Open – Design Week Frankfurt RheinMain

World Industrial Design Day FRM 2026

Design can help shape societal transformation in a value-based, forward-looking and effective way. The World Industrial Design Day FRM explores the role design can play today and where its boundaries need to be redefined.

Transformation requires design at all levels of society. A form of design that helps us look systematically and anticipatively towards the future, recognising, framing and setting in motion what is desirable within what is possible, plausible and probable.

A form of design that explores its potential while remaining committed to a universal canon of values: guided by idealism and humanitarian goals, beyond imperial-authoritarian and neoliberal particular interests, ad bonum.

To live up to this responsibility and assume the role assigned to it, the design discipline must turn again towards larger tasks. In line with its self-image as an intelligent problem solver, it should move beyond its focus on consumption-driven “wrappings”, open up fields of action beyond styling and customer experience, and become involved already in defining the very problem that is supposedly to be solved.

Design for Democracy, the motto of World Design Capital Frankfurt RheinMain 2026, understands design as inherently political. Design can unfold this impact when it questions, changes and shapes its own framework conditions and thus the normative foundations of its actions, becoming a force that can challenge systems.

As part of the World Industrial Design Day (WIDD), we want to discuss where the system boundaries of design lie today and how we can shift and stretch them in order to enable a necessary values-based transformation.

Registration:

WIDD FRM 2026 Registration

World Industrial Design Day (WIDD) goes back to an initiative of the World Design Organization (WDO) and highlights the social significance of industrial design worldwide. Within the framework of World Industrial Design Day FRM, we have been discussing the relevance, values and roles of design in today’s world since 2019.