Upcycle is a speculative design project that reimagines the future of work through material experimentation, storytelling, and field-based imagination. Commissioned for The Future of Work Reimagined exhibition at Makers Landing, the brief asked six designers to upcycle disused office furniture and propose a vision for how we might work in 2050.

We responded by designing the Cabinette – a modular field station for a future Climate Restoration Engineer (CRE). Inspired by the literary history of the cabin as a site of retreat and radical thinking, the Cabinette functions as a mobile work habitat equipped with an indigenous seed library, a dye laboratory, a herbarium, and a mobile apiary. It is not just a piece of furniture – it is a narrative tool, a prototype for a future profession, and a proposal for how design might operate in a decentralised, climate-responsive world.

The process was deeply material. Over 50 discarded furniture components were repurposed: roller credenza doors became roof panels; cable trays became planters; perspex partitions were laser-cut to hold pressed botanical specimens; acoustic panels were CNC-cut into protective forms. Natural dye tests were carried out using marigolds, chamomile, red cabbage and juniper berries, turning the studio into a living laboratory.

The most meaningful tools were not the machines, but the fragments. Herbarium samples, jars of dye, coded materials, a reworked riot helmet transformed into field gear. These acted as carriers of memory, place and speculation. For us, making became a form of research,  a way to test futures through touch, scent, rhythm, and care.

Upcycle proposes that the workshop is not just a site of production, but of imagination. That work in the future may not occur in boardrooms and office towers, but in wetlands, orchards, forests and communities. And that the tools we carry will matter not for their efficiency, but for the stories and futures they enable.