Taught by Chris Woebken

Students build artifacts from imagined worlds to question how emerging technologies could reshape bodies, cultures and everyday life.

Selected student work · View course documentation

Co-taught by Chris Woebken and Daniel Leithinger

Physical AI, haptic interfaces and interspecies prototypes investigate how bodies sense, communicate and relate through technology.

Selected student work · View all eight selected projects

Taught by Chris Woebken

Repeated experiments in materials, fabrication and form develop objects that connect personal narratives, bodily experience and cultural meaning.

View course documentation

Co-taught by Chris Woebken and Daniel Miller

Situated computational research examines how systems of mapping, machine vision and urban infrastructure shape power, environmental justice and access to resources.

Collaborative storytelling and artifacts give form to worlds organized around mutualism, repair and coexistence, drawing on Haraway and Le Guin.

Free program · NYCU and NTHU students.

2025 · Documentation and videography: Karan Lo · Full photo album

Scent and performed dialogues make changing carbon cycles perceptible, inviting participants to inhabit the social and sensory worlds of an energy transition.

Taught by Chris Woebken

Students turn urban waste streams and overlooked ecologies into biomaterial experiments, examining the environmental and ethical implications of making with biology.

View course documentation

View material process

Taught by Chris Woebken

Fictional devices and bodily extensions question how everyday technologies shape identity, communication and the boundaries of the human body.

View student projects & process

Selected student projects

Snail Antennae Device

Quanyi Wang · Spring 2023

What if humans communicated through antennae? Quanyi’s wearable combines two air-driven antennae, a reflective face shield and earplugs to explore communication beyond familiar facial expressions and speech.

How it works

1. Press buttons on two handheld controls.
2. Air pumps inflate or deflate each antenna.
3. Use changes in antenna position as visible signals.

Commu-tail (Cat Tail Device)

Hannah Lee · Spring 2023

A speculative wearable tail inspired by how cats communicate through posture and movement. A flexible base and modular outer segments explore how a tail-like extension could become part of the human body. Earlier whale- and bird-tail studies informed the final model.

Process & development

Ali Forney Center youth and staff use spatial dioramas to define what belonging, affirmation and safety should feel like in shared spaces.

Free program · Ali Forney Center clients and staff.

Taught by Chris Woebken

Growing materials and imagining life after petroleum, students examine how making with microorganisms could change industrial production and relationships with other species.

View course documentation

Co-taught by Chris Woebken and Anastasiia Raina

Investigations of microbial perception and machine vision become graphic and physical experiments that challenge the human viewpoint as design’s default.

View project & course documentation

Diatom Perception

Student project by Sadia Quddus and Dougal Henken · Spring 2022

Sadia and Dougal imagine the experience of a diatom through color, gesture and projected imagery. Drawing on research into how diatoms respond to changes in their environment, the installation explores an intuitive, empathetic way to approach climate change through a nonhuman perspective.

Course & program documentation

Design in the Posthuman Age

- SS22, RISD GD
co-taught with Anastasiia Raina

Young designers reimagine the fire hydrant as a shared neighborhood resource, proposing new ways to drink, cool down and gather around water.

Concept contributor honoraria
Honoraria covered Water Is… workshop participants, credited as concept co-creators.

Guided role play and immersive installations let participants rehearse everyday life, social values and new kinships in a New York beyond fossil fuels.

Course & program documentation

Precognitioning post-oil

What might it feel like to live in New York City after fossil fuels?

The fossil energy regime of coal, oil and gas has to and will end eventually, coal rolling and the renewed celebration of excessive fossil fuel consumption have been merely petromelancholic rebound effects… This is the backdrop for our ongoing research project on the histories and afterlives of petromodernity. How do we want to live in a post-fossil future? How and with whom will we develop new kinships after the social bonds connected to the resource economy and the exuberant promises of our ‘Western Way of Life’ are untied? Will we actively delve into a world of living materials and microbiological entanglements? Will we get beyond racism and patriarchy? Will we cease to privately own land?

Join us at one of three successive precognitioning sessions at 1014! Play out visions of urban renewal, societal reformation, and a post-extractivist approach towards natures and societies after the possible endings of fossil energy regimes.

