The Design Futures Lab is a space for invention, collaboration and imagination, where emerging talents and experts come together to pioneer regenerative design with community impact at its heart. By welcoming both success and failure, the Lab encourages open-ended exploration and ideas with purpose.
For Geelong Design Week 2026, the Lab expands into design activism through a whole-school exploration of waste. Across STEAM, students examine materials through the lens of the periodic table, revealing their molecular value and rethinking waste as a resource.
The exhibition brings together a range of student-led design projects, including a whole-school tiny house, regenerative materials lab, bio-textiles, leather upcycling and a living systems project combining future foods and endangered species.
Discover how young designers are questioning what we value, challenging systems of consumption and imagining more regenerative ways of making and living.
“Crisis brings us to invention and ironically to opportunity”
Margaret Diffey-Warylo, Year 11
“It’s very important that we start using bio materials to replace non renewable materials”
Saffron Macfadyen, Year 9
