"What makes our planet thrive?" This ‘top-of-the-mind’ question seems to evade definite answers. We humans, at species level, clearly don’t seem to be answering this question. The ongoing sixth mass extinction, pollution, wars, unfiltered abuse of technology, and rising sea levels are just some of the current challenges we face. Given these circumstances, and the failure of traditional ways of doing things, we're left wondering what we can do about it.

Historically, design has contributed to the current state of affairs. Designing the everyday, as we have come to realize, exerts an effect on the world all of us - and non-humans- inhabit and/or will inhabit. We’re now better able to understand how powerful the choices we make as humans, and especially, as human designers, are. The good news is that designers are skilfully equipped to tackle wicked problems, reflect and act on ill-defined issues, and proceed to worlding with the material-experiential expertise, critical thinking, creativity, imagination, and ingenuity the task at hand demands.

Addressing the current planetary challenges also asks us to think about how and where design can build bridges: between emerging technologies and the people who use and experience them, between individual lives and wider society, and between human systems and the living planet. No longer is the question about what technology can do; it’s about how design can mediate its relationships, consequences, and opportunities across these scales, ensuring that technological advances serve broader societal and environmental value.

It’s now time for us to sever our ties with maintaining business-as-usual; it’s time to design for a thriving planet. We're currently trespassing the well-defined boundaries of human-centred design, to design for more-than-human relations, scales, and temporalities. This means rethinking the bridges between technology, people, society, and planet, and asking how these relationships might be redesigned rather than be taken for granted. We need new imaginaries, ways of doing things, unexpected collaborations, and careful dedication. To show how we can design for a thriving planet, we’ve put together a selection of inspiring designs and designers.

• Bringing a material deeply tied with human evolution and communal expression to 3D printing technology, Printing Living Futures shows how building with clay can support life.
• Proposing futures of ecological regeneration, Encoded skin digitally and materially reinterprets bark and introduces printing ecological interfaces that support inhabitation and more-than-human relations.
• Likewise, multispecies cohabitation is at the core of Arthropolis, which introduces e-textile technology for sensing arthropods, highlighting their significance for balanced ecosystems.
• The situated nature of some projects creates the need to attend to the specificities of the places and communities we're designing for. Waste to Infrastructure turns lack of sanitation, gender inequalities, and plastic waste into community resilience, participation and infrastructure. 
• Microbial Smellscapes conducts us through possibilities of experiencing future everyday water environments through microbial smellscapes, as a form of engaging with the social environment.
• Responding to sea level rise, Cultural Heritage Climate Futures responds speculatively, posing futures where cultural heritage is not only preserved but changes along with the world, in a dialogue with water management.
• Bridging life and electronic waste, Kombuchán proposes a bio-electronic artefact, offering humans the opportunity to interact with bio-materials through sound while relating product lifespan and material life.
• Rethinking the every-day materials we use is part of the change needed to design a thriving planet. Mycelium-based composites offer exciting opportunities. FUNKI explores the underdeveloped aesthetic potential of mycelium-based composites while contributing to their broader acceptance.
• As planetary limits continue to be transgressed, our ability to adapt to change is a vital challenge. SPHERE explores redesigning food for a world of deserts, resource scarcity, and life beyond Earth, suggesting an autonomous plant habitat for these constraints.
• On another note, but also regarding food security, A sustainable biochar Kiln proposes caring for soil regeneration by repairing soil acidity and improving water retention, nutrient availability, and organic carbon content, while contributing to the resilience of millions of smallholder farmers.
• Self-healing Futures eases us into adopting, adapting and relating to self-healing living materials, making way for us to care for our objects whilst caring for the planet.

With these projects, we grapple with new imaginaries, rethinking our experience of materiality, and enacting new relations with our communities, with space, and with other living beings. We welcome you to feel, see and engage with these responses to the damage to our planet through our exhibition, and to prolong these acts of resistance into our dialogue sessions as we continue designing bridges across Technology, People, Society, and our Planet, and opening up new ways for them to thrive together.