Messy Futures

Messy Futures explores everyday life in 2050, where today’s mess becomes tomorrow’s possibility.

Messy Futures is a speculative design project about living in 2050. It reframes mess as a fertile ground for biodiversity, circularity and creativity—inviting visitors to contribute their own visions for 2050 to a growing collective artwork.

Messy Mundane

Messy Futures is a speculative design project that focuses on the ordinary and everyday aspects of living in 2050. Instead of presenting the future as a polished, seamless narrative, it highlights the messy, contradictory, and layered nature of daily life: kitchens that mix old and new, streets where wild plants reclaim space, and communities where trading replaces buying. By shifting attention towards the mundane, Messy Futures suggests that the future is best shaped through looking at daily existence. Mess is treated not as waste but as a resource: leftovers that can spark creativity, rewilding projects that support biodiversity and material improvisations that spark circular ways of living. In this way, the project proposes that futures are not clean slates but patchworks: imperfect, collective, and dynamic.

Participatory Installation

At Dutch Design Week, Messy Futures came to life as a participatory installation in Trudo’s new Matchbox building. A long communal table, draped with a patchwork tablecloth made from recycled tote bags, is at the centre. On the table were speculative objects and narratives: a gardener’s apron stitched from discarded textiles, designed for the community care of urban green spaces; a neighbourhood map where asphalt gives way to green corridors for both people and insects; a kitchen reconstructed from salvaged building panels that looks as good as new. These scenarios are provocations—small windows into how circularity, creativity and biodiversity might be expressed in everyday life. Visitors were invited to contribute their own visions of 2050. They wrote short reflections on fabric patches, which were then embroidered and sewn onto the tablecloth to create one collaborative artwork.

Artist in Residence at Trudo

Messy Futures approaches design as an open, collective practice. Futures are not singular, coherent stories but layered, contradictory, and shared. By combining speculative design with co-created scenarios and public contributions, the project demonstrates how imagination itself can be circular and regenerative. The project originated during my residency at Trudo, an innovative social housing corporation in Eindhoven. They invited me to explore future scenarios around living in 2050 and to inspire both colleagues and external audiences. Workshops with Trudo colleagues provided many of the seeds for the speculative objects and narratives, grounding the work in lived perspectives while expanding it beyond the organisation into the public realm. At Dutch Design Week, the project culminates in an installation that grows with each contribution. It does not end with answers, but with a question posed to every visitor: if the future is messy, what kind of mess do we want to create together?