The tonal shift at this year’s SF Climate Week was hard to ignore.

Last year, a landmark federal investment in climate initiatives fueled the sense of confidence and creative possibility that are essential drives of this work. This year, under an administration doubling down on fossil fuel expansion and defunding climate research, the focus narrowed to emergency response.

In moments like these, focusing on the practical and the immediate is necessary. But when urgency crowds out imagination, we risk losing the visions that could pull us forward. If we want radically different outcomes, we need to safeguard the space to dream and ground those dreams in a plan we can act on right now. Designing our climate future shouldn’t feel like a luxury. It should feel like a priority.

Imagination and action are often pitted against one another, but we treat them more like co-conspirators. Play is one of our most reliable tools for bringing them together. Getting out of our heads and into our hands helps us move from abstract ideas to tangible form. Over the years, many of our “out-there” ideas have evolved into real-world solutions. From reimagined digital government services to a future-fit strategy for a leading philanthropy, play has been a cheeky way we’ve made bold ideas buildable.

So at the close of SF Climate Week, we invited guests to get a little makey.

Getting out of our heads and into our hands

At our Gender and Climate Meet & Make workshop, we invited guests to explore the future through a hands-on activity. Guests were split into five breakout groups and prompted to build an artifact from a climate-positive future. Each table was scattered with odds and ends sourced from local creative reuse centers and old projects: puzzle pieces, fabric, pipe cleaners—a real random assortment.

To set the tone, our Executive Design Director Mary Katica invited everyone to connect to their inner child, the part of us that imagines without constraint. That invitation became a kind of refrain across the room, nudging participants to loosen up and take creative risks.

Whenever we run this activity with external groups, we notice the same pattern: people are hesitant at first, then, with a little encouragement, the momentum is hard to stop. The default is often to stay in the comfort zone of talking through, debating, and analyzing ideas rather than jumping in. But once participants are encouraged to start making, the synapses start firing in a big way.

It’s not that we lack creativity or imagination at the start. As adults, and especially as social impact professionals working with limited resources, we’re made to feel like our ideas have to be airtight before we can start doing the thing. We don’t want to waste time and precious resources. But in trying to get everything right from the start, we often get stuck in a cycle of caution and analysis and miss the chance to learn by doing and iterating in real time.

Play interrupts that impulse; it lowers the stakes. It gives us permission to take the first step without fully knowing where it will lead. Over time, it builds the muscle to stop overthinking and start moving from abstract thinking into tangible action.

Play is also a kind of embodied release. Making with our hands, moving our bodies, and thinking in weird, wacky ways helps loosen the grip of fear and tension that lives in us. (More on that in our In-Between advice column response.)

The outcomes of our Meet & Make were wild in the best ways. In just 20 minutes, the room built incredibly imaginative visions for our climate future. One group created “community coins,” a system of exchange for a regenerative economy that rewards unpaid labor (especially by women) with resources and social recognition. Another built a gender portal that allows people to experience the world through the perspective of another gender at any point in history.

Each artifact felt like a glimmer of something innovative we could begin building today.

Climate work has a particular urgency unlike any other issue we navigate. We have no choice but to act decisively in the present, but those actions have to be tethered to an expansive vision of the future.

And we’re far from alone in that belief. Across the climate space, we’ve drawn inspiration from others who treat imagination and play as serious tools for transformation. Grist’s Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest invites writers to dream up futures shaped by alternate systems of care, governance, and climate resilience. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s What If We Get It Right? is a luminous collection of climate futures authored with joy, honesty, and ambition.

At the close of Grist and Project Drawdown’s SF Climate Week event on storytelling, a quote by Grace Lee Boggs was shared that has since stayed with us.

As designers, we hold the same conviction. Our role is to turn bold imagination into a climate future we can begin to build right now. And play is one of the most generative ways we know to start.