On Thursday, April 10, Elise O’Brien, the graduate director of the HOPES Conference, stood before a dimly lit lecture hall for the event’s introductory panel. For the 30th anniversary of the event, attendees’ ages ranged broadly, including many conference alumni.
Founded in 1994, HOPES began with a small group of architecture and design students inspired by a collective of law students adamantly committed to sustainable causes. After hours of debate, the group decided that “Holistic Options for Planet Earth Sustainability,” or HOPES, captured their ambition. As the designers of the future, the group sought the wisdom necessary to create ecologically sustainable systems.
The original members of the conference believed that their responsibility as creators would be to design a better world, counteracting geopolitical neglect of the environment. Thirty years later, O’Brien’s introductory speech echoed the same mission.
“We are right now living in a reality formed by distorted dreams of power and domination,” O’Brien said. “We are caught up in other people’s dreams.”
Resurgence was the theme of the event this year, a sentiment reflected in each speaker’s message as well as the context of the conference itself. The conference was forced to take a hiatus during the COVID-19 years, disrupting the tradition of leadership being passed down to student successors. The notion of rebuilding cultures that have faced extinction by insidious forces resurfaced throughout the conference.
Lisa Morehead-Hillman, a traditional basket weaver native to the Karuk and Yurok tribes, spoke of her experience as a local teacher of the practice during the conference. She explained how entire generations from which she descended were abducted from their homes at a young age and sent to boarding schools. She said that because of the United States government’s initiative to “assimilate” Native people, entire centuries of cultural heritage were wiped from memory.
Morehead-Hillman plans to establish a layered apprenticeship program, working closely with Yurok, Hupa and Karuk communities to reinvigorate a long-standing tradition.
Throughout the conference, speakers called attention to current political events, making many of the panels all the more relevant.
“We are not so separate from what is outside the walls of the university, and I cannot pretend that what is happening in the world doesn’t exist,” O’Brien said.
Stories such as Morehead-Hillman’s, of the U.S. government attempting to institutionally erase a marginalized culture, bore striking resemblance to various policies enacted in 2025 by the Trump administration.
However, the impact of current events did not seem to discourage panelists, but rather strengthened their purpose. On Friday, Dark Matter U, an anti-racist design justice school, hosted a panel titled “Challenging Patterns of Supremacy: Provocation from Collective Pedagogy, Practice and Organizing.” The exercises prompted participants to imagine the geography of their social lives, mapping protruding branches of personal connections from themselves, stationed at the center.
Dark Matter U emphasized the importance of organizing and advocating for change within one’s immediate social environment. Investing in local efforts — whether social, political or environmental — was a recurring sentiment throughout the conference.
For the attendees of the 30th HOPES Conference, the unified education of the creatives tasked with designing the future held the same importance envisioned by the HOPES founders in 1994.
This collective mission, as O’Brien put it, is that, “As designers we need to understand that we have an outsized impact on spatial reality and therefore reality in general, and with that comes a responsibility and an opportunity to make things right.”
