clear
In collaboration with Queen Mary University of London, this Speculative Futures project seeks to answer the HACKMASTERS brief asking
“What will trust look like in the future?”
In a future shaped by environmental collapse, privatisation, and failing infrastructure, access to clean drinking water has become increasingly unreliable. Water companies continue to prioritise profit while ageing systems deteriorate beneath growing demand from industry, data centres, and urban expansion.
As public trust collapses, people begin building their own filtration systems at home.
Makeshift purifiers appear beneath kitchen sinks. Communities exchange hacked cartridges, repair guides, and DIY configurations online. Greywater is recycled out of desperation. Illness spreads quietly through unsafe systems, while clean water becomes a premium commodity available only to those who can afford it.
Clear imagines a future where the government attempts to regain public trust by decentralising water purification entirely.
Instead of relying on invisible infrastructure controlled by private corporations, every household is provided with a transparent water purification system that visibly filters and verifies water within the home itself.
Each machine exposes every stage of the purification process. Water passes visibly through layered filtration chambers, mineral balancing systems, and final verification modules before it can be consumed. Nothing is hidden.
The system measures purity through an openly visible mechanical water score — rejecting black-box automation in favour of physical transparency that people can see, understand, and maintain themselves.
But Clear is not simply a machine.
It is a new social infrastructure built around collective responsibility and public participation.
Communities gather monthly to exchange filters, share configurations, compare water scores, and collectively maintain their systems. Local “Water Stewards” provide support to neighbourhoods, helping residents understand, repair, and adapt their purification systems over time.
Water becomes communal once again.
The project explores how trust is rebuilt not through centralisation, but through visibility, shared ownership, and collective maintenance.
Yet beneath this optimistic vision lies another tension.
The same crisis that forced communities to reclaim control over water was created by decades of institutional failure. The government now asks citizens to trust the very systems that allowed the collapse to happen in the first place.
Clear questions whether transparency alone is enough to rebuild public trust once it has been broken.
When every household becomes responsible for its own survival, where does public infrastructure end and individual burden begin?
And when access to clean water depends upon participation in a government-managed system, is this empowerment —
or simply a more visible form of control?
Clear is both a proposal and a warning.
A future where communities reclaim ownership over essential resources.
Or one where survival itself becomes decentralised.
Meet the Team