WHAT STORIES DO OBJECTS TELL?

In Winter 2026–27, Design Investigations embarks on a new collaboration with the Weltmuseum Wien. Together we will explore how objects carry meaning across cultures. The museum's curators and conservators read objects as material evidence: what people made, how they lived, what they believed. Every scratch, repair and sign of use tells a story.

We invite you to turn that reading outward. Over the semester you will learn to build worlds, tell stories, and craft speculative objects that act as cultural artefacts: things that carry the traces of a lived world, with signs of use, wear, adaptation, ritual. Objects that, placed in a museum case two hundred years from now, could tell a visitor something real about the culture they came from. We are calling this fictional ethnographies.

You can work with any material or process to create cherished objects.

There will be three key touchpoints include Midterm review, Design Freeze and final jury.