Speculative Materials

Speculative Materials investigates the social imagination of plausible materialities. It does not only ask what materials are, but also what people wish, fear, believe, or imagine materials could become. These imaginaries are translated into carefully articulated material propositions that deliberately remain in a proposal state – as an ongoing material inquiry that invites discussion rather than implementation.

In 2012/13, Clemens Winkler developed Fictional Materials as »material stories« within the Design Interactions programme at the Royal College of Art – a collection of material propositions for substances that only exist conceptually. The aim was not to replace the remarkable richness of natural materials, but to probe the human capacity to think and act with materialities – whether they are called organic, smart, or adaptive – including the question of where we should intervene and where it may be productive to leave the unavailable and invisible at rest; the project explored how imagined materials might affect bodies, environments, infrastructures, our affective registers, and thus our thinking – not primarily as technical solutions, but as material narratives in which desires and anxieties around new substances explore possible worlds before they become real.

Approaching Material Beliefs Through Cultural Convictions
Rather than starting from anticipated scientific breakthroughs or market applications, the project approached materiality through cultural convictions, emotional expectations, wishes, fears, and societal concerns. These were translated into highly specific fictional substances whose properties remained linked to existing scientific concepts, yet exceeded what is currently realisable.
As a starting point for a larger series, first conceived within the Cluster »Matters of Activity« in 2021 and now being developed towards its conclusion in 2027, four fictional materials formed the basis for a set of technical A0 screen-printed blueprints, exhibited in 2019 at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich: Radiant Crystals, Hallucinogenic Black, Mutable Drugs, and Postvisible Matter. Each blueprint describes a Speculative Material through a short material story, a schematic drawing, and a diagram that positions it between three overlapping fields: energy, biology, and information. (see images above)

Material Props and Productive Dissonance
Seemingly ordinary substances such as sugar, carbon, glycerine, gelatine, or water serve as stand‑in props for these fictional materials: they do not imitate them, but provide tangible points of attachment for material imaginaries that may be technologically inaccessible or physically impossible (for now). The contrast between familiar materiality and extraordinary attributed properties generates a productive cognitive dissonance: sugar can stand in for an energetic crystal, glycerine for a mutable medical substance, carbon for a surface capable of altering perception.

Scientific Plausibility Without Modelling
The propositions derive their credibility from highly specialised scientific domains, but they are not visualisations of existing knowledge. Nor are they simplified models intended merely to make complex research easily accessible; instead, scientific concepts, cultural narratives, personal desires, and societal anxieties are brought together in ways that generate new material questions.

The Social Imagination of Materials
Today, this earlier work provides a conceptual and practical starting point for Speculative Materials within the Cluster »Matters of Activity«. From the perspective of »Matters of Activity«, Speculative Materials can be read as an early inquiry into the social imagination of materials. Materials appear not simply as substances with technical properties, but as sites where scientific knowledge, cultural convictions, emotional expectations, and political values are tightly interwoven.
The designs do not predict future technologies; they ask what kinds of bodies, infrastructures, dependencies, risks, pleasures, and modes of perception particular substances might bring into being. What counts as natural, artificial, plausible, or even supernatural is not culturally neutral, but depends on historically and socially shaped expectations about what matter is allowed to do – while many seemingly magical effects already exist as highly specialised phenomena in photonics, nanotechnology, biomedicine, or materials science. Conversely, scientific plausibility does not determine whether a material proposition is socially desirable, just, or acceptable.

Guiding Question
Speculative Materials therefore asks: Which materials do people already desire, fear, expect, or invent – and what do these material imaginaries reveal about their visions of the future?

MoAs Desired Materials – Next Phase 2026/27
The next phase extends this inquiry through conversations with Principal Investigators of the Cluster »Matters of Activity« and, prospectively, other groups of interest. No specialised materials‑science knowledge is required; the conversations begin from concepts, needs, convictions, longings, and concerns, and ask how these might be translated into possible or imaginable materialities.
Speculative Materials proposes a transversal approach across three interrelated dimensions: people's material beliefs, scientifically plausible futures, and material agency—bringing cultural imaginaries and emerging scientific possibilities into experimental processes of co-making that allow materials to participate in shaping the speculation. The resulting propositions will feed into a new series of science illustrations for Speculative Materials, planned for the conclusion of the »Matters of Activity« as a Cluster of Excellence in 2027. The series asks how cultural imaginaries, emerging scientific possibilities, and material behaviours might together shape what materials can become.

Further links: https://www.hfs-berlin.de/detailseite/clemens-winkler-im-interview/