Exploring Water Otherwise: The Art of Storytelling in the Anthropocene
Project (TUM Future Learning) for all students interested in water as a research topic.
Water is a planetary challenge that no single discipline can address alone. This Project takes water as its starting point, not just as a resource or a technical problem, but as an object of future-making that is scientific, political, and cultural all at once.
How can we explore water beyond the methods of our own discipline? How can we talk about water across disciplinary boundaries, and with publics who hold their own knowledge and stories about water?
We will discuss global water insecurity alongside emerging technological interventions, from atmospheric water harvesting to lunar ice extraction, to ask how different fields imagine, design, and contest water futures, and what gets left out when only one discipline does the imagining.
The course introduces Speculative Fabulation (SF), a creative-analytical framework developed by feminist Science and Technology Studies scholar Donna Haraway, as a method for interdisciplinary inquiry.
Students from STEMM and design are invited to treat it as a practice that critically engages with scientific and societal approaches to water futures. Through theoretical input, artistic workshops, and project-based work, students reflect on their disciplinary assumptions, collaborate across fields, and produce speculative interventions that bring scientific expertise into dialogue with storytelling. The course cultivates competencies beyond technical knowledge, including critical thinking, tolerance for ambiguity, and communication across disciplines. By the end of the Project Week, students will have contributed a digital artifact to a shared archive demonstrating how scientific knowledge can be combined with speculative storytelling to reimagine water futures.
Public Science Lab 