What machines are missing in the world? What technologies haven’t we imagined because they don’t make money, wage war, or surveil?
This workshop starts with a simple premise: a group of rebellious scientists and world leaders has run out of ideas— and they’re asking for help. Children take on the role of special agents, tasked with designing machines that don’t yet exist, but could change everything.
Many of the technologies we use every day —GPS, cell phones, even the internet— were originally invented for military purposes. They come from a history where technology was designed to control, occupy, and attack. In this workshop we ask:
what if machines were created for the opposite?
Machines that exist to care, to imagine, to play, to listen, to disappear, or to do nothing at all. Technologies that don’t obey a single way of understanding the world or follow a logic of usefulness.
During an intensive session, children aged 6 to 14 speculated based on provocative questions and discarded technological materials. It wasn’t about building functional objects, but giving shape to affective, useless, poetic machines: a keyboard that becomes human from telling its feelings too much, a TV that shows your dreams from different perspectives, an artifact that turns laughter into medicine for your immune system...
Some machines against the end of the world
A machine that whispers the secrets of the universe… but only in the language of planets that no longer exist. It prints the most incomprehensible secret of your choice and disappears after 13 hours.
A blueprint that isn’t flat: it must be read in a spiral and reveals instructions to build an invisible machine.
Buttons that send you to past or future moments… but never your own. They take you to the moment that most needs to change. They only work if you bring a memory you’re no longer afraid of.
A sensitive keyboard that, as you type, feels what you're feeling and replies in a soft whisper. It only speaks your truth in the late hours of the night. It's called Rober because it became human after expressing so many emotions.
A machine that transports you to a parallel dimension where everything is reversed, including your reflection. It lets you return… only if you accept that something from that world will follow you back.
A machine that folds origami from things you wish you could say: it takes what you haven’t shared and turns it into a flower that wilts in silence. It only blooms if you speak the truth behind it.
A machine that transmits your dreams on a television screen, but from the point of view of an animal you’ve never seen. Your dream can only be watched once.
An artifact that collects your laughter and turns it into waves of light that travel through your body. It only releases its power if you laugh.
The workshop combines speculative design, affective pedagogy, and science fiction narrative through a situated lens.
It’s not about teaching how technology works — it’s about asking what it could be if it didn’t have to be useful.
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