The Wild Future Lab
The Wild Future Lab@Iddah Akinyi | Credits: Iddah Akinyi
The Wild Future Lab@Ajax Axe | Credits: Ajax Axe
The Wild Future Lab@Ajax Axe | Credits: Ajax Axe
The Wild Future Lab@Ajax Axe | Credits: Ajax Axe
The Wild Future Lab@Adams Rop | Credits: Adams Rop
The Wild Future Lab@Lea Oneko | Credits: Lea Oneko
The Wild Future Lab@Adams Rop | Credits: Adams Rop
The Wild Future Lab@Ajax Axe | Credits: Ajax Axe
The Wild Future Lab imagined Nairobi in 2045 as a metropolis where ecological systems and urban life have been transformed through regeneration and biomimetic design. This speculative worldbuilding project explores how fashion can respond to—and help facilitate—a transition toward rewilded urban spaces. Set in a future where abandoned greenhouses and forgotten infrastructure have been reclaimed by native flora and fauna, the project included an exploration of textiles, machines, and garments that exist at the intersection of locally made materials, adaptation, and ecological integration.
The conceptual foundation of The Wild Future Lab emerged from urgent questions facing many African cities: How might we design for resilience in the face of climate uncertainty? What relationships between humans and non-human species could flourish in post-extractive urban environments? How can fashion serve as both a practical technology and cultural narrative in rewilded spaces?
At the core of the project's research was the synthesis of traditional Kenyan craft techniques with innovative approaches to textile production. Storytelling led our inquiries, but we also wanted to produce tangible results and not just fantasies about what might be possible in the future here. We built fabric electronic spinning machines using 3D-printed components and open-source CNC files. With these tools, we now hope to create a distributed manufacturing system that will enable community-level textile production. Our team scientist, Willy Ng’ang’a, worked with Zaida Crafts, to experiment with banana fiber extraction and processing—conducting systematic tests on enzyme treatments, mechanical separation techniques, and softening protocols that can transform this agricultural waste into a viable textile. These experiments, along with tests on nettle, pineapple, and vegan silk fibers, led us to look into flax and the development of linen because it grows well in Kenya, can be produced sustainably, and is already a viable material and not an experimental one. Abdul Rop grew an ⅛ of an acre of flax successfully and we then created the tools for breaking the flax to extract the fibers and spin them on the e-spinners. From our research, we believe we may be the first people to have created linen thread in Kenya since before World War II.
The Wild Future Lab extended beyond our research and experiments to encompass a participatory design methodology. Through a series of workshops with Nairobi-based designers, the project developed speculative worldbuilding techniques that help participants envision and articulate their own perspectives on rewilded urban futures. These collaborative imagination exercises serve as the foundation for material experimentation and design development, creating a feedback loop between conceptual exploration and making.
The collection was photographed in partially abandoned greenhouse structures, creating a visual dialogue between the speculative future garments and environments that hint at possible transitions already underway. These images document the potential relationships between people, material futures, and evolving ecosystems.
The Wild Future Lab explored fashion design as a form of critical future-making—a practice that doesn't just respond to changing environmental conditions but actively participates in imagining and materializing regenerative possibilities. By presenting concrete artifacts from a speculative future, the project invites viewers to consider how current design decisions might contribute to the emergence of more rewilded and resilient urban environments.
Concept and design: Kairos Futura
Kairos Futura: Abdul Rop, artist; Lincoln Mwangi, artist; Willie Nganga, scientist; Stoneface Bombaa, artist; Ajax Axe, artist; Coltrane McDowell, designer
Workshop facilitation: Kairos Futura Team, New Order of Fashion, and Lea Oneko
Project development: Abdul Rop, Coltrane McDowell, Willy Ng’ang’a, Ajax Axe, Helen Milne
Project fashion designers: Mike Mwa, Maureen Shena, Stoneface Bombaa, Ajax Axe, Hisi Studios
Nairobi Photography: Ajax Axe, Adams Rop
Locations: Kairos Atelier, University of Nairobi, MacMillan Memorial Library, The Temple Park: Lower Kabete Campus Program
Partners: New Order of Fashion Program
Support: Stimuleringsfonds
Textile production: Tosheka Textiles, Zaida Crafts
Design research: Abdul Rop, Willy Ng’ang’a, Ajax Axe, Lea Oneko, Coltrane McDowell
Kairos Futura (KE) is an arts futurist collective whose work explores the intersection of art, ecological resilience, worldbuilding, and speculative futures. Founded by Abdul Rop, Ajax Axe, and Lincoln Mwangi, the collective's practice combines imaginative futuring with critical design methodologies to address environmental and social challenges in East Africa. Their previous projects have been exhibited at Milan Design Week, Nairobi Design Week, The UN Headquarters, and Triennale Milano. Through The Wild Future Lab, Kairos Futura investigated how fashion can function as both a practical technology and cultural narrative in imagining post-extractive relationships between humans and ecosystems. The collective has been recognized for its innovative approach to futuring and its engagement with traditional Kenyan craftsmanship in dialogue with emerging technologies.
"What does it mean to make a future entirely built here, and what could we make if we work with what's already available here?" These two questions have framed Kairos Futura's winning entry for the STARTS Prize Africa 2025.
A trans-disciplinary collective of artists, designers, engineers, and scientists, the organization's The Wild Future Lab, which commenced in 2023, imagines a future in which re-wilding has successfully turned Nairobi into a city that's more harmonious with nature and that has built a self-reliance based on the resources available to it without the need to import goods from elsewhere. Rather than embarking on a merely conceptual world-building exercise, the lab has focused on the resources, skills, crafts and other maker traditions and energies that anyone can find in daily Kenyan life.
The results of their experiments are as varied as the eclectic ideas at the heart of the project. Recognizing the expense and difficulty of getting textile equipment in Kenya, they used open-source blueprints to build their own fully operational prototypes to allow them to turn raw fiber into threads, followed by a series of experiments in growing flux, designing and building other processing tools, resulting in the successful spinning of the first thread in Kenya in over 70 years, a result of the thinning out of manufacturing capacity across the country that has happened since gaining independence. Further experimentation has resulted in the production of non-synthetic, local fabric from banana fibers and other materials and processes that have been used as the basis for the design and development of a range of "wearable artefacts of the future—climate resilient garments made from the new materials together with recycled solar panels, discarded billboards, and other materials. The garments look as good and are as imaginative and appealing as the ideas behind them.
Africa, as a continent, needs to imagine itself differently and on its own terms. Kairos Futura, through The Wild Future Lab, and in the rest of their work, boldly proposes what a re-imagining process might look like in ways that challenge the familiar, are fun, and transcend genre, form, discipline, and appeal. By directly challenging how we imagine the future from a Kenyan/Nairobi perspective, Kairos Futura is daring Africans to wildly engage one aspect of life on the continent—developing a new, homegrown imaginary of both the present and the future—that is in desperate need of attention, and new approaches. Many such attempts exist, but most are exercises in mere, often shallow image-making without substance. They turn into the creation of fantasies that replicate, express and respawn ideas from Europe and elsewhere without convincingly managing to demonstrate how they are truly responding to their context and solving present and future challenges. They fail to demonstrate how those ideas can move us from where we are now to a different future.
Kairos Futura's The Wild Future Lab attempts to build the beginnings of that roadmap in modest but inspiring ways through continuing experiments that involve dreaming, developing, and testing, and prototyping new ideas and objects. This is why, as a jury, we found them deserving of the 2025 STARTS Prize Africa Grand Prize.