Design Tales from Beyond Science: A Material Poetics Methodology

Design Tales from Beyond Science is an ongoing series of research-led workshops developed across multiple institutional contexts between 2012 and the present. Situated within a practice of Material Poetics, the work investigates how designed objects can function not only as tools or artefacts, but as instruments of embodiment, relationality, and alternative ways of knowing.

Through processes including object-making, storytelling, character construction, movement, and performative exploration, participants develop artefacts that operate beyond narrow utilitarian function, engaging affect, desire, intimacy, ritual, and social relations. The object is approached as a material-poetic form: a body extension, narrative device, ritual instrument, or symbolic tool through which participants explore psychological and social dimensions of design.

The series includes workshop iterations such as Heels From Hell, Design Passionnel, Body–Movement–Space, and Design a Ritual, each exploring different aspects of embodiment, relationality, and symbolic life. Taken together, these form a distinctive methodology that positions workshop-based practice as a mode of object-based inquiry.

The work offers a critical response to design cultures shaped by optimisation, control, and measurable outcomes, foregrounding sensory knowledge, imagination, care, and relationality. It demonstrates how pedagogic formats can function as sites of research, contributing to alternative social imaginaries and expanded understandings of design practice.

This research has been disseminated through teaching and workshop delivery at London College of Fashion and external institutions including HEAD Genève, as well as through publication and presentation, including writing in Fashion Theory Russia (2018) and presentation at the conference Imagining the Unusual: Cognitive Dissonance, Pattern Breaking and Other Fantastic Beasts (Moscow, 2019).