Speculative Woolgathering at NSA North Sheep 2025

On Wednesday 4th June, our research team had the opportunity to bring the Speculative Woolgathering project to NSA’s North Sheep 2025, held at Greystoke Castle Farm in Penrith. Against the beautiful backdrop of the (very rainy!) Cumbrian fells and in the heart of one of the UK’s key sheep farming regions, we invited attendees to imagine the future of sheep farming and the wool industry through a series of creative, critical conversations.

Our project is all about asking “what if?” — What if robotic sheepdogs joined the farm? What if decisions around wool grading or breeding were made by AI? What if the supply chain radically changed due to new environmental or economic pressures? To help explore these questions, we brought with us several speculative future artefacts, including Robo-peep, a robot sheep dog from a potential farming future, and a set of ‘anticipatory evaluation’ cards designed to provoke thought and conversation about the adoption, implications, and ethics of emerging technologies in the industry.

We spent the day engaging with a wide range of stakeholders — farmers, wool processors, crafters, agricultural students, and policy advisors — to test out these tools. The responses were rich and wide-ranging, from excitement about potential labour-saving technologies to caution around the social and environmental implications of change. Crucially, the speculative nature of our materials encouraged people to think beyond current constraints and imagine a broader spectrum of possible futures — for better and for worse.

The goal wasn’t to predict the future, but to collaboratively imagine it — and to consider how today’s decisions might shape what’s to come. We’re especially interested in the ways different actors in the wool supply chain might perceive “progress” differently, and what counts as “good” when it comes to innovation.

Thank you to the National Sheep Association (NSA) for hosting us, and to everyone who stopped by our stand, shared stories, asked challenging questions, or hid from the great British summer weather with us! North Sheep offered an invaluable opportunity to ground our speculative work in the lived experience of those shaping the industry today.