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 age groups and across the world 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 is partnering with LunARC and Cairo American College to co-design and facilitate the second Lunar University Lab - an ongoing series of facilitated experiments that use the Moon as a neutral canvas to explore governance questions that experts are grappling with right now: Who should be in charge, and what gives them the right? What do we owe each other, including people who are not here yet? What do we do when someone does something wrong?

The first lab engaged undergraduates at Universidad NUR in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Cairo is the second node, continuing to test the approach across cultures and age groups.

The concept of a Lunar University is designed to rethink what a university can be. We often imagine universities as sites of our most advanced thinking. Here, the inquiry begins with those we might conventionally place outside those spaces. By inviting young children to grapple with big governance questions, the lab expands who belongs in the room and whose thinking counts.

In this lab, children imagine a shared lunar community through play, storytelling, and collaborative making. The work begins with a simple question: what do children think governance should be before anyone has told them what it is? By creating enough distance from everyday classroom norms, the Moon becomes a playful “what if” space where children can explore fairness, leadership, responsibility, repair, and belonging through their own lived experience.

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

Duration of Engagement
Spring 2026 - Present

Acknowledgements
Jennifer Sysko and the CAC PreK team