The challenge

Oakley's Artifacts From The Future campaign, marking fifty years of the brand and looking toward 2075, invited five emerging designers (the Oakley Future 5, selected from a global call-out) to reimagine what cultural tools like eyewear, apparel, footwear and accessories could become in a world shaped by AI, climate shifts, augmented bodies, and new cultural systems. IoDF, producing the innovation lab on Oakley's behalf, needed a workshop leader who could introduce the cohort to AI as a tool for speculative ideation, in a way that respected their existing practices and held its own alongside the day's other sessions on material futures and post-human wearables.

The cohort of Khumo Morojele, Lexi Scharpf, Nigel Matambo, Charity Kase (Harry Whitfield), and Joe Brimicombe spanned upcycling and craft, AR and wearable technology, drag and prosthetics, biomaterials and 3D: five practitioners with very different existing relationships to emerging technology. Outputs from the workshop were to feed directly into a public panel that evening attended by industry guests and press.

The approach

The session was titled AI: Playfulness as Provocation. I kept a neutral stance on AI throughout, making space for critique and caution alongside curiosity. The session opened with emotion: real examples of people turning to AI with emotionally sensitive material, from grief tech to therapy bots, and what it means to use these tools responsibly within our own practice. The conversation then moved into how AI could be used for creative ideation, with physical sketching and hands-on exploration of tools grounding the discussion in practice.

The solution

I structured the workshop in two halves. The first was an exploratory tour of current AI capabilities across image, text, code, music, personalised learning, and video: a rapid, playful sweep designed to lower the barrier to experimentation and surface open questions about authorship, ethics, and bias. The second half opened up a discussion of how AI could be used to ideate a speculative artefact for 2075, introducing Google AI Studio and Ideogram as live working examples. The discussion explored what it means to bring AI into the earliest stages of creative thinking, what the tools do well, where they fall short, and how each participant's practice might or might not accommodate them. I piloted the session with two volunteers in the days before the event to test pacing.

The approach drew directly on methods developed through my work in the cultural sector, particularly around using emotion as the entry point to AI literacy, framing experimentation as critical awareness, and treating participants as experts in their own practice whose existing knowledge and values should shape how they use these tools.

The impact

The ideas and questions opened up in the workshop fed directly into the evening's Innovation Lab Live panel, which I joined alongside the Oakley Future 5 and the wider team. The panel, held in Shoreditch, was attended by press, the Oakley brand team, and industry guests, and continued the conversations from the workshop around what cultural tools might look like in a post-human future. The event was covered externally, including a feature in New Wave Magazine, and across IoDF's social channels. The project demonstrated that approaches developed for cultural institutions travel cleanly into brand and commercial contexts, and opened conversations with IoDF about further collaboration.

With thanks to Leanne Elliott Young, Liv, and Cat Taylor at IoDF for the invitation, and to the Oakley Future 5 for bringing their practices so generously into the room.