Can we look to the future with any sense of hope? Can innovation and the harnessing of human potential make us hopeful? In an age of activism and renewed social awareness is it even enough to passively talk about hope? Should we be actively going about achieving a better planet rather than simply hoping for it?

Joseph Grima creative director of the Design Academy Eindhoven and co-founder of the design research studio, Space Caviar, introduces a fundamentally hopeful vision of the future driven by a new generation of architects and designers who are abandoning the modernist orthodoxies of the past in favour of an ideology focused on the environment. Transformation and innovation is happening in the cultural sector too and in the publishing world Sharmaine Lovegrove is acting to effect change, making right the staggering lack of inclusion of Black voices in English literature.

Information designer and eternal data optimist Giorgia Lupi speaks about how to visualise all the facts and figures that we are constantly bombarded with, she sees the beauty in data, a resource we can use well, or badly. More innovation comes from designer, researcher and writer Matthew Claudel on how we can develop alternative organisational models to improve cities; he asks if we should be vaccinating our economies, not only our people?