A designer without chairs.
But with imagination.
An artist without paintings,
but with a message, intuition, and sensitivity.
I come from an environment where it was believed that a “real” designer must be able to design a chair — or at least an app. I prefer to design questions, to materialise them, and to travel through time.
That is why I defend “what if” thinking.
Not as an escape from reality, but as a working method. As a designer, I like to give questions a material form — which is why aesthetics and modes of expression matter to me. I feel especially close to those rooted in material culture, though I do not limit myself to them.
- Future thinking – thinking about and analysing possible futures
- Speculative design – designing those futures
- Design fiction – telling their stories
- Critical design – asking questions
- Aesthetics – giving them meaning through form, matter, and experience
I began my path at a time when design was understood mainly as industrial design. Today, with perspective, I see how little space there was then for reflection on aesthetics, material culture, and context.
That is why connecting humanities, form, and structure, and working at the intersection of past, present, and future became so important to me. Professors and academic environments often felt uncomfortable being associated with artists. Artists treated designers from art academies as service providers. It was in these tensions that hybrids were born — and I am one of them.
I joyfully connect these worlds and many more. I am also a futurist. For futurists, working with history, the present, and perspectives of development is essential, but I additionally bring artistic sensitivity and intuition into this process.
I work with tools rooted in the visual arts, as well as with project structures, curiosity about the world, courage, and sensitivity.
I do not predict the future — I work with it, I create it. Sometimes I do the same with the past, because — my dear ones — the past is also speculative, and we live in many realities at once.
That is why my research and my work often require journeys through time and between dimensions — academically, aesthetically, and culturally. The key is learning how to travel consciously.
For this reason, I connect the humanities, aesthetics, and project structure. I work with material and immaterial culture, worldbuilding, mythology, and communication — with everything I consider necessary for a given project.
You will not put me in a box.
Sorry.
But we can draw a conceptual map together and name this field.
My first PhD focused on glocality — the relationship between the local and the global, rooted in material culture. It was a critical project based on curiosity, ethnography, history, and the search for values.
Thinking about the future has accompanied me for a long time, but around 2016 it became a real field of practice. I am currently pursuing my second PhD in Valencia and developing Applied Science Fiction, which I understand as a combination of the approaches mentioned above, futures studies, and reflection on spacetime in a cultural context — within an art-based research framework.
Art is my laboratory: an emotional and aesthetic form of expression. It can become a fetish of technology, but it can also be a tool for critical reflection. It allows me to visualise tensions, questions, and anxieties that cannot be expressed in words and demand to be embodied.
My installations emerge between the material and the digital, between myth and fact. I work with courage, curiosity, imagination, and sensitivity.
I am a hybrid: art & design & futurology.
Hybridity, interdisciplinarity, and contextuality are my common ground.
I come from Poland.
I create in Spain.
I realise projects in cultural spaces rather than administrative ones.
Prof. ASP, Dr. Hab. Marta Flisykowska
Lecturer and Educator
I am a lecturer at the Faculty of Design of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, where I lead interdisciplinary ARTLAB project workshops combining speculative design and form aesthetics. I also teach a TEAMWORK course on collaborative practice for designers in English, integrating theory with practice and critical thinking.
Researcher and PhD Candidate
I am a researcher and PhD candidate at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, where I am pursuing my second PhD in the field of art and future thinking, based on an art-based research methodology. My research focuses on the relationships between art, science fiction, and visual culture, analysing temporal perspectives: the future in the past, the past in the future, and parallel realities.
