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Image Credits: Henrik Rieß

‘Bloom’ explores speculative futures of human-plant relationships for the year 2050 within the context of the climate crisis and global ecological upheaval.

Student teams create multi-layered future scenarios beyond dystopian binaries, instead aiming for implicative futures that—rather than being judgmental—imply the consequences of current global trends continuing to accelerate.

‘Punk & Participation’ leverages research for and through design to gain insights into how storytelling can foster conversations and shed light on discussions of relevance for a generation of young designers. The topics range from very personal experiences, such as the promotion of misleading body perceptions among young women, to wicked problems, such as the fight against fake news in increasingly authoritarian systems.

Central to Bloom is a shift away from purely human-centered design. The project cultivates future literacy by embracing plant-centered and system-centric perspectives. Through group-based trend research, foresight analysis tools, and generative AI experiments, students develop critical 'provotypes'—that challenge assumptions—reflecting reimagined ecologies and new modes of living.

Each project contains at least one tangible artifact from the future with a corresponding digital counterpart. Both elements converge on an interactive projection table that reads and interprets the physical objects, revealing layers of speculative meaning and potential futures embedded within the artifacts.

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