Excursions to unusual or outstanding places and events provide opportunities to experience the entanglements between science, technology, design, and art in a sensory and immersive way. For example, at the Futurium Berlin, the complexity of future-oriented topics is made tangible and comprehensible through interactive exhibits, generating impulses for reflection on sustainable developments.

Places, phenomena, and works such as Gerhard Richter’s installation in the Dominikanerkirche Münster, featuring a Foucault pendulum, or Karin Sander’s work Schwerpunkt von Münster, demonstrate the interdisciplinary dialogue between art and science.

Methods such as interactive and transformative storytelling are tested, practiced, and experienced — for example through a theater performance like The Trojan Horse by posttheater Berlin — to foster an understanding about complex issues through art, design and communication.

As part of SteamSpace, we organized an excursion to the Futurium. As the “House of Futures,” the Futurium explores key questions about the future and their potential impact on society and the environment. Scientific, technological, and societal perspectives are combined with creative and design-oriented approaches. Interactive exhibits allow visitors to engage playfully with background information, connections, and ideas for sustainable development.

This immersive experience promotes interdisciplinary learning and strengthens the understanding of the challenges of a dynamic world.

In short workshops at the Futurium Lab, as well as through the use of the so-called “Future Boxes,” project-based learning was explored. Students developed their own future scenarios for selected topics and questions, designed initial prototypes, and subsequently discussed the societal implications of new technologies. This exchange fostered an understanding of different perspectives and inspired first ideas for storytelling, prototyping, and artistic exhibits.

In this way, questions about the future can be examined from multiple viewpoints, while experimental formats support problem-solving skills, creativity, and collaborative work. The exhibition and mediation concept also highlights that technological developments always have cultural and aesthetic dimensions.

An excursion is a workshop that refuses to sit still: notebooks, cameras and a route planned loosely enough to be abandoned halfway.

A selection of what came back — the images that survived the train ride and the notes that still made sense the next morning.

The trip to Enschede combined talking about living materials with handling them. The lecture set the terms; the workshop immediately complicated them.

Working with organisms rearranges the schedule. You cannot rush a culture, so the afternoon has to be planned around it rather than the other way round.

Stuttgart, a studio full of instruments that look scientific and behave otherwise, and a group that arrived with questions and left with more of them.

Half excursion, half workshop — the kind of format where nobody can say afterwards which half produced the good part.