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August 14, 2025

This spring, an experimental design studio course called “Farfetching” encouraged Olin students to bring their creativity, design and fabrication skills, and optimism to speculate about the future.

Taught by Deb Chachra, professor of engineering, “Farfetching” unites upper-level students across majors and invites them to design and fabricate artifacts that embody the future they want to live in—a concept that feels like archaeology in reverse.

“In this class, I’m asking the students to dip into the field of speculative design or design fiction—designing artifacts that don’t exist or make sense in a world that doesn’t yet or may never exist,” says Chachra, one of Olin’s earliest faculty members.

“This kind of thinking and building straddles the world between design and art; there isn’t a bright shining line in between those two things.”

Chachra’s specific approach in “Farfetching” is to ask students to create artifacts from around the year 2070, with the premise that by then humanity would have harnessed the technology to have abundant energy—which Chachra argues is the main driver of a country’s ability to thrive, rather than money.

“After 20 years of developing large-scale renewable energy technology, we now have most of the technologies we need for everyone to have enough energy, so it’s time to imagine what that world might be like if we committed to building it out,” says Chachra.

“This is a future that absolutely can exist, so this course is a way of getting students to deeply engage with the idea that there isn’t necessarily a dystopia ahead of them. We can get out of the ‘extract, consume, waste’ mindset and think about all the positive ways we can work to create this world.”

Maricela Garibay ’26, a mechanical engineering major, was drawn to “Farfetching” because she liked the idea of considering what’s happening in the world today and still envisioning a positive future.

“I thought this course would be super technical, but it’s more about asking what we value as humans and what’s important to us,” says Garibay. “It was very refreshing to look at the community and social aspects of what we would want to do when we take the energy question off the table.”

As part of answering these questions, students did “signal scanning” over the course of the semester to look for current behaviors that may indicate what’s to come. Possibilities they came up with included desalination on a massive scale to give more people access to fresh water and the internationalization of grocery store offerings to reflect a greater demand for cultural ingredients.

For their final projects, students were asked to design something that makes sense as an artifact in 2070 and which communicates ideas to people in 2025. Garibay was part of a team that envisioned a future for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which climate models suggest may be warm enough by 2070 that citrus trees grow readily, and the ways in which society could leverage this possibility for the good of the community.

“We imagined a community where people would plant citrus trees instead of shade trees so that everyone would have better access to fresh food,” says Garibay. “We created a community board where people would post when their trees’ fruit is ready to pick so that people could come by and take what they needed, and there would be community-building around the harvest, like group marmalade-making events. We also printed our report using a velum-like paper because in the future, we envision that people will use more plastic over paper because it will be able to be infinitely recycled.”

Other final projects included a future games night which showcased the social context around the game, as well as a vision of near-urban Houston converted to green space used as pasture land for sheep and for recreation, criss-crossed by trails and public transit.

Garibay, who is interested in both engineering education and design, says that she wants to maintain the kind of positive outlook and impact-oriented mindset of “Farfetching” throughout her career.

“Whatever I end up doing, it’s important for me to stay optimistic about the future,” says Garibay, “It can be easy to feel pessimistic and let the weight of everything happening in the world get to you, but instead I want to think about what we can do to change it. As engineers, let’s start thinking of how to get to the future we want to see."