Describe or narrate a scenario about a festival found a century into a future in which society as we know it has come apart. Your description should address issues related to disease and elicit feelings of embarrassment.

In the year 2250, society has broken into self-sufficient communities, each shaped by collapsed global structures and the suffering of disease. Though the communities are isolated, they are technologically advanced. In a show of outreach and collaboration, they communicated with each other and decided to host the worldly festival that once celebrated human excellence and unity — the Olympics.

Olympics of the New World is more than just athletic competitions. They are a celebration of human invincibility, as humanity believe their isolation and variety of technology advancements conquered diseases, and that they are all survivors. Athletes compete in high-tech suits designed to display their immunity to disease, while spectators marveled at them from the safety of sterilized stadiums.

The festival includes contests such as the “Pathogen Relay,” where athletes symbolically “outrun” bacteria; the “Immunity Marathon,” where runners wear suits embedded with real-time health diagnostics to showcase their resilience in numbers; and the extravagant “Viral Vault,” where athletes jump over holographic viruses – a symbolic gesture of humanity’s triumph over nature.

Throughout the festival planning, and the ultimate decision to host the games together, there were outcries from community members, questioning the safety of this big event. As humans recently combated disease and famine, many were skeptical and embarrassed of the decision to host a festival of this scale. Ironically, the very act of gathering many people from around the world, in close quarters and with a false sense of security, spread of the very diseases they thought they had defeated. A particular embarrassing moment was the opening and closing ceremony, where large crowded events were planned, and athletes and audiences mingled without caution, celebrating their supposed invulnerability—only for this event to become the epicenter of a new outbreak.

Provoking Reflection and Social Dreaming

Drawing on the ideas of Dunne and Raby (2013), the Olympics of the New World here is not just an event. It is a design of the future based on existing problems we have in the world. It is an artifact that provokes reflection on the values, assumptions, and ideologies of the past and present. In my design, the isolated communities did not engage with the Olympics as a simple sports event, but as a speculative experiment, questioning what these games represent in a world where the very concept of global unity has become anachronistic.

The embarrassment they feel is not just a reaction to the past but a provocation to consider how our current values might be judged by future generations. The event becomes a space for questioning, imagining, and dreaming of futures where the mistakes of the past are not repeated but transformed into opportunities for growth and evolution.

I am not sure if anyone noticed, we are more technologically advance than ever right now, yet we seem to have equally much, if not more, problems than before. It is funny that we have the convenience of finding everything at the tip of our fingers, and we still miss the simpler days. This tells me people don’t always find solutions to problems, regardless how advanced we become. As advanced as we are, unless the world is run over by AI robots, humans can never achieve the level of rationality to solve all the problems to become a true utopia. I resonate with Dunne and Raby (2013) in the sense that, though design always seek a solution, many current problems humanity have simply cannot be resolved. We can design our future based on idealistic, problem-solving strategies, or we can speculate based on our current values, and learn from our mistakes to make more conscious decisions for our future.

References 

Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming. The MIT Press.