What are Futures Made of?

Many people give little thought to the materials in their everyday environment. We are used to their smooth functioning and inexhaustible availability. Yet there are good reasons to fundamentally rethink materials: our use of raw materials and resources consumes large amounts of energy, reinforces global social injustices, and is already making parts of the world uninhabitable. Isn’t there another, more sustainable, way of making?

New solutions will require a different approach to the handling of materials and maybe even another type of materials altogether: materials that are not passive and rigid, like steel and concrete, but active and alive. These types of materials are intelligent, they breathe or remember. They reach out, talk to each other or react to their surroundings. A sensitive robotic hand, communicative fungal networks and creative bacterial communities are only the first examples of this material world full of new possibilities.

What if buildings and cities in the future were no longer made of rigid materials, but grew and adapted to their surroundings, like plants? What if materials were not thrown away and burnt after use, but recycled in a self-organized way into different states of matter? What if we could find another way of living with each other by learning from living materials? Might active materials enable a new way of thinking and acting for our society in the ecological crisis?

In the experimental lab »CollActive Materials«, people from society and science take on these and other urgent questions in collaboration. In workshops and events, participants are invited to think about new material futures. Therein, current debates about ecological and geopolitical challenges play just as much a role as new developments in robotics and collective intelligence. Through methods of Speculative Design, the participants develop hypothetical futures scenarios and design futures stories, objects and environments, thereby making individual imaginations and shared visions tangible. At the heart of this work is the curiosity in trying things out together and learning from each other directly on and with the material.

Highlights of the project include several open research and design workshops, a »Civic Summit« for debate, and an exhibition of the speculative scenarios and prototypes created at the Humboldt Lab Berlin.

The experimental lab is a joint project of the Berlin Clusters of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material» and Science of Intelligence and is funded under the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder by the Berlin University Alliance.

More information: www.berlin-university-alliance.de