It's so sad that economics hasn't progressed over the last 100 years or so, beyond either "extreme central planning doesn't work" or "extreme unregulated free market doesn't work". Nothing, save Gesell and Yunus. Have you ever considered that cdo's, cds's and letters of credit were not invented for their own sake, but for a real world reason? What's going to be scarce in weirdtopia? The normal? Or, if I can have all the gadgets I want and never need a job or a place to live, talent and hard work? I think a lot of dissatisfaction comes from 1) frustration, 2) popculture. Our imagination is stuck in either LOTR or Star Trek. The reality is underground. Under people's noses a sea change is going on. Physics and philosophy have been demoted and biology rules. What if a patient cured himself (any affliction) by exchanging, through bodily fluids, the necessary molecules synthesized by the body of another human? Why should humans not install photosynthesis in themselves? No need for fancy electricity, just light. Sure handy for spacetravel. I think people's sensibilities have been numbed, so they don't recognize, for example, that our culture is musically best typified by death metal. The drilling, shrieking, roaring... wait! any modern building site. The reason "it ain't happenin" is that evolution just bumbles along, frame by frame. It has no direction. We see the snail's pace and demand a two hour film. But if you want a film, the answer is to go out and construct it.
Utopia and Dystopia have something in common: they both confirm the moral sensibilities you started with. Whether the world is a libertarian utopia of the non-initiation of violence and everyone free to start their own business, or a hellish dystopia of government regulation and intrusion—you might like to find yourself in the first, and hate to find yourself in the second; but either way you nod and say, "Guess I was right all along."
So as an exercise in creativity, try writing them down side by side: Utopia, Dystopia, and Weirdtopia. The zig, the zag and the zog.
I'll start off with a worked example for public understanding of science:
Disclaimer 1: Not every sensibility we have is necessarily wrong. Originality is a goal of literature, not science; sometimes it's better to be right than to be new. But there are also such things as cached thoughts. At least in my own case, it turned out that trying to invent a world that went outside my pre-existing sensibilities, did me a world of good.
Disclaimer 2: This method is not universal: Not all interesting ideas fit this mold, and not all ideas that fit this mold are good ones. Still, it seems like an interesting technique.
If you're trying to write science fiction (where originality is a legitimate goal), then you can write down anything nonobvious for Weirdtopia, and you're done.
If you're trying to do Fun Theory, you have to come up with a Weirdtopia that's at least arguably-better than Utopia. This is harder but also directs you to more interesting regions of the answer space.
If you can make all your answers coherent with each other, you'll have quite a story setting on your hands. (Hope you know how to handle characterization, dialogue, description, conflict, and all that other stuff.)
Here's some partially completed challenges, where I wrote down a Utopia and a Dystopia (according to the moral sensibilities I started with before I did this exercise), but inventing a (better) Weirdtopia is left to the reader.
Economic...
Sexual...
Governmental...
Technological...
Cognitive...