Open – Design Week Frankfurt RheinMain

World Industrial Design Day FRM 2026

Designing Designability Gestaltbarkeit gestalten Transformation requires, at all societal levels, design.

Design that helps to systematically and anticipatively look into the future and to recognize, grasp, and set in motion the desirable within the possible, plausible, and probable. Design that seeks its possibilities while also committing to a universal canon of values; following idealistic and humanitarian goals, beyond imperial-authoritarian, neoliberal particular interests: ad bonum. To meet this responsibility and to assume its role, design must learn to think (again) on a larger scale. In accordance with its self-understanding as “intelligent problem solver” the discipline must detach itself from its focus on consumer-promoting “wrappings” open up action spaces beyond styling and customer experience, and participate in naming the supposedly solvable problem.“Design for Democracy”, the motto of the WDC FRM 2026, understands design as inherently political. Design can unleash this effectiveness when it questions, changes, and shapes its framework conditions and thus the normative preconditions of its own actions, becoming a “system breaker.” In the context of World Industrial Design Day FRM, we want to discuss where the system boundaries of design lie today and how we can shift and stretch them to enable a necessary values-based transformation. At World Industrial Design Day FRM, we have been discussing the relevance, values, and roles of design in today's world since 2019.

Register here: https://widd-frm-2026.eventbrite.de