Emergent Futures Require Emergent Change Agents

The world is constantly changing. Some of the challenges we face today didn’t even exist until the last decade. It is difficult for traditional education systems to keep up with the pace of change. The World Economic Forum estimates that most children entering primary school today will work in job categories that don’t yet exist.

Present-day challenges require critical thinking, an understanding of emerging technologies, and the ability to approach problems through systems-level design. These creative problem-solving skills are highly prized in the modern workplace and society at large.

The Master in Design for Emergent Futures is a multidisciplinary, two-year program by Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC and ELISAVA School of Design and Engineering. The program aims to create unique, hybrid designers who can build simple, small-scale solutions to large-scale, wicked problems.

It combines design knowledge from ELISAVA and research experience from Fab Lab Barcelona and is built on the distributed education model of the Fab Academy program. Students learn to translate ideas into prototypes, develop designer identities, and create “design responses” to human needs.

Graduates from the MDEF program become change agents for “radical transformation of the current state of affairs” and can explore research, academia, entrepreneurship, and other forms of professional advancement.

According to MDEF Academic Coordinator Chiara Dall'Olio, the students "leave not just with new skills, but with new ways of seeing and interacting with the world.” They are encouraged to “embrace uncertainty, experiment boldly, and design with a clear purpose.”

Every June, the graduating students present their final projects at the MDEF Festival (MDEFest), as part of a grad showcase program by ELISAVA.

MDEFest 2025, titled “My knees hurt, tomorrow it will rain," featured experimental projects and interactive installations to promote “design as a tool for transformation.”

Explaining the theme, Dall'Olio says, “In Spain, there’s a popular saying: 'My knee hurts, tomorrow it will rain.’ It blends science and human intuition, a guess rooted in past experience, a subtle signal interpreted as a tool for prediction. Pain becomes a means to speculate, to project a possible future.”

The projects presented by the students combined multiple channels of digital, human, or biological perception and response to design for the future. Here are some of them:

Darned Circuits

Lucretia Field’s final project is a hodgepodge of broken items and discarded electronics. She says Darned Circuits is from another reality “where computers have cloth screens and woven trackpads and jeans have butt patches that light up.” She hopes it will inspire people to embrace repair as the default, rather than discard.

Darned Circuits includes a “mended laptop” interactive art piece with textile sensors, discarded LEDs, and an audio player, all powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico W.

CHOP

A rocket stove uses an insulated vertical chimney for efficient cooking or heating. It produces high amounts of heat from little fuel, and emits almost no smoke. Maximilian Becht’s rocket stove uses fire bricks (also known as refractory bricks) for easy assembly and disassembly. The rocket stove was made to support his workshop on “collaborative making.”

Becht says his project investigates how “technological systems can serve as tools for democratic resource management and community self-determination.” He calls it “collectively hacking overlooked possibilities” or CHOP.

Material Ethnographies

Due to the detached efficiency of mass production, most of us are rarely connected to the items we own. We often know little about where they came from, who made them, and how they are made, save what is written on the tag or label. This is the thesis behind Maithili Manoj Sathe’s project, Material Ethnographies.

Using clay as a subject material, Material Ethnographies explores materials as vessels of history, culture, and the human touch. It leverages “craft and vernacular building practices as a way of carrying forward traditional wisdom in working with local resources.” Sathe's projects include a DIY Pottery Wheel made from discarded electronics, and a 3D-printed clay form based on ant movement patterns.

The Future of Design and Making

Carmen Robres de Veciana’s project explores the usefulness of artificial intelligence for community-based design and fabrication. Her work reimagines AI as a local collaborator instead of an industrial machine and explores how it can help “non-experts create, repair, and design objects within makerspaces.”

de Veciana initially built MegaTool, a platform for generating models from text, image, audio, or webcam data, but it became impossible to maintain when the API it used became private. She pivoted to exploring AI as a tool to support learning and reflection, with its limitations in mind.

She says: “AI for fabrication still lacks the maturity to deliver usable results, and if it develops into something hyper-efficient, we risk losing the learning process. Only people with a background in design will know how to challenge AI critically. That’s why I’ve shifted focus toward teaching people what AI is, how it works, and what to expect from it — not just how to prompt, but how to understand its limits.”