Designing for Symbiotic Worlds - IIT Delhi

The NonSense Bazaar workshop at IIT Delhi represented a landmark event as the first official side event of Future Days to be hosted in India. Organised independently by Re:ac8 Studios at RNI Design Park, IIT Delhi, this two-day immersive workshop invited a multidisciplinary cohort of participants to challenge anthropocentric design thinking and imagine shared, symbiotic futures.

Participants engaged deeply with speculative design frameworks, including persona embodiment, world-building, and diegetic prototyping. Over two days, they crafted future artefacts and narratives from the perspective of non-human stakeholders, ranging from island nations and vultures to hermit crabs and fungi networks.

The workshop featured inspiring guest talks by Dr. John Fass and Lauren Davies, as well as presentations from student teams at the University of the Arts London. These contributions helped situate the exercises within global design discourses, while also grounding them in local ecological urgencies.

Participants produced a range of provocative outputs, including vulture claw extensions for safer scavenging, interspecies visa forms, and speculative languages and currencies for hermit crabs. The concluding "NonSense Bazaar" exhibition showcased these artefacts, turning the workshop space into a lively bazaar of shared imaginaries and alternative futures.

A special thanks to the organising team at Meri Sahade, Uri Casademont and the organising team at Future Days for logistical support, and to all participants for their openness, curiosity, and critical imagination. The workshop at IIT Delhi not only demonstrated the transformative power of speculative and more-than-human design but also marked a significant step in expanding these practices within India’s design landscape.