Arts University Plymouth opens call for papers for Making Futures 2026

The 2026 conference, Feeling Materials: Care, Reciprocity & Responsive Matter, will take place from 29 to 31 October 2026 at Arts University Plymouth’s city-centre campus in Plymouth. The conference will be held in person, with key sessions recorded and made available online after the event.

Making Futures is Arts University Plymouth’s international research platform for contemporary craft and maker movements. First convened in 2009, it brings together scholars, makers, artists, designers and educators to examine material practices in relation to sustainability, community regeneration and technical innovation.

Making Futures is one of the platforms underpinning Arts University Plymouth’s Centre for Circular Materials, chaired by Professor Stephanie Owens, Professor of Arts and Material Futures. The Centre for Circular Materials brings together artists, designers, researchers, students and partners to explore how materials are chosen, used and kept in circulation across creative practice, design fabrication and Knowledge Exchange, with a particular focus on bioregional and responsible materiality in the South West.

For 2026, the conference asks how our emotional encounters with materials and objects shape the forms, interfaces and systems that we create. Its theme considers human making alongside more-than-human understandings of matter, drawing on craft, materials science, biotechnology, critical ecology and environmental advocacy.

The call is open to designers, artists, makers, educators, scholars, researchers, policymakers, scientists, curators and cultural practitioners working across craft, design, material practice, technology, ecology, education and cultural research.

Submissions are invited across six conference tracks:

1. Material Intelligence as a Framework for Ecological Care
   Renewable and regenerative materials, the built environment, infrastructure, energy, material libraries, ecological objects, creative co-authorship with natural systems and socio-material interfaces.

2. Designed Reciprocity & Heritage Futures
   Non-extractive practice, community, knowledge exchange, reciprocal creative methods, collaboration, community projects and responsible heritage.

3. Crafted Cultures of Repair
   Reuse, repair, recirculation, right-to-repair policies, material restoration, mending, repair skills and restorative practice.

4. Responsive & Agentic Materiality
   Functional materials, adaptive materials, engineered matter, art/design/science collaborations, AI and matter, material agency and living interaction design.

5. Education as Infrastructure: Regenerative & Circular Systems of Making
   Circular economy, supply chain innovation, circular material practice education, local fabrication, ecosystem design, systems thinking, regenerative design and bioregional culture.

6. New Socio-Material Ontologies: Entanglement Devices
   Health wearables, biosensor technologies, biometric data platforms, socio-material entanglements, agential realism, material biotechnology and wellbeing modulation.

Contributors can submit paper abstracts, project presentations, Futures Forum proposals, breakout sessions, workshops or designed interactions, and exhibition proposals.

Abstracts and proposals should be no more than 300 words and should include the relevant track number, title, author or authors, and organisation or institutional affiliation. Submissions should also include a short biography of no more than 200 words per author or participant.

Abstracts will be blind peer reviewed by the Making Futures Research Group and the Making Futures Editorial Committee. Accepted abstracts are due to be announced on 20 July 2026. The submission deadline is: 15 July 2026.

A major development for 2026 is Making Futures’ partnership with Intellect to publish a Special Edition of Craft Research dedicated to Feeling Materials: Care, Reciprocity & Responsive Matter. After the conference, selected contributors will be invited to develop full research papers of 4,000 to 6,000 words or shorter craft and industry papers of 1,500 to 3,000 words. The special edition is currently scheduled for publication in September or October 2027.

Craft Research is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal dedicated to contemporary craft research, including research into materials, processes, methods, concepts, aesthetics, style and craft education.