Ecologies of Making: Science, craft & alternative material futures

Bringing a bit of Lesnes Abbey wood to Waterloo, we hear from George and Ian as they share their work using innovative technologies to better understand London’s historic woodlands and the possibilities for more conscious crafting.
Connecting woodland management, in-situ use of harvested timber and community access to these precious green spaces, the FORESTED project creates a template for ecological citizenship in other community woodlands.

Pietro's work explores alternative manufacturing processes to mass production in the clothing industry. Distributed manufacturing, which aims to arrange manufacturing processes in microfactories across urban contexts, claims to hold the key to address the social and environmental consequences of mass production. However, despite noble intentions and promising results it is yet to enter the manufacturing mainstream. Why then, has this shift not taken place? Is it really desirable? And, if so, how can it be supported?

What if the materials of tomorrow could be grown, not extracted? Barbara, Kailash and Maria take us behind the scenes of arts-university bio-labs, sharing what it’s like creatively experimenting with living materials, showing off some cool projects at the intersection of art, design, engineering and bio-science, and imagining alternative futures of making.