Through narrative techniques and design futures methods a series of bespoke design interventions and immersive installations transform 1014 into a hyper-reality testing environment. Using guided speculative role play and co-created moments of immersion, participants are encouraged to experiment with new values and beliefs that might emerge in a post-petro world. The scenarios and installations have been developed in collaboration with an architecture course at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, led by participatory futures practitioner Chris Woebken in partnership with cultural researcher Alexander Klose.

The idea of precognition: Being neither driven by big corporations nor by governments, the precognition process takes up the project of working with and on futures in an explicitly non-technocratic, experimental way. It avoids statistics-based "scientific" methodologies. Instead, it relies on collectively crafted visions and material-based artifacts and embodied roleplay. An archeology of the fossil presence: surveying infrastructures, collecting images and narratives that at the same time manifest all kinds of afterlives and hint to possible escape routes.

You’re invited to join us as a participant on one of the evenings Oct 28, Oct 29, Oct 30. In two groups of max 15 people, visitors will walk through the installations and the precognitioning process accompanied by Alexander Klose and Chris Woebken and different ‘lead speculators’ from varying fields of practice and knowledge for each evening. We will explore and respond to new precognitioned values, myths, and cultural imaginations that might emerge while being shaped by the afterlives of petro-modernity.

Commissioned and hosted by 1014, New York City, in cooperation with Goethe Institute New York City and Popup Goethe Institute Houston.

Find more information on our lead speculators here:
https://www.1014.nyc/events/precognitioning-post-oil-hjrjl

Scenes from the sessions at 1014 and collages by Adeline Chum, Jules Kleitman, Aditi Mangesh Shetye, 2021

Young people in Bronzeville and Rockford translate climate science into neighborhood scenarios and objects that express their own priorities for the future.

Free program · Young people at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Rockford and Chicago (Bronzeville).

Chris Woebken · Co-instructor

Collaborative media environments and experiential prototypes explore how life after oil might transform everyday rituals, institutions and collective beliefs.

View course documentation

Chris Woebken · Instructor

Sets, props and participatory scenarios turn alternative relationships with technology and the environment into situations people can enter, experience and debate.

Taught by Chris Woebken

Fieldwork with urban wildlife and microbes informs situated prototypes that test how humans might share the city with other forms of life.

Course & program documentation

Cross-Species Test Sites

- SS19 & FA19 at Columbia GSAPP
Building Science & Technology Elective
Taught by Chris Woebken

This course investigates the complex relationships between humans and non-human urban inhabitants. Students study urban animal wildlife, indicator species, and microbial communities and work with biologists and ecologists to identify new potentials in designing for biological systems. Through the process of fabricating, situating and testing prototypes, we aim to create a reflective space for deeply considering the details of these new interactions, and to discover unforeseen opportunities, twists and challenges. Project outcomes are physical devices in the form of multispecies interfaces, bio-receptive materials, and infrastructure modifications that propose new multispecies collaborations across all scales. 

Full Syllabus


Jules Kleitmann | FA19



Michael Alexander Mc Dowell | Seahorse Exchange, SS19

Matteo Cordera - Ratelier, SS19

Julia Pyszkowski - Soilcell3000, SS19

Michael Lu - Raptor Vending Machine, SS19

Sadie Dempsey, Recolonizing, SS19

View course documentation

Co-taught by Chris Woebken, Paolo Cardini and Agi Haines

Experimental objects expose the assumptions behind industrial design, questioning what counts as a problem, whose needs matter and what design is for.

Course & program documentation

Critical Thinking & Experimental Processes

- FA19 at RISD MID
Grad studio taught by Paolo Cardini, Agi Haines, Chris Woebken

In this course, we will focus on areas of the design discipline that treat design not as a vocational tool for developing products that solve problems, but rather as a practice of critical inquiry. What does this mean? Historically, Industrial Design has been tightly coupled with industry and commerce, with designers designing functional products that improves people's lives, and more importantly, sells! Sustainable design, social design and various other approaches within design have tried to make the products of Industrial Design less harmful. However, design as critical inquiry is different from all these approaches, in that it attempts to use design to question and reveal the underlying assumptions of the systems in which we operate as designers, but also as citizens, humans, animals. This approach to design is variously known as critical design, speculative design, discursive design. Interestingly, Critical Design itself has been critiqued as being not sufficiently radical. Industrial Design has also traditionally been seen and presented itself as a somewhat logical and goal-driven process of problem-solving. We will also be turning this aspect of traditional design on its head, and use design as an experimental process, non-goal driven, open-ended yet iterative. We can refer to this as Experimental Design. The word ‘experimental’ is tricky, however, because it can refer to two quite different, almost opposite things: tightly controlled experiments as conducted in the sciences, or experimental inspiration-seeking activity in the fine arts. In this course, we will tend toward the latter meaning.

