Presented by Matrix Design at Material Matters London (15–17 September 2026), ‘Hand, Code, Matter: A New Workflow for Spatial Design’ explored how human judgement, artificial intelligence and material intelligence can shape the next generation of spatial design. Part of the London Design Festival, the exhibition brought together emerging architectural voices, technological experimentation and the enduring value of making by hand.
The exhibition marked the UK debut of Lovspark AI, an AI-powered spatial design platform, and featured MIX, Matrix Design’s material and delivery platform, connecting design ideas with material knowledge and practical implementation. Together, they reflected a wider question central to Matrix Design’s evolving practice: how can creative judgement, emerging technologies and the expertise required to realise built environments inform one another?
For Matrix Design, the exhibition was more than a demonstration of new tools. Since 2019, the practice has explored AI-assisted approaches alongside its work in the built environment, where ideas must ultimately respond to people, places, materials and practical constraints. Bringing its international design team into dialogue with emerging designers, technologists and makers, Matrix Design used London as an open forum to examine how these different forms of expertise might come together.
Curated by Pick Up Architecture and designed by Farrokh Aman, the installation brought together the work of eight recent architecture graduates, Matrix Design’s International Team, and the MIX team. Rather than presenting AI as a replacement for the designer, the narrative set out a new flow for spatial design. 'Hand' represented human judgement and imagination, 'Code' introduced artificial intelligence to support the designer's ideas, and 'Matter' brought those ideas back to real materials, furnishings and execution with MIX connecting design to production.
Visitors entered at the centre of the installation and were greeted by an introduction and demonstration booth where visitors could try the platform for themselves before moving freely between the graduates' models, drawings, tapestry and cabinets. Lined up beautifully was a display of postcards, each image showing how the graduates brought AI into their work, and the only AI-generated pieces on the stand.
At the heart of the exhibition was the designers’ own ‘hand’ work encompassing skills including embroidery, thatch, hand drawing, fabric formwork, bamboo and model-making. Each graduate embraced Lovspark AI in a different way, testing it within their own process and reflecting on what it added.
The stand was itself an exercise in making, with handmade, precise and precious furniture elements to house the display, each built from simple timber units, elevating these humble materials through colour. Designed with circularity in mind, the pieces will be reused after the fair.
Material Matters London, the fair dedicated to material intelligence, was the natural home for the installation. For its fifth London edition, the fair opened at its new home, UNLOCKED, in the heart of Shoreditch Design Week, as part of the London Design Festival. With a setting celebrating materials, craft and making, 'Hand, Code, Matter' showed how artificial intelligence can sit alongside core design values rather than against them.
www.materialmatters.design/The-Fair
Curator – Pick Up Architecture
Design – Farrokh Aman
Graphic design – Matrix Design
