
FUTURES. Materials and Design of tomorrow
Topic: ready made future
21 November 2024–24 August 2025, Leipzig
location: GRASSI Museum for Applied Arts
selection of exhibits: Dr. Sascha Peters
Humanity has always had a fascination with visions and scenarios of the future. Global challenges such as resource scarcity, climate crisis, social and economic injustice and war play an essential role in future perspectives that are being developed and shaped today.
Biocircular material design with fungi, algae and bacteria
Designers are increasingly concerned with aspects of possible futures. This plural reflects the options, scenarios and a certain uncertainty with which we view what lies ahead. Design has long since seen itself as more than just a discipline of aesthetics and functionality. It looks for possibilities, researches systems and processes and is often open-ended.

Using local and international positions at the interfaces of biology, creation and industry, the exhibition shows what role design can play in these futures. The spectrum of exhibits ranges from speculative design and provocative food for thought to research projects and existing products made from biomaterials.
In three thematic complexes on fiction design, bio-based materials and biocircular products, as well as a materials lab in cooperation with various art and design universities, the exhibition enables a reflective and optimistic look at possible futures.
How do you design with living materials like fungi, algae and bacteria? FUTURES gets to the bottom of these and other questions, such as the material cycle or the understanding of design. The future agency Haute Innovation is responsible for the topic of biomaterials and puts together material and design innovations that come from natural raw materials and are, if possible, biocircular.
image (top): bathroom sink from wood cellulose (Woodio, Finland)
image (below): Mapu Preto – sound speakers based on natural raw materials (source: Documentary Design)
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