Hello everyone, Dan here. Welcome to the October 2026 update from the Institute for Sustainable Worlds at Norwich University of the Arts.

First, we have two upcoming events to share:

Branching Beneath the Fields

3 October - 1 November 2026, Food Museum, Stowmarket, Suffolk, UK

Annabel Howland, our affiliated artist-researcher, has a new exhibition in the conservatory of Abbot's Hall at the Food Museum in Stowmarket (the UK's only "museum of food"), opening on 3 October. Branching Beneath the Fields explores the underground world of the relationships between plant life and mycorrhizal fungi through microscope images, drawings, sculpture and sound, peering inside the roots of East Anglian crops and grasses. It imagines the vast fungal networks that branch out through the soil, foraging for nutrients like phosphorous and nitrogen to exchange for the sugars and fats that plants produce through photosynthesis. (How we imagine and understand 'the invisible' has of course been a central topic in so much of my own (Dan's) work with the Imaginaries Lab over the last decade and more, and is a big theme for us at the Institute for Sustainable Worlds as we gradually develop our research directions.)

The installation was made possible with the generous support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the UK and, as well as with us at the Institute for Sustainable Worlds, Annabel collaborated with the Crop Science Centre (University of Cambridge), TextielLab (the professional workshop of TextielMuseum Tilburg) and numerous farmers across East Anglia. Having just today visited to see the installation in progress, I can say this has a very distinctive and intriguing combination of work which transforms the museum's conservatory into a very different-feeling space.

As part of the exhibition, I'll be running a workshop activity during Saturday 24 October's Fungi Discovery Day — inspired by using fungal networks as a metaphor, we'll be exploring other invisible systems of climate, society, and everyday life. The Fungi Discovery Day also features activities with plant scientist Jen McGaley from the Crop Science Centre at Cambridge. Stowmarket is an easy train journey from London if you're looking for a day out!

Unbox: Playing to Deepen Collaborations, at Dutch Design Week

17 – 25 October 2026, Foundation We Are, Torenallee 22-04, Eindhoven, Netherlands

Many collaborations begin with excitement and end up buried in meetings, spreadsheets, and ‘project talk’. Unbox asks a simple question: what if collaborating could be more playful and profound? Unbox is a game-like experience that helps teams explore how they work together through play, storytelling, and metaphors. Using carefully designed metaphorical objects, interactive boards, and quests, participants (re)imagine their process, for example, as an adventurous sailing journey or a careful dive into the unknown. (Some of you reading this might have tried out an earlier iteration of Unbox at RSD 13 in Oslo back in 2024). Unbox is funded by the Centre for Unusual Collaborations, and is a transdisciplinary partnership between Utrecht University, Wageningen University & Research, Norwich University of the Arts, TU Eindhoven, and Foundation We Are.  

At Dutch Design Week 2026, as part of Foundation We Are's exhibition The Collective Response: Design for Shared Action, Dan Lockton joins the rest of the Unbox team (Jonas Torrens, Jillian Student, Merijn Bruijnes, Femke van Beek, Daniel Tetteroo, and Alex Szwaj) for Unbox: Playing Together to Deepen Collaboration, a mini-exhibition exploring how play and metaphors can transform the way we work with others. DDW visitors can play with the Unbox game, discover the power of metaphor, and experience how playful thinking can unlock more meaningful collaboration. No need to register. On Sunday 18 October between 14:00-17:00 CEST we'll be officially launching Unbox with a 15-minute experience, Ready, Set, Unbox! that'll allow participants to taste how playful approaches can shake up the usually boring ways projects are handled. If you're coming to Dutch Design Week, please come and join us!   

And some quick updates on research and practice:

Field Kitchen: Designing Edible Futures for Rewetted Landscapes

Field Kitchen is a 1-year AHRC Design Generators-funded project in which artist Andrew Merritt joins Norwich University of the Arts, working with Carolina Lio-Rodrigues from curatorial office Looking Forward, for a new component of the ongoing Slow Disasters programme. The project uses art, food, and historical-ecological research to restore damaged environments and rebuild relationships between people and place.

