In a three-day symposium at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg, we analyzed the overlaps of design and democracy, together with three exciting design thinkers. Starting off with an initial encounter and assessment of power structures within the design processes and discipline, we scrutinized the possibilities of co-creation and horizontality in design, together with Katharina Mischer from Vienna-based design studio mischer’traxler.

Then, with Anna Puigjaner, principle at MAIO architects and professor at the ETH Zürich, we looked into whose voices are actually heard (and whose aren’t), how we can add diversity and how we can cope with the resulting polyphony and contradiction. 
And finally, with Prem Krishnamurthy and his Department of Transformation (D🌎T) we turned to possible ways to enact transformation.

Program

Thursday, 18 April, 10:00-20:00

Horizontality: Distributing power 

With Katharina Mischer from mischer’traxler

Can we shape design to create open-endedness, possibilities, and empowerment? This day looks at how the discipline needs to change to embrace restraint, allowing for collective learning and unlearning. We will turn to co-creation and examine how we can collectively create ideas, objects and spaces that people can use for learning, gathering, exchanging knowledge, and deliberating. Through the input of design office mischer’traxler and collective ideating, we will create active proposals for dismantling current typologies associated with the oligarchic systems that we live in today.  

Friday, 19 April, 10:00-20:00

Poliphony: Diversifying systems 

With Anna Puigjaner

Under the guise of an alleged “normality”, architecture and design have constructed a spatial and visual regime that is unequal. How can we create for non-conforming bodies and minds, include perspectives aside from the ideal of the average–possibly even non-human–and acknowledge the intersectional conditions that are shaping us all? How do we transgress the heteronormative configuration of collective living and being? Architect, author and educator Anna Puigjaner will guide us on how to design of domestic systems capable of dismantling social biases.

Saturday, 20 April, 10:00-20:00

Transformation: Changing paradigms 

With Prem Krishnamurthy

This day brings the Department of Transformation (D🌎T) to Nuremberg, which mobilizes the power of art and design towards individual, collective, and structural transformation. Engaging with the entangled crises of our times, D🌏T fosters interdependence and mutual support between artists and designers towards achieving common goals. Founded by designer, author, and educator Prem Krishnamurthy, it takes shape through public programs, exhibitions, educational engagements, and community-based activities (+ karaoke!) around the world.