AN international
audience for
Making Futures // 2024
The conference looks at how these encounters begin to alter both the formal and conceptual expectations of craft, opening traditional techniques to the behavioural, biological and environmental dimensions of physical matter beyond object-making, to take a more holistic view of how materiality shapes and influences human experience.
Making Futures® is Arts University Plymouth’s research platform
Making Futures® is Arts University Plymouth’s research platform exploring contemporary craft and maker movements as ‘change agents’ in 21st-century society. The highlight of Making Futures® is an international conference bringing together scholars, makers, artists, designers and educators to explore the frontier of material practices in the context of sustainability, community regeneration and technical innovation.
First convened in 2009, the conference is focused on the transformative potential of material and fabrication practices, whose tacit and traditional ways of making contribute to new, progressive futures where people and the planet live together more harmoniously.
Making Futures® seeks to situate material cultures and material knowledge at the centre of the many critical issues facing global consumer society, including how we might move beyond mass consumption towards an inclusive, regenerative economy capable of supporting social well-being and enabling more resilient communities.
As a platform for challenging the material status quo and inviting speculation on how traditional approaches to material production might inform emerging technologies and economies, Making Futures advocates for the importance of our shared human heritage, social making, and the significance of place in the value of creative form.
Independent, specialist arts university run by artists and designers for artists and designers
Arts
University
Plymouth
Founded in 1856 as the Plymouth Drawing School, the University offers a comprehensive spectrum of specialist undergraduate, postgraduate and pre-degree study in Arts, Design and Media – combining over 165 years of creativity with contemporary thinking and cutting-edge, industry standard resources.
The 2024 conference will be in person and will take place at Arts University Plymouth’s city centre campus, Tavistock Place.
The campus is located in the heart of Plymouth’s ‘Cultural Quarter’ adjacent to The Box and numerous other emerging art spaces and studios.
CALL FOR PAPERS & PARTICIPATION
Please follow the link below to enter your submission via the Cvent platform.
We are most interested in aspects of material-led creative practices and innovations that expand traditional techniques into new domains of design practice, knowledge production and exchange, interdisciplinary thinking and making, cross-cultural learning, material hybridity, speculative or new materialism, creative and material ecologies, models of art/science pedagog, small-scale and distributed material production, circularity in material practice and education, and other physical and philosophical interfaces between life, matter, and creativity.
conference tracks
Track 01 explores the relationship between design, form and place where why something is made is materially consistent with where it is made—a deep look at the role that terrain, ecosystem, climate, landscape, geography have on what becomes a signature craft in any particular place. What is the knowledge or behaviour of the land embedded in the form or necessity of an object? This track asks us to look closer at the ways an object’s morphology, substance and purpose are determined by a specific set of raw material conditions that result in the form which emerges. It is a view of ‘crafting’ as a verb that can be applied as well to crafting worlds, crafting democracies, but doing so from the bottom up rather than top down.
Fashion and textile design have led the emerging development of materials which are innately or synthetically responsive to the wearer or the surrounding environment. In contrast to the notion of the design of a fixed garment or accessory, innovations at the interface between matter and computation have inspired clothing and textile designers to create highly adaptive and responsive materials and flexible structures that directly conform to changes in body temperature, chemistry, proximity, and other dynamic forces. Track 02 invites papers and ideas that explore the ways in which the relationship of clothing and wearables and the body have evolved with the invention of new synthetic approaches to harnessing smart materials and computational behaviours.
Track 03 is an open call for ideas and prototypes for how artificial intelligence (AI) systems might redefine how we interact and utilise physical matter and how AI might be applied to physical matter in the future. It is a call for speculative provocations as well as evidence of existing projects that demonstrate how large language models, neural networks and other algorithms informed by large datasets are being designed to automate and manipulate the natural world. Evidence and speculations can include interventions into human biology and anatomy, health and medicine, farming and horticulture, the built environment and other dynamic material realms that would undergo radical change with the introduction of AI.
From creating bio-inspired or biomorphic forms inspired by nature to imitating it more broadly through biomimicry, we have since the advent of cybernetics and early information systems furthered our affinity for nature to include our direct, creative intervention with living processes. Designers and artists now create structures that incorporate emergent forms grown from living plants, bacteria, mycelium networks, crystals, and other vital organisms. Where living forms are directed to perform specific behaviours or toward desired objectives, the resulting work can be said to be one co-authored with nature—the creation of a ‘soft-system’ akin to an algorithm or generative design. What are the creative opportunities of co-authoring with nature with post-natural frameworks and living platforms in mind?