So: Experimentation and Critical Inquiry are the two fundamental elements of this studio class. We will learn about these approaches in design, but more importantly, through their research and making, students will be invited to discover the unknown and ask relevant and pointed questions.




Danlei Huang - Post Plastic Age


WenYu Du - Exit Plan

Co-taught by Chris Woebken and Daniel Goddemeyer

Interviews, fictional scenarios and embodied prototypes examine the social consequences of everyday AI and the designer’s responsibility in shaping them.

Participants invent hypothetical Estonian government programs and communicate them through public artifacts, opening civic priorities and possible futures to discussion.

New Yorkers develop scenarios for the city’s future green spaces, forming the basis for theatrical simulations of changing infrastructures and social relations.

Co-taught by Chris Woebken and Karolina Sobecka

Food systems and waste become starting points for public engagement proposals that connect everyday experience with climate politics in preparation for COP24.

View student projects & descriptions

Selected student projects · Fall 2018

Proposals and prototypes developed at NYU ITP/IMA.

#WatchingCOP24

Sarah Schoengold · 2018

A proposed portrait and social media campaign connecting people affected by climate decisions with COP24. The presentation traces public-engagement research, field tests, a participation poster and a website prototype.

Trash Prints

Arnav Wagh · 2018

A proposal to map conference waste through the photographs and knowledge of sanitation workers and volunteers. A New York map prototype tests how waste and the labor of cleaning it up could become visible to the public.

Galaxy of Personal Food Waste

Effy Fan · 2018

An interface that turns daily reports of food waste into a shared visualization. Tested at ITP, the prototype uses clusters of colored circles to make individual patterns part of a collective picture.

Chris Woebken · Visiting critic

Visiting critiques of graduate thesis research in industrial design, across three offerings in 2015 and 2018.

Co-taught by Chris Woebken and Elizabeth Hénaff

Sampling, genomic analysis and experimental devices make environmental microbiomes legible and explore new relationships between microbial life and the built environment.

Course & program documentation

Micro-Environment Exploration Lab

- SS18 at NYU  Tandon - IDM
Taught by Elizabeth Hénaff and Chris Woebken

Metagenomics is the field of research which investigates the microbial component of our environment. It is a rapidly growing field, enabled by the recent decrease in cost and increase in throughput of DNA sequencing technology. We can now easily measure the microbial component of our environment and have the opportunity to incorporate this new microbial metric into the design of our built environments and products. In this class we will cover a basic understanding of the state of current research in environmental microbiomes. Students will get hands-on experience in which they will learn the computational methods to analyze genomic data. We will design physical devices to interact with this invisible component of our environment, either in form of sampling instruments, bioreactors or bio receptive substrates that propose new symbiotic relationships with the microbial environment.

Full Syllabus


The projects presented at Biodesign Challenge: https://biodesignchallenge.org/nyu-idm

Queens residents author and prototype neighborhood futures, bringing their own desires and priorities into a setting historically associated with official visions of tomorrow.

Free program · Queens Museum’s New New Yorkers workshop participants.

Fictional pull-tab advertisements turn a city alley into a forum for imagining what people might need, offer or exchange in future informal economies.

Co-taught by Chris Woebken and Karolina Sobecka

Students turn relationships between weather and culture into public activities for a speculative 2064 climate pavilion at the Queens Museum.

Weather World's Fair, December 2017 · Photography: Hyungjin Park · Full photo album

Co-taught by Chris Woebken and Sascha Pohflepp

Live-action role play, machine learning and fabricated environments make possible futures inhabitable, testing speculative ideas through an immersive exhibition.

2017 Summer · Full photo album

Coney Island visitors imagine fictional amusement rides as experiments in future urban experience, receiving their proposals as personalized postcard tickets.

