Design Policy Days
When Form Becomes Attitude
Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach/Main, Board of International Research in Design
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The second day of the Design Policy Days, organised in collaboration with the HfG Offenbach and the Board of International Research in Design (BIRD), explores how design can take a stand and why this is needed now more than ever. It combines project presentations on interventions in urban space with an international symposium. The focus is on design that is not treated as a service but as an independent stance, one that must assert itself in public space.
The programme opens with interventions in public space – both physical and digital – as a stage for democratic practice: projects from the WDC 2026 programme will be presented, all of which take a stand in urban space – ranging from the kiosk as a place of solidarity, through objects of resistance, to formats that make history and democracy visible in everyday life. Through dialogue between the projects and with the audience, the symposium will explore the potential impact of such interventions.
The symposium will then bring together international perspectives on a political understanding of design and create a space for dialogue around ‘Partisan Design’ – partisan design at the intersection of responsibility, engagement and transformation. The focus will be on questions concerning a politicised design discipline, new roles for designers in public spaces, and the need to understand design as a social attitude.
With keynote speeches by:
Tatjana Schneider, Noemi Biasseton, Silvio Lorusso
Key themes:
The political self-image of design: Must design take sides?
Interventions in public space: Projects from the WDC year
The limits of the discipline: What design can (and cannot) do – between aspiration, criticism and precariousness
Design and politics in the information age
Architecture and urban space as a collaborative, political practice
Programme:
10:30–10:50 Opening & Framing
10:50–12:30 Partisan Spaces – Interventions in public space: moderated project presentations and dialogues between the projects
12:30–12:55 Open discussion with the audience
12:55–13:00 Closing Part 1 & Outlook
13:00–14:30 Break
14:30–17:00 Keynotes with introduction and Q&A: Silvio Lorusso, Noemi Biasseton, Tatjana Schneider
17:15–18:30 Panel discussion with the BIRD Board of International Research in Design
