Facilitated Conference Workshops
Getting Scrappy with Materials: Hands-On Bio-Material Exploration to Support Sustainable Imagination
What if materials from nature—mycelium, plant fibers, and everyday scraps—could be transformed into new bio-based materials for making and design?
This hands-on workshop invites participants to explore scrappy bio-material practices as a way to spark curiosity and new ways of thinking about sustainability. Participants will experiment with examples such as mycelium-based materials, recycled fibers, plant-based binders, and repurposed scraps, exploring how these materials can be grown, shaped, and recombined into new forms.Through touch, testing, and playful experimentation, participants will investigate how materials behave and how they move through cycles of use, reuse, and disposal. Together, we will consider how direct engagement with materials can help learners question everyday material choices and imagine more circular possibilities for making and design.
This session is designed for educators, librarians, makerspace facilitators, researchers, and anyone interested in introducing accessible bio-material exploration into youth learning environments.No prior experience with bio-materials is required—just curiosity and a willingness to experiment.
Find this workshop in the 2026 Play Make Learn Schedule
FutureCraft: Tools for Rethinking, Reframing, and Remaking Tomorrow
This 75-minute hands-on workshop introduces FutureCraft, a critical making framework and card deck designed to support reflection and design ideation around sustainability, ethics, and emerging technologies. Developed through grant-funded research, the FutureCraft deck invites participants to explore material, social, and environmental entanglements in technology and design—surfacing tensions and imagining alternative paths forward. The FutureCraft Card Deck can be accessed for free here: https://www.jillianlwarren.com/teaching/futurecraftpml
In this session, participants will engage in small-group activities using the cards to “break apart” dominant narratives around innovation, consumption, and progress. They will then shift into a “mending” phase, where they create speculative design responses that reflect care, justice, and possibility. This process embraces messiness, ambiguity, and partial solutions as vital to creative growth.
Participants will have an opportunity to reflect on how this process could be adapted in their own contexts. Feedback and insights from the session may help inform future development of workshop templates or facilitation guides for use in educational or community settings. Those interested will be invited to contribute ideas or remain connected for possible publication or collaborative iteration.
Designing Tangibles for Children Workshops
I have co-designed and facilitated workshops to teach designers, researchers and practitioners the unique challenges and opportunities when designing products and prototypes that integrate tangible interaction. We discuss how considerations for tangibles are based off knowledge related to children's developmental ages, skills and abilities, and what we know about how hands-on play and problem-solving assist in meaning making, skills and confidence building, and connection to world and others. These workshops are a mix of presentation with real world examples and hands on activities that allow small groups to explore what they've learned through planning and executing a lo-fi tangible product for children based on a short design challenge prompt. I facilitated these workshops at international ACM conferences, including the Interaction Design and Children conference (IDC) and the Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction conference (TEI). If you are interested in running a workshop like this at your company, research lab, etc. please reach out to me to discuss these opportunities.