Participants in Malta imagine programs a future European Union could introduce, using speculative proposals to explore alternative public priorities.

Children use everyday materials to prototype responses to unexpected future needs, making room for possibilities beyond familiar products.

Co-taught by Chris Woebken and Richard The

Observations of New York become speculative devices tested in everyday settings, inviting public responses to how emerging technologies might change city life.

2016 Fall · Full photo album

A participatory futures program at Pioneer Works.

Chris Woebken · Visiting critic

A visiting critique contribution to the Hybrid Urbanism studio at Strelka Institute.

Students translate emerging scientific developments into fictional devices and behaviors, then take their prototypes onto New York streets to gather public responses.

A series of workshops inside Ginkgo Bioworks brings designers into the foundry to explore possible futures for biotechnology.

Workshop co-led by Chris Woebken and Elliott P. Montgomery

Students and educators turn signals of change into dioramas and prototypes that explore how learning and food systems could evolve.

Visitors model changes to urban infrastructure from the perspective of species affected by climate change, imagining new forms of habitat and coexistence.

Free program · Walker Art Center visitors.

Discussions with emergency planners inform fictional preparedness objects and scenarios that actors test through improvisation, exposing different ways a crisis might unfold.

Graduate students translate scientists’ climate research into speculative instruments, placing prototypes at NCAR to discuss future research practices and environmental change.

Students post speculative thesis prototypes on Craigslist’s barter section, using responses to explore how unfamiliar objects acquire meaning and value.

Free program · University students in the USC workshop; related public calls were also free.

Students turn callers’ hopes and concerns into physical gifts for named recipients, making speculative futures personal and addressed to someone in particular.

Participants compare futuring methods by designing street posters, using familiar public messages to imagine changes in New York’s social and technological landscape.

UNICEF staff translate institutional goals into fictional children’s dreams, using narratives and dioramas to connect abstract ambitions with imagined everyday lives.

Participants revisit past visions of space travel, build speculative payloads and launch them in model rockets to explore the cultural imagination of spaceflight.

Invented products and filmed sales pitches populate a fictional shopping channel, bringing possible futures into the persuasive language of home shopping.

Synthetic biology research becomes speculative artifacts of life in 2050, examining everyday dependencies between people and engineered microorganisms.

Visitors invent residents and belongings for a display home, using synthetic biology as a prompt to question who inhabits the consumer future.

Museum visitors prototype objects for a fictional pawnshop, opening questions about how future needs, desires and systems of exchange might assign value.

Walking, listening and making produce tools for sensing Mexico City, revealing social and environmental conditions that conventional urban measurements can miss.

Free program
Laboratorio para la Ciudad supported materials, sourced from local shops during a field trip.

PS 147 students choose neighborhood issues and model future mobile services, using street vending to imagine changes in local social life.

Free program · PS 147 students, invited by NurtureArt.

Participants fill four time capsules with artifacts of divergent futures, exploring how growth, collapse, discipline and transformation could shape everyday life.

A card game generates divergent scenarios that participants turn into products for a working vending machine, placing imagined futures within an everyday transaction.

Visitors form fictional lobbying groups for communicative objects and print their demands as bumper stickers, imagining political voices for nonhuman things.

A futures exercise with IDEO and a veterinary client explores possibilities for pet care to inform longer-term organizational choices.

Design Interactions students prototype technological products for an informal electronics market, placing imagined devices among the familiar goods of everyday commerce.

Designers diagram their futuring methods with food, using a shared picnic to compare how they imagine, organize and communicate possible worlds.

Visitors invent future services and receive them as junk mail, using unsolicited advertising to explore the needs and consequences of imagined urban economies.

Participants fabricate products from imagined futures and sell them in a neighborhood discount store, inviting shoppers to encounter speculation through ordinary consumption.

Time-lapse, camera traps and face detection reveal hidden urban behaviors, testing how altered cameras can produce unfamiliar perspectives on the city.

Course & program documentation

Camera Hacking - Night school, 2011

On November 30, 2011 Media artist Kyle McDonald and speculative designer Chris Woebken ran a Night school at Studio-x demonstrating a series of experiments using time-lapse, photo traps, and computer face-detection to reveal hidden perspectives, invisible behaviors, and unexpected interactions in the city.