Mariana Pestana set up a curatorial lab during the first edition of the Porto Design Biennale, in 2019, to explore the relationship between fiction and design. The results of the lab (four workshops led by key Design thinkers and attended by over 30 young professionals) were showcased during the Biennale and led to Fiction Practice: Prototyping the Otherworldly, a book published by esad—idea in partnership with Onomatopee.

Through speculative design, Afro-Surrealism, critical fabulations, and re-edited pedagogies, key thinkers and curators of contemporary design explored the radical potential of fiction as a critical tool.

In the lab, new relationships between objects and ideas were imagined. Other worlds were designed, impossibilities were brought to life, histories and artefacts remixed, parallel dimensions disclosed, critical fabulations invented, and ontological oddities modeled. Each of the four workshops, with a different character, enacted an institutional model — an archive, an assembly, a committee, and a school.

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