A range of novel materials, often called smart materials, raise the demand for new design explorations, techniques, knowledge and applications. Materials that change in response to external stimuli, have programmable properties or adapt to environmental conditions are radically different to the conventional materials of Design. Whether they emerged from science laboratory or from a creative practitioner, all these substances require hands on experience to grasp their phenomenological and technological complexity.
However, little has been said about the environments where we work with such materials and phenomena. Every surrounding, either being natural or domestic, is potentially full of substances and processes. Guided through creative intuition, we can mix these as ingredients and combine them in processes of transformation. In this respect, we would like to investigate an alchemic approach from the Wunderkammer as a design tool, the “old science of struggling with materials, and not quite understanding what is happening” (James Elkins “What painting is” 2000). By combining this approach together with modern forms of collaborative investigations, tools from science laboratories, and expressive or performative outcomes from the arts, we will create a hybrid space that we call the Wunderkammer for Arising Matter. In this space a three day long material-driven workshop and symposium will take place, as pilot lab for a future directions in material design research.