Material Incubator

‘The borders between inside and outside, body and environment, biology and geology, human time and deep time, are fluid and constantly re-inventing themselves. The artist’s invaluable quality is to contextualize and criticize these dynamics through materiality, as well as speculate on their possible implications and possibilities.’
— Xandra van der Eijk and Adriana Knouf (Course Leaders Ecology Futures)

This workshop aims to broaden the perspective of biodesigners and stimulate design ideation with living materials (e.g. bacteria- and algae-based materials) based on speculative storytelling strategies and recent research on designing with living materials.

As a designer fascinated with dust as a material, the image “Pale Blue Dot” taken by the Voyager 1 Spacecraft, on 14 February 1990, has an incredible significance. It shows planet Earth from the furthest possible distance. From this perspective, for me, Earth appears as a small, fragile particle of dust in an immensely vast space.