Abstract
This paper reimagines material catalogues not as static inventories but as archives of deep-time and affect: tools for sensing, caring for, and reconfiguring our relationships with the more-than-human world. It presents Tagus estuary colour swatch, a Research-through-Design exploration in which bio-pigments derived from local plant, mineral, algal, and waste streams form a colour palette embodying the estuary’s ecological rhythms. The project reframes materials beyond inert resources but rather as affective mediators of and for more-than-human temporalities – by embodying and expressing temporal processes and by enabling designers and audiences to engage with them. Positioned against the extractivist legacy of traditional catalogues, the research is framed within a wider shift in design that proposes alternative bioregional approaches valuing provenance, affective relations, and care. By revealing materials’ more-than-human narratives, the research demonstrates how design tools can cultivate awareness, empathy, and connection across humans, landscapes, and the temporalities they share.
Keywords
More-than-human temporalities, Decolonizing Design, Bioregion design, Biomaterials
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2121
Citation
Simoes, M., Pestana, M., Duarte, F., and Nisi, V. (2026) Tagus estuary color swatch – Materials as affective mediators in more-than-human temporalities, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2121
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Tagus estuary color swatch – Materials as affective mediators in more-than-human temporalities
This paper reimagines material catalogues not as static inventories but as archives of deep-time and affect: tools for sensing, caring for, and reconfiguring our relationships with the more-than-human world. It presents Tagus estuary colour swatch, a Research-through-Design exploration in which bio-pigments derived from local plant, mineral, algal, and waste streams form a colour palette embodying the estuary’s ecological rhythms. The project reframes materials beyond inert resources but rather as affective mediators of and for more-than-human temporalities – by embodying and expressing temporal processes and by enabling designers and audiences to engage with them. Positioned against the extractivist legacy of traditional catalogues, the research is framed within a wider shift in design that proposes alternative bioregional approaches valuing provenance, affective relations, and care. By revealing materials’ more-than-human narratives, the research demonstrates how design tools can cultivate awareness, empathy, and connection across humans, landscapes, and the temporalities they share.