EDUCATION
2005–2010 — Master’s Degree (MA), Design
Academy of Fine Arts, Faculty of Architecture and Design, Gdańsk, Poland
2008 — Erasmus Scholarship
École Supérieure d’Art de Metz Métropole, Metz, France
2010–2013 — Doctoral Studies (Interfaculty Programme)
Design Arts, Academy of Fine Arts, Poland
Dissertation: The Idea of Glocality in Authorial Product Design. An Analysis of the Relationship between Global and Local Material Culture
2023–2028 — PhD Studies (Second Doctorate)
Visual Arts / Artistic Research, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Programme: Arte: Producción e Investigación (Art: Production and Research)
Dissertation: Art + (Sci-Fi) – Applied Science Fiction in the Spacetime Field of Visual Arts and Culture (Future Studies in Art-Based Research)
ARTISTIC & RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS / RESIDENCIES
01.09.2022 – 30.04.2023
Faculty of Fine Arts, Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Valencia, Spain
Project: Digital / Analog. Implementing New Assumptions of Aesthetic Dualism of Image, Object, and Space in Cultural Context
02.05.2023 – 31.07.2023
Centro de Investigación en Arte, Universidad Miguel Hernández de Elche (UMH), Altea, Spain
Project: Fossibilities – Archaeology of the Future
10.04.2024 – 10.07.2024
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max Planck Institute, Florence, Italy
Project: The Future in the Past. Futurological Heritage and Narratives of the Future Registered in Visual Culture
09.02.2025 – 12.03.2025
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Centro de Investigaciones de Diseño Industrial, Faculty of Architecture, Mexico City, Mexico
Project: Design Fiction as a Research Tool: Speculative Scenarios and Intercultural Dialogue in the Context of Future Challenges
SELECTED ART & DESIGN PROJECTS (SINCE 2014)
2025 — UFO, group exhibition (project: Culture Debris), Wozownia Art Gallery, Toruń, Poland
2025 — Bestiopía: Un Bestiario Futuroeslavo / Beastopia, exhibition and research-art project, Galería de la Biblioteca Luis Unikel, Faculty of Architecture, CIDI UNAM, Mexico
2024 — The Lac(k)una Project, artistic project and symposium participation, Kunstkammer, International Symposium of Contemporary Art “The Utopia of the Ossola Republic”, Italy
2023–2024 — Mascletà – Celebration of Destruction, art installation, Intersectorial Festival of Contemporary Art of Ukraine and Spain, CultUcrania, UPV, Spain / Ukraine
2023 — Ecualonia – Cultural Parallels and Artistic Singularity, artistic residency and interdisciplinary project, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Universidad Central de Quito, Ecuador
2023 — Fossibilities – Archaeology of the Future, artistic-research project, Culture Moves Europe, Goethe-Institut, Spain
2023 — Rover Obstacle Course – Small-Scale Mars Base Mock-up, scenography and research installation, ESA / ESOC Darmstadt (“Pwn The Rover”), Germany
2022 — Do You Feel Connected?, interactive installation, Athens Digital Arts Festival, Kotzia Square, Greece
2021 — Do You Feel Connected?, installation and Polish national representation, Gwangju Design Biennale, International Pavilion “Dub Revolution”, South Korea
2020–2022 — In Rust We Trust – Martian Pottery, experimental project (3D printing, regolith simulation), author’s project, Austria / Poland
2019 — We Need More Space, curated exhibition, Gdynia Design Days, patronage of the Polish Space Agency, Poland
2019 — Around The Table, conceptual project and exhibition design, PMQ Design Gallery, Hong Kong
2018 — Bionanocellulose Design Lab, speculative project and exhibition, Gdynia Design Days, Academy of Fine Arts, BOWIL Biotech, Poland
2018 — Baltic Amber Tradition and Innovation, exhibition participation, INHORGENTA Munich, Tour & Taxis Brussels, Germany / Belgium
2018 — Who Nose?, speculative project, Museo del Traje, Spain
2017 — Parallel Reality, solo exhibition, Gdynia City Museum, Poland
2017 — Infuture Food Lab, curatorial project and exhibition, Infuture Institute, Tesco, Academy of Fine Arts, Gdynia Design Days, Łódź Design Festival, Poland
2017 — Polish Design. Tomorrow is Today, exhibition participation, Superstudio Più, Milan, Italy
2016 — Design: LAB – Design: HUB, exhibition participation, Amber Museum, Gdańsk, Poland
2015 — Polish Party – INFRAVIOLET, exhibition participation, Maison & Objet, Paris, France
2014 — We Will Sea, co-curated exhibition, Łódź Design Festival, Poland
2014 — Pure Nord Design, Kolonia Artystów, Gdańsk, Poland