Field Kitchen responds to the long-term ecological effects of drainage in the Norfolk Broads: biodiversity loss, degraded peat soils, rising flood risk and the loss of local ecological knowledge. Its central proposition is that food can make the landscape transition tangible. The 'Field Kitchen' itself is a portable kitchen and exhibition space constructed from wetland materials including typha fibreboard, sedge, alder and willow. Inspired by rapid-deployment disaster relief structures, it will travel to sites across the Norfolk Broads, hosting meals, conversations and immersive experiences that enable farmers, residents and policymakers to explore the region's past, present and possible futures. Andrew will be working with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, the Broads Authority, Broadland Catchment Partnership and the University of Cambridge to identify crops suited to wetter landscapes, and collaborate with Norfolk farmers, the Norfolk Food and Farming Discovery Trust and the Royal Norfolk Agricultural Association to develop food products and new economic models for regenerative farming. The full project team also includes Candice Allison, Louis Nixon, Andrew Farrell, Francesca Fantoni, and Dan Lockton.

Welcoming Holly Sandiford

Artist and educator Holly Sandiford joins us this month as a part-time PhD student, collaborating with Norfolk Museums Service as part of an AHRC-funded Collections & Communities in the East of England studentship. Supervised by Nicola Simpson and Dan Lockton from Norwich University of the Arts, and Hannah Henderson and Louisa Wickham from the Museum of Norwich. Excited to share more about Holly's project as it develops!

Performing the Rule: Contemporary and Medieval Computus

On 18 September, in Norwich Cathedral, Nicola Simpson (research impact fellow), with Norwich University of the Arts' Phil Archer, An-Ting Chang (Institute for Creative Technologies), and neo-mediaevalist composer and performer Laura Cannell, presented Performing the Rule. This interactive musical experience used reimagined medieval instruments, ritual objects, electronic music and vocal performances by a medieval drone choir to bring together medieval monastic temporalities of prayer and communal living, with embodied contemporary spirituality. This was a very powerful experience as an audience member, including processing through the Cathedral, and using objects to "perform" according to procedural rules. All three compositions were made with the support of the Institute for Creative Technologies at Norwich University of the Arts — thank you to Kirk Woolford!

Living with transformative change

How do we 'live with' transformations when discomfort and darkness are part of change? What happens when design research methods like cultural probes are brought together with transitions scholarship? Our affiliated researcher Femke Coops, together with Kristina Bogner, Timo von Wirth, Jonas Torrens, Barbara Kump, Julia Wittmayer, Caroline Hummels, Flor Avelino and Dan Lockton, has just published ‘Living-with’ Transformative Change, in the first issue of the new Futures Reframed journal. The article is part of Femke's PhD at TU Eindhoven on 'designing spaces for letting go', using design research to explore different ways of making space for and engaging with grief, loss and letting go in societal/sustainability transitions.

Coops, F., Bogner, K., Lockton, D., von Wirth, T., Colen Ladeia Torrens, J., Kump, B., Wittmayer, J., Hummels, C., & Avelino, F. (2026). ‘Living-with’ Transformative Change: Exploring Affective Entanglements When Working Towards More Just and Sustainable Futures. Futures Reframed, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.63934/ewp5w569

Nonlinear Overshoot

What would you do if you knew climate breakdown was coming—sooner than the public thinks? I've had a short story published in The Sociological Review's September magazine (including a more academic exegesis at the end) that tries to explore questions of climate futures and their sociological impacts. As some of you know I'm interested in how designers can work much more with fiction writing, and vice versa, and as I use my long journeys from Utrecht to Norwich and back to try and develop some more experience with writing fiction, hopefully something interesting can emerge.

Lockton, D. (2026). Nonlinear Overshoot. The Sociological Review Magazine, 8 September https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.auoc6003

• More next month, including an update on our workshop series with the Broads National Park Authority around co-designing a vision for the future of heritage in the Broads in an era of climate change. With 2040 as a 'target' date, we have been working with stakeholders from 40+ organisations, including Environment Agency, the Tyndall Centre, Norfolk Wildlife Trust, National Trust, and local government, but also members of the wider public from smaller grass-roots education, heritage, mental health, and arts organisations and charities, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. More next time.

• Also, for those of you who don't follow UK higher education closely (forgivable!), you might be interested in Norwich University of the Arts' partnership with the Royal College of Art: from September 2027 we'll be offering joint undergraduate degrees, which opens up a large new world of possibilities and collaborations.

Take care
Dan ([email protected])