Conference Agenda

This Laboratorio de Futuros held in Mar del Plata (Argentina), brought together architecture and design professors and master’s students from Argentina, Chile, and Colombia to explore an Epimethean approach to design—acting after rather than ahead of action, embracing delay, reflection, and care. Rooted in voices and material practices from the Global South, participants engaged in embodied exercises fostering inter-learning through reciprocity and complementarity. We explored the territory holistically with our whole bodies, attuning to wind, sand, sea, and insects, and reframing design as the enactment of relational infrastructures through affective attunement and planetary excesses. Our bodies became sensors, registering the relational texture of the shared environment. As speculative outcomes, we collectively imagined temporary and affective structures that challenge anthropocentric and disciplinary boundaries—Radical Pavilions for interspecies coexistence and cosmopolitical encounters. Through gestures of unmaking and care, the workshop positioned design as a situated, reparative practice that weaves futures of shared dwelling.

This paper explores speculation otherwise by tracing how speculative potential emerges from the very first encounters of design research. Rather than viewing speculation as a designer-led projection of possible futures, we propose a shift toward understanding speculation as something to be recognized within already unfolding worlds. Drawing on Tsing’s notion of contamination and Ingold’s concept of correspondence, we show how design engagements evolve through entanglements with speculative forces circulating in the everyday: through material residues, infrastructural rhythms, social negotiations, and more-than-human relations. Through slow alignments, tentative invitations, failed funding applications and walks through neighbourhood sites, we describe how our own imaginaries became entangled with worlds of urban transformation. We argue that what is often framed as a pre-project phase is already a site of speculative formation. Speculation otherwise thus positions design as attuned participation in unfolding situations, engaging not by projecting futures, but by corresponding with speculative possibilities already in motion.

This paper explores how mechanical jewellery can serve as an Epimethean design practice that rethinks human–machine relationships through care, hesitation, and affective engagement. Drawing from post-anthropocentric design discourse and new materialist theory, the research investigates how low-tech, playful, and speculative prototypes can undo conventional narratives of technological progress. Through a practice-based workshop conducted at Fringe Arts Bath 2025, the study examines how wearable artefacts exhibiting unpredictable motion provoke emotional response and relational awareness in participants. The findings suggest that mechanical jewellery can operate as a modest yet generative medium for staying with the trouble of human–machine entanglement, foregrounding absurd materiality, multispecies sympoiesis, and embodied reflection as critical modes of post-anthropocentric design.

Design in Mexico, often disconnected from the local industry value chain, has long relied on arte popular as a self-referential cultural narrative to add value, establish identity, and find its “substance.” While this practice stems from a genuine search for rootedness and authenticity, it frequently leads to stagnation, raises concerns about cultural appropriation, neo-colonial dynamics between designers and craftspeople, neglect of functionality, and lack of innovation. This paper critiques this and proposes a framework for defining functionality, rooted in Mexican philosophy as an alternative value system. Drawing on thinkers such as Emilio Uranga and Grupo Hiperión’s work, it identifies parallels that reveal a more nuanced understanding of the Mexican condition, marked by ambiguity, contradiction, and in-betweenness. Concepts such as relajo, zozobra, and accidentality are reconsidered as epistemological foundations that challenge modernist rationalism. From this perspective emerges Función-Nepantla, redefining functionality beyond utilitarian logic, as illustrated through La Caja de Toques.