Rob Hopkins

Am so thrilled to be able to share this with you. It is the last of the three short animations I worked on with the amazing Temujen Gunawardena and Badj Whipple of temjam.com, such incredible artists. It cuts together the voices of Sam Lee, Dr Jane Myat, Marie Godart, Christian Jonet, Ariane Conrad and Dee Woods, and it really rather delightful. These were some of my highlights from Episodes 1-9. I would love to do the same for Episodes 10-19. If you are inspired by these and would like to help fund the making of such a thing, do get in touch. Enjoy…

These days of COVID have shown us that extraordinary profound reimagining of many aspects of society are entirely possible. Might this be the time to forever do away with the idea that the only way to measure our progress, cultural, social, spiritual, economic, is purely by how much bigger our economy is than it was […]

I was recently a guest on the ‘The Future is Beautiful’ podcast, presented by Amisha Ghadiali. You can hear the episode in full here.

Let’s imagine, and this takes quite a leap in Britain in 2021 I’ll grant you, but stay with me, that we had a government who recognised that we are living through a time of imaginative contraction alongside a climate and ecological emergency, a social justice emergency and so much more. Let’s imagine that they were able to recognise this as the crisis it is, that allowing a population’s imagination to contract is profoundly dangerous. 

My story of how the Transition: Bounce Forward What Next Summit unfolded, with videos of the sessions and some reflections.

I have a theory. It is rooted in a lot of experience with many different groups. I have an exercise I call the ‘Time Machine’. I tell people that I have a Time Machine, and that I am inviting them to travel with me to 2030. The 2030 we travel to, and this is very […]

When was the last time you read a book cover to cover? And if you are still able to do this, do you feel you read in the same way you did, say, 20 years ago? How is the decline in our collective attention span affecting our ability to read and, by extension, our collective capacity for knowledge, wisdom and art? What do we lose when we lose our ability to focus? This was such a fascinating conversation, with two people who have given this question a great deal of thought.

Here is Episode Two of the videos I’ve been working on with Temujen Gunawardena and Badj Whipple animating some of the best bits from guests’ 2030 imaginings in Episodes 1-9 of ‘From What If to What Next’. This episode features Ariane Conrad, Marie Godard, Marieke van Dooninck, David Holmgren and Masum Momaya. I hope you love it. 

Welcome to Episode 23 of our journey together into the imagination and into the powers of What If. Today we are looking at street art. Street art has stood alongside the fight for climate justice, the Black Lives Matter revolution, and pretty much every mass uprising for change through history. But is it just decoration? Or does it have the power to deeply shift a culture? To fire the collective imagination? And what if it was everywhere?

Welcome to Episode 22 of ‘From What If to What Next’. This week we are exploring failure. More precisely, what if we were able to create a culture in which failure is embraced, celebrated even, rather than feared, avoided or ridiculed? What would society look like if we embraced failure in politics, education, economics and everyday life, indeed if we learned from a young age that failure was just as important as success? There’s a great What If question to stretch your imagination.