Human minds and social systems often work against sustainable change, but understood well, they can also drive it. This course examines why and equips students with the intellectual tools to imagine and rigorously evaluate novel sustainable futures: not as wishful speculation, but as evidence-grounded design challenges. Students begin by sketching a sustainable future they align with and reviewing the state of the planet, then study the psychology of sustainability: why logic and reason don't always work, how people discount the future, and why individuals, groups and organizations push back against pressure to change. They then learn systems thinking tools, taught through psychological examples, to see how these psychological processes lock into self-reinforcing social systems, from social norms to infrastructure and power.

With those foundations, students critically assess past visions of sustainable futures, analyze real sustainability programs through combined psychological and systems lenses, and identify why some succeed and others fail. The course closes with a studio in which each student refines the future they sketched in week 1, stress-tests a pathway with a pre-mortem, designs a program or educational intervention toward it, and tests a pitch for it on the people it targets, guided by principles such as scale-appropriate organizing and audience targeting.

Prerequisites. None beyond graduate standing. The course assumes no statistics or modeling background: the analysis is conceptual and qualitative, and systems tools are taught from the ground up.