Planetary Design: Reclaiming Futures

The SNSF-funded Sinergia project 'Governing Through Design', led by Claudia Mareis (Humboldt University), Orit Halpern (TU Dresden) and Kenny Cupers, will conclude with an international conference from 23-26th October in Berlin.

Under the heading of "Planetary Design: Reclaiming Futures", the organizing team, led by Urban Studies lecturer Laura Nkula-Wenz, has put together an exciting program of panel discussions, round tables, and artistic interventions hosted at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (23-25th October) and Spore Initiative (26th October). The event brings together critical thinking and doing around the role of design in making, unmaking and remaking worlds. 

Starting from the intersection of design, infrastructure, and the planetary environment, it offers a generative platform open to artists, academics, and activists for rethinking design’s role in producing the present and for developing alternative planetary futures. Reflecting on how design makes worlds in the 21st century requires an interdisciplinary effort that addresses it as an intersectional, multi-faceted phenomenon. Design becomes not only an object of empirical study but also a conceptual lens that might open up new ways of articulating transdisciplinary critique.

A central goal of this conference is thus to open up a novel field: the planetary study of design. This aspiration motivates studying design as an expansive field of socio-material processes and place-based practices with planetary implications. The conference aims to delineate this field by focusing on how epistemological and ontological aspects of design inform our understandings of planetary change, environmental management, coloniality, governmentality, and the climate crisis but also democratic reconstruction. The insistence on ‘planetarity’ comes from a recognition that these are world-historical conditions, without overlooking the locally situated, contested, and contingent nature of their manifestations. Planetarity evokes the concepts of synchronicity, discontinuity, and friction.

Supporting historically, conceptually, and ethnographically rich inquiries, the conference hopes to develop a new conversation about design that spans diverse disciplines, geographies, and methodological orientations that straddle the poetic and the pragmatic, the critical and the constructive. Thus, this gathering is at once looking ahead while also reckoning with inherited and continuing injustices that still haunt collective planetary futures.

Two keynotes by Prof Andrea Ballestero (USC) and Prof Noortje Marres (Warwick) will be streamed live to the public.
To learn more about the event, please visit: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/planetary-design-reclaiming-futures/ 

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