Making Futures Research Group

Description

Making Futures Research Group (MFRG) is a coalition of educators, artists, designers, scientists and social entrepreneurs at Arts University Plymouth interested in how traditional methods, materials and cultures of making might exist in future contexts through the use of emerging practices and technologies.

As a group of active practitioners, the MFRG explores the interface between organic and digital materiality as a means to better understand the construction of identity and cultural representation. As an exploration of materiality in the context of making more broadly, it seeks to investigate, through materials research and the development of an interdisciplinary pedagogy, the link between matter, networks and place.

Working as an interface between the studio curriculum and the Making Futures biennial conference at AUP, the MFRG operates on the horizon of matter and new technologies as a way of reimagining creative authorship across science, engineering, design and art. We employ responsive, bioactive, photonic and other structurally hybrid and augmented organic materials to investigate the potential of new materials to extend traditions of making into new territories of knowledge and aesthetic expression.

Through partnerships that allow play, study, innovation, critical thinking and social intervention to come together as a collaborative mode of research, the group aims to create a space for creative speculation through different material processes that have common learning goals and shared, sustainable outcomes.