The Creative Education Conference

Material / Machine

An Embodied vs Synthetic Debate in Creative Education

Welcome to the UCA Creative Education Conference 2026, where we explore the meeting point of the Embodied and the Synthetic. This year’s theme, Material/Machine, invites educators, makers, academics, technicians, librarians, leaders, policymakers, and students to interrogate the tensions and harmonies between material intelligence and digital automation.

We are rethinking what it means to learn, make, and create in a cross-disciplinary world where physical and digital processes intertwine. How can we design learning environments that honour embodied practice while embracing synthetic innovation? How do we protect authorship and integrity while expanding participation and aesthetic diversity?

Three Interlocking Strands

The conference is structured around three strands: Embodied, Machine, and Bridge. Collectively, they invite us to interrogate the pedagogic tools we use and how ways of knowing, making and relating are reshaped when material and synthetic practices meet.

As well as examining the analogue and digital as opposing forces, the three strands invite contributions that examine nuance: where do tactile, situated practices still matter most? Where do automated systems genuinely extend creative possibility? And what happens in messy spaces in between the generative?

Strand 1: Embodied - Material Intelligence in a Digital Age

This strand centres practices where bodies, materials and places do the primary pedagogical work.

We invite contributions that:

• Champion making as a sensory, situated, and relational act;
• Explore studios, workshops, libraries, labs and communities as learning ecologies;
• Examine how touch, gesture, rhythm, repetition, and craft knowledge shape identity, confidence and belonging;
• Push back against the idea that all practice must be digitised, automated, or datafied to be valued.

Embodied does not mean anti-digital, and instead asks what is lost when material intelligence is treated as optional.

Strand 2: Machine – Synthetic, Automated, Scalable

This strand focuses on synthetic and automated systems: from generative AI and Large Language Models to algorithmic curation, smart tools, and immersive digital platforms.

We invite contributions that:

• Critically examine how machine led processes are reframing authorship, originality, and assessment;
• Share teaching strategies that build digital fluency and critical literacy around AI and automation;
• Address questions of ethics, consent, data, labour and bias within creative and educational uses of technology;
• Showcase experiments where synthetic tools expand aesthetic range, access, or participation.

This strand asks where machines genuinely extend human creativity, and where they risk narrowing it.

Strand 3: Bridge – Hybrid Practices in the Space Between

The Bridge strand explores hybrid, entangled practices where material and machine are co-habit within pedagogic practices.

We invite contributions that:

• Weave together analogue and digital methods in coherent pedagogical journeys;
• Use AI, VR/AR, or digital fabrication to augment (rather than replace) studio and workshop practices;
• Explore assessment, feedback and critique models that account for both embodied process and synthetic tooling;
• Offer institutional, curricular or policy perspectives on leading programmes that live between the physical and the digital.

Why Attend?

Connect with educators and practitioners redefining the future of creative learning

Share and test your ideas in an open, interdisciplinary environment

Explore hands-on methods for teaching with both material sensitivity and digital fluency

Contribute to a growing conversation about integrity, inclusion, and imagination in creative education.

Contact us: creativeedconference@uca.ac.uk