Inclusive and Pluriversal Design Paradigms
As Western modernity collapses under its own weight, we must turn to other ways of knowing and being. Pluriversal design embraces the coexistence of many worlds: Indigenous, Afrocentric, rural, urban, digital, and ancestral. As Dr. Dimeji Onafuwa has proposed, Yoruba values like Yiye (appropriateness), Tutu (coolness), and Oju Inu (inner eye) can provide alternative design principles rooted in harmony, balance, and spirit. Designers must become facilitators of co-creation, not authors of top-down solutions.
5. Rebuilding Social Infrastructure
In a time of institutional failure and widespread mistrust, designers can help rebuild the commons. This means designing digital platforms and physical systems that support mutual aid, deliberative democracy, community governance, and localized economies. We must move away from extractive social media platforms and toward digital spaces that cultivate trust, cooperation, and long-term thinking. This is not about UX trends, it’s about the future of civic life.
6. Speculative Foresight and Experiential Futures
Designers have a superpower: the ability to make futures tangible. Speculative design, world-building, and immersive storytelling can help individuals and communities imagine what a post-collapse, or post-capitalist, future might look like. This is not idle futurism. It’s a form of psychological and cultural preparation. We are unlikely to survive if we cannot imagine surviving the future.
7. Long-Terminism: Designing Across Generations
Perhaps the most important shift is temporal. Designers must stop thinking in quarterly roadmaps and start thinking in decades and centuries. What does it mean to design tools, systems, and institutions that are legible, functional, and equitable a hundred years from now? How do we embed the wisdom of intergenerational stewardship into everyday UX? Inspired by thinkers like Roman Krznaric, long-term design means asking, “Will this make us good ancestors?”
The Consequences of Inaction
If we fail to act, the likely outcome is not a cyberpunk techno-dystopia but ecological collapse, mass migration, food and energy crises, and a dramatic reduction in the global population. In the worst-case scenario, surviving humans may return to small-scale, subsistence farming or hunter-gatherer societies, clinging to life in the last habitable zones near the poles. Our most advanced tools, languages, and cultures could be lost, or preserved only as myths.
But we have another choice.
Like the Foundation in Asimov’s saga, we can begin laying the groundwork now. Not to save this civilization, but to seed the next one.
A Final Call
Design is never neutral. Every interface carries assumptions, and every experience encodes values. If extractive capitalism gave us addictive apps, infinite scrolling, and fast fashion, then the next civilization must give us designs that honor limits, restore ecosystems, and reflect the dignity of all life.
This is not an incremental design challenge. It is a civilizational one.
Designers of the world, this is your mission: not to optimize but to reimagine, not to serve the system but to replace it.
Now is the time to design the long now.
