Monika Lukowska-Appel, Jo Li Tay, and Claudia Westermann
At a moment when ecological crisis and rapid technological transformation make the future feel foreclosed, this workshop proposes a different question: what if design practice could be an act of hope, a disciplined, embodied work of keeping futures open?
Speculative Entanglements and Material Practice is a participatory workshop rooted in the research of the Ecologies of Imagination Micro Lab at Curtin University, which brings together researchers from architecture, graphic design, fashion, and sustainability to investigate how creative practice can reconceive ecological futures with other-than-human agencies—both biological and artificial. Drawing on speculative design, care ethics, and material experimentation, the workshop invites participants to work with living and synthetic materials such as soil, fibre, biological processes, and AI-generated images, not as problems to overcome, but as collaborators in reimagining how we live on this earth.
Keywords: speculative design, imagination, creative practice, uncertainty, pluriverse