Crafting
Futures
Workshop

The Crafting Futures Workshop hosted by Kairos Futura brought together artists and designers to explore potential futures. Using speculative design and design fiction as primary tools, we dove deep into experimental material crafting techniques and innovative pattern cutting to unlock new ways of articulating future narratives, reimagining how garments might tell stories of environmental, social, and technological change.

PROJECT SPECULATIVE DESIGN WORKSHOP
SECTOR DESIGN & FUTURING
ORGANISATION IN COLLABORATION WITH KAIROS FUTURA
ROLE DESIGNING WORKSHOP | WORKSHOP FACILITATION
WORKSHOP DURATION 1 WEEK

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KEY METHODOLOGIES & TOOLS
SPECULATIVE DESIGN | DESIGN FICTIO | STEEP FRAMEWORK | CRAFTING MATERIAL | GARMENT PRODUCTION

01︎
What is Speculative Design?

Designers were introduced to speculative design as a powerful tool for envisioning possible futures and exploring their potential implications. This foundational step established understanding of speculative design methodology and its role in exploring alternative futures rather than just solving current problems.

︎02
Mapping Nairobi 2050

Using the STEEP framework (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political), participants explored four distinctive environmental scenarios for Nairobi in 2050. This exercise created concrete, multi-dimensional future contexts that would serve as the foundation for design exploration, ensuring designs respond to realistic complex challenges.

03︎
Reimagining Materials

Inspired by the scenarios, designers developed their own speculative landscapes and began pushing beyond conventional boundaries by exploring how materials could be manipulated, transformed, and re-imagined. This phase expanded creative thinking about material possibilities and encouraged designers to move beyond existing material constraints and conventions.

︎04
Rebuilding Patterns

Designers took simple patterns and radically modified them to create entirely new designs aligned with their speculative concepts. This step translated abstract speculative concepts into tangible design elements, bridging the gap between conceptual thinking and practical application.

05︎
Bringing Futures to Life

Participants merged their speculative scenarios, material explorations, and pattern innovations into refined concepts and prototypes. This final phase synthesized all previous explorations into coherent design proposals that demonstrate how speculative thinking can lead to innovative, future-oriented solutions.

︎06
Workshop Outcomes

The process resulted in innovative concepts including reflective safety wear, solar panel jackets for personal energy generation, a Gikomba City economy based on material manipulation skills, armor-like protective jackets, adaptive garments for visually impaired users, water-harvesting jackets, and Seed Pirates' garments for transporting botanical diversity.

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Nomadic
Futures
2299

Nomadic Futures is part of the Nairobi Space Station Project, where designers, artists and scientists collaborate to envision plausible future scenarios. The Escapist Pack is a speculative design artefact that functions as a protective jacket during the day and transforms into a temporary tent shelter at night, designed for nomadic communities navigating climate-related challenges.

PROJECT NOMADIC FUTURES
SECTOR FUTURING & DESIGN
ORGANISATION AS PART OF NAIROBI SPACE STATION
ROLE DESIGNING FUTURE ARTEFACT
PROJECT DURATION 2 MONTHS

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KEY METHODOLOGIES & TOOLS
SPECULATIVE DESIGN | MAPPING FUTURE SCENARIOSDESIGNING & MAKING ARTEFACT

︎Nairobi in the year 2299

The project responds to a dystopian vision of Nairobi in the year 2299. The city has transformed into a harsh landscape where towering concrete structures from an earlier era cast shadows over parched, dusty terrain. Former rivers have become toxic sludge channels threading through the urban landscape. The population has adapted to a nomadic lifestyle, constantly moving through the sprawling metropolis in search of basic necessities—food, water, and nightly shelter.

Nomadic Futures︎

The Escapist Pack addresses the fundamental challenge of survival in this mobile future.It's a transformative garment that serves dual purposes: functioning as weather-protective outerwear during daily wandering, then converting into temporary shelter for nighttime rest. This dual-function design embodies the principle of maximum utility with minimum weight—essential for a population that must carry everything they need.

︎Mobile Solutions

Drawing from survival gear principles, the pack prioritizes functionality and portability above all else. It represents a design response to radical mobility, where traditional concepts of home and permanence have dissolved into a more fluid relationship between clothing, shelter, and survival. The project demonstrates how everyday objects might evolve to meet the extreme demands of climate change and urban transformation.

This speculative artifact serves as both a practical design exercise and a provocative meditation on resilience, adaptation, and the future of human habitation in challenging environments.

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Wild Cards;
Building
Resilient
Futures

Wild cards are events with low probability and extremely high impact, often resulting in seismic shifts, and broad implications on human society. We explored using wild cards as a tool to test complex infrastructure systems that can potentially help us strategize, plan and structure future decisions, promoting sustainable change and building resilience in the face of uncertainty.

PROJECT WILD CARDS
SECTOR FUTURE FORESIGHT
ORGANISATION ZPUNKT (CLIENT BMBF)
ROLE DESIGN STRATEGIST
PROJECT DURATION 2 MONTHS

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KEY METHODOLOGIES & TOOLS
SPECULATIVE DESIGN | MAPPING FUTURE SCENARIOSDESIGNING & MAKING ARTEFACT

01

We began by identifying weak signals that could potentially have far reaching impact. Weak signals act as early warning signals and instruments to help us anticipate future events, they can be harbingers of change and often don’t fit into exisiting expectation grids.