Research Lab of Ambiguous Futurology

Sasha de Koninck

The Research Lab of Ambiguous Futurology creates heirlooms for the future. We are living in uncertain times, some might even say, ambiguous times.The Internet of Things is evolving into the Internet of Disposable Things. Our technology is becoming smaller and cheaper to produce. We are creating so much waste, and have no ways of processing it. What is the future we are creating for ourselves? At the Research Lab of Ambiguous Futurology, we want to create objects for you to preserve for future use. An antique heirloom is traditionally a used object which is preserved to be passed down to future generations to treasure, but its usefulness has typically passed. A future heirloom is an object whose usefulness has not been used up. You preserve your future heirloom for future use. And once it can no longer serve its purpose, it must be repurposed, recycled or revised. At the lab, we study traditional textile techniques such as quilt-making and weaving, and combine those techniques with materials we have and envision new possibilities. For the Textiles from Home symposium, the Research Lab of Ambiguous Futurology would like to lead a virtual workshop about imagining new futures for traditional textile techniques. For this workshop, the lab would like to work with participants to work with the materials around them, to create a future heirloom. We would all imagine a future, 10 minutes or 10 years from now, and create a future textile heirloom to be used specifically for that future moment.