WHAT STORIES DO OBJECTS TELL?

In Winter 2026–27, Design Investigations will partner with the Weltmuseum Wien on an exciting collaboration. Together we will explore how objects carry meaning across cultures. The museum's curators and conservators will give us tours of their collections, and share how they read objects as material evidence of what people made, how they lived, and what they believed.

For our semester, we will take this learning to explore speculative pasts, presents and futures. What story might an object reveal about an Empire that has never been told? What story might an object tell about the Commons that never made it into the museum’s collections? 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, if infiltrated into the museum’s collections, could tell visitors a unique, perhaps even unsettling story about the culture they came from, or a side of the culture that is never talked about.

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.