SMR Institute for Advanced Design Practices

The School of Materialist Research’s annual Summer Institute for Advanced Design Practices 2025 explores the relations between the natural and the artificial in the context of design research and practice. In doing so, the summer institute aims to trouble neat and tidy divisions between the two and also work against the easy subsumption of one to the other. The theme of SMR’s summer design institute, Nature/Artifice Reimagined, captures this spirit, and through intensive studios, workshops, and discussions, participants shape design interventions that challenge well-worn dualisms and reductions of the natural and the artificial, paying close attention to the political and ethical stakes of any intervention. Over the course of the institute, techniques from speculative and critical design, the graphic arts, performance, painting, and sculpture will be introduced alongside theories from materialist philosophy, science and technology studies, feminism, decolonial theory, ecotheory, and media studies.

The theme for this year’s summer design institute wagers that Design—as a discipline, a practice, an ontology—is critical for negotiating the complex and evolving relation between the natural and artificial. In an era when advanced computational technologies are so interwoven with biological and physical systems (from biotech and molecular biology to geoengineering and modeling earth systems), it’s no longer clear whether nature is artificializing itself (or maybe nature has always been artificial?) or the artificial is naturalizing itself (through biopolitical techniques that naturalize computing throughout the biosphere—GMOs, CRISPR, etc.). Or perhaps neither of these conceptions is appropriate and we need new conceptual and practical frameworks altogether. Whatever the case, many argue that Design finds itself caught somewhere in the middle of the natural and the artificial: at once a part of the ontological structure of humans and other living systems and also evidence of their artificialization. One might wonder then: Is it in the nature of certain systems to artificialize themselves through designs that design them in turn?

These and other questions will animate the theories and practices over the course of the summer institute. Students, professors, and researchers work alongside one another to research, experiment, and prototype interventions at the SMR campus and throughout the beach town of Olympiada, Greece