Current threats to the balance of our planetary ecology have challenged artists, makers and designers to seek to develop non-toxic, non-corrosive, non-extractive and non-exploitive processes for use in their work. An important shift in this challenge to creative practice is a move from consideration of the creative process driven by the appearance or performance of the artefact to a more expansive view of what economic, environmental, geo-political and historical forces are engaged in the full life cycle of creative productivity. In Track 05, we will explore the pedagogical and social impacts of bringing this more expansive view of creative practice into the studio and curriculum, to outline lasting sustainable practices in the sector.
Innovations in materials science and engineering, which include developments in additive biomanufacturing, smart matter, responsive materials, shape-memory materials, and other programmable forms of matter, offer revolutionary opportunities to see traditional crafting materials in a new light. Utilising the cellular, atomic structures and properties of glass, clay, polymers, metals, and other materials, scientists are expanding the ways in which these materials are experienced and used. Track 06 explores case studies of collaborative research projects that unite artists, designers and scientists in joint discovery of novel material behaviours and experiments that lead to new knowledge for all disciplines.
MAKING FUTURES 2024
The power of crafting, or of shaping the physical realm, is often juxtaposed with computation and technology, but as distributive manufacture, distance learning and platform economies have shown, the interface between atoms and bits have introduced not merely new, more efficient, sustainable supply chains, but have begun to generate a new language of form and experience that is meaningful beyond craft.
This language is symptomatic of a more intertwined creative practice that unites art, design, computation and science in a shared field of human agency and ingenuity.
The 2024 conference asks the following:
What new forms of craft and material practice are emerging as a result of innovations in material science and engineering, art/science collaborations, and the shared desire across disciplines to meet the urgency of climate change?
Whether small-scale production for niche consumer markets or as part of large-scale distribution and manufacture, can we imagine a context for artisanal knowledge where the notion of ‘crafting’ can be meaningfully applied in the future?
What forms of craft incorporate the emergent, ephemeral or entropic aspect of the natural world into their designs or concepts in a compelling way?
Is there a role for traditional, regional material practices or an ethos of artisanal crafting beyond object production?
What is the relationship between biological, chemical, ecological and other living systems and the cultural or formal value of craft?
Submission formats
- Conference Paper
- Panel proposal
- Poster session
- Material Workshop
- Masterclass
Panels
Proposals for panels (consisting of 3-5 speakers) should consist of a max. 500-word abstract outlining the panel: panel title, summary of panel topic and individual names/title/institution of confirmed panellists/speakers.
Posters
Proposals for Poster Session should consist of a max. 300-word summary of a 10-minute micro presentation of a current creative research project outlining the research content and/or project objectives. Upload one image (.jpg or .png) of the research or project to be presented.
Papers // Presentations
Abstracts for papers/presentations should consist of a max. 500-word abstract with title. Proposed paper to be presented must be original and unpublished and organised in the following structure:
- Title: The name of the written work or project
- Keywords: 5 keywords max. that identify the paper content or project
- Introduction: Summary overview and relevance
- Methodology: Methods, stages, and techniques
- Results: Key findings or result of research
Workshops // Masterclass
Proposals for a Workshop or Masterclass should consist of a max. 300 word summary of the workshop / class content, named workshop / class leader(s) and intended outcome for enrolled participants.
Submission language is English for all formats. The deadline for submissions has been extended to:
30 April 2024 | 5:00PM BST
About your submission to the conference
Biography
Final Paper Submissions
Final paper submissions should be 3500-5000 words plus images in the following format:
- Title: The name of the written work or project
- Keywords: 5 keywords max. that identify the paper content or project
- Introduction: Summary overview and relevance
- Methodology: Methods, stages, and techniques
- Results: Key findings or expected results
- Discussion: Contribution and impact
- References: List Relevant sources
Peer Review
Notification of Acceptance
Submission and conference timeline
30th April 2024
Submission Deadline
15th May 2024
Notification ofAcceptance
May 2024
Conference Registration Opens
5th July 2024 5:00PM BST
Final Paper Deadline
Mid July 2024
Speakers Published
17th October 2024
Conference Opens
MAKING FUTURES JOURNAL
Each edition of the Making Futures Journal brings together submissions from an international community of scholars, artists, makers and curators worldwide, representing a spectrum of responses to the corresponding Making Futures biennial conference which has been held since 2009.
