For its 2026 international conference, Making Futures (TM) will explore the relationship between objects, material intelligence and the emotional encounters we design with and through the natural world around us. Taking place at Arts University Plymouth from October 29–31, 2026, the three-day conference brings together artists, designers, innovators, educators, researchers and other specialists to consider materials not simply as passive matter, but as active participants in creative and cultural practice.
Under the topic, Feeling Materials: Care, Reciprocity & Responsive Matter, the conference takes a materials ontology approach to artefacts, considering both human design and the “more than human” agency of materials within craft, materials science and engineering, biotechnology, critical ecology and environmental advocacy.
First convened in 2009, Making Futures (TM) is a globally recognised platform for contemporary craft and material-led creative research.The conference gathers an international roster of creative scholars and thought leaders every two years to challenge traditional approaches to material practice through emerging technologies and economies that highlight the importance of our shared human heritage, social making, and the significance of place in the value of creative form.
The programme explores six interconnected tracks:
–Material Intelligence as a Framework for Ecological Care
–Designed Reciprocity & Heritage Futures
–Crafted Cultures of Repair
–Responsive & Agentic Materiality
–Education as Infrastructure: Regenerative & Circular Systems of Making
–New Socio-Material Ontologies: Entanglement Devices
Across these themes, Making Futures (TM) 2026 considers regenerative and renewable materials, repair and reuse, reciprocal creative practices, material innovation, art/science collaboration, circular systems, biotechnology, responsive materials and new relationships between people, matter and the natural world.
Making Futures 2026: international research conference
October 29–31, 2026
Arts University Plymouth
Plymouth, England