The MoA Design Research Studio on »Growth« was a continuation of the »Scaling Nature« series introduced in Summer 2019. In this context, the core idea of the studio was to investigate matter as an active agent in the design process. This means that it has its own innate capacity of formation and performance, that is being designed from the bottom up. Scaling nature can be understood as the process of extracting principles from naturally occurring systems and taking them as inspiration for specific applications – during this process scaling operations necessarily are one key aspect of this translation. The results of the MoA Design Research Studio on »Growth« were on internal display at the weißensee school of art and design berlin from September 22nd to October 14th, 2020. more

The exhibition »Design Lab #13: Material Legacies« at Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin explored contingencies and ruptures between traditional crafts and the most recent developments at the crossroads of material research, design, engineering, and architecture. It brought together artifacts from the museum’s collection with work-in-progress installations by designers and researchers from the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« in order to initiate a dialogue about the historical, contemporary, and future conditions under which materiality unfolds.
By engaging with a series of different materials and techniques the exhibition encompassed both the problematization of unsustainable pasts and presents as well as the imagination of speculative material futures. Taking materiality as a starting point, each of the exhibits investigated its sociocultural, economic, and political context in order to disentangle the multiple interrelations that arise from and with materials. more

»Matters of Activity« und das Experimentallabor für Wissenschaftskommunikation »CollActive Materials« starteten im März eine neue Veranstaltungsreihe im Futurium Lab. Unter dem Titel »Materialzukünfte besuchen« fanden über vier Monate vier Workshops statt, die die Forschung des Clusters mit der Zivilgesellschaft zusammenbrachten und in denen gemeinsam über Materialzukünfte spekuliert wurde. Begleitet wurden die Veranstaltungen von einer temporären Ausstellung im Futurium Lab. more