Lecture: “Stitching Temporalities: Tending to futures through thread and touch”

Lecture with Marysol: Visioning — the act of imagining futures — is crucial to design, yet dominant approaches often rely on fast, linear notions of time that limit what futures become possible. This lecture explores how the synergy between embroidery and design, as time-variant and material practices, offers an alternative mode of visioning, one that embraces layered, relational, and non-linear temporalities. By engaging with these plural timescapes, designers can contribute to a rebraiding of these temporalities — including and questioning dominant narratives of progress — to more intertwined futures. This approach invites a shift toward future-making that is embodied, affective, and attentive to ongoing change.

 

 

Building on the lecture’s exploration of time-variant and relational visioning, this hands-on workshop invites participants to engage with photo embroidery as a versatile practice for visioning, co-creating, storytelling or reflecting. Through guided prompts and material exploration, participants will braid everyday actions/objects into personal and collective futures of dishes yet-to-come, using threads, photographs, and temporal shifts. At the end of the workshop, we will have an artefact that, at once, encompass memories of past meals and future anticipatory everyday life actions.

No prior embroidery experience is needed, only a willingness to experiment with tactile, time-aware forms of making.

 

Marysol Ortega Pallanez (she/her) is a designer, researcher, embroiderer, and educator. Marysol is an Assistant Professor in Design at Arizona State University (USA). She works at the intersection of design, embroidery, and adjacent arts-based practices, engaging in ways-of-being as designers who care for relations—both human and more-than-human—as pathways to addressing today’s multiple social-ecological crises.

 

Simona Mancusi (she/her) is a service designer on a mission to bridge design and ecology. She strives to embed feminist research methods and decolonial analysis in her design research. Her work moves between transition design, futuring research, human ecology and co-design.