Imagining the Systems Future Generations will Inherit

Design Challenge
How might we make space for young people to imagine and build the systems they will inherit?

Partners
LunARC & Cairo American College

Project
Co-design & facilitation

Role
Design lead & co-facilitator

Outcome
This is an ongoing engagement.

LunARC believes young people should design the systems they will inherit. The organization runs experiments across ages and geographies to observe something rare: how children and youth think about fairness, belonging, and what to do when things go wrong - before the world tells them how they are supposed to think.

Good Future Ancestor Studio partnered with LunARC and Cairo American College to co-design and facilitate a Lunar University Lab: an ongoing series of facilitated experiments using the Moon as a neutral canvas for exploring questions experts are grappling with now: Who should be in charge, and what gives them the right? What do we owe each other, including those who are not here yet? What do we do when someone causes harm?

A university suggests a place of advanced thinking. Lunar University Labs intentionally subvert that idea by beginning with people conventionally placed outside those spaces. Inviting young children into questions of governance expands who belongs in the room - and whose thinking counts.

In the lab, children imagined a shared lunar community through play, storytelling, and collaborative making. The starting question was simple: What do children think governance should be before anyone tells them what it is?

The Moon offered enough distance from everyday classroom norms to become a playful “what if” space - one where children could explore fairness, leadership, responsibility, repair, and belonging through their own lived experience.

At Cairo American College, this inquiry was especially resonant. Students already move across multiple cultural worlds, where expectations around rules, belonging, and authority can shift between contexts. The lab created space to notice that plurality and begin making sense of it together.

Duration of Engagement
Spring 2026 - Present

Acknowledgements
Jennifer Sysko for holding space with generosity and care, and Lakshmi Karan for being equal parts thought partner and co-conspirator in radical imagination