Plastic Futures

Plastic Futures was an installation that operated at the scale of a room environment, designed to frame a set of individual, speculative works by students that proposed future situations, scenarios and possibilities.

The project explored the intersections of bio-art and contemporary field-based design practices in the context of speculative fiction. A group of architecture and fashion students engaged in a workshop over a five week period in 2009, including a one week intensive in Western Australia with SymbioticA (UWA) where we explored the environmental conditions of a colony of thrombolites, (bacterial ‘growing rocks’) found at Lake Clifton in the Yalgorup National Park. The project was aimed at generating a future scenario.

The Plastic Futures installation environment was designed to evoke a scalelessness, ambiguous/blurred boundary conditions, and an ambience of the indefinite, qualitatively similar to clouds. An interactive work was incorporated into the ‘cloud’, engaging visitors in a process of operating at multiple scales at once and amplifying scalar ambiguity. A sound-scape and a text based fiction in large printed form became important parts of the installation experience.

Plastic Futures was part of an ARC Discovery project that sought to re-theorise innovation in relation to creative practices, via creative practice research (see also The Innovation Imperative). The work was part of the Victorian State of Design Festival – a significant national event showcasing innovative design. A discussion forum was held in the installation with Professor Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby (Designing Interactions, RCA), Oron Catts (SymbioticA), Pia Ednie-Brown and Professor Mark Burry.