Boris Kochan
Daring more design—how heartening that optimistic departure for new destinations would be! Willy Brandt’s rallying cry of “Let’s dare more democracy” could be the inspiration for an urgently needed reform program featuring boldness and ambition in equal measure. Because design shapes and encourages transformation; it is a creative force and scope for change, a tool for visualization and translation; it offers solutions and nourishment, inspiration and methodology.
At the 2024 Social Design Days, Jörg Sommer, director of the Berlin Institute for Participation, explained how we need to be much more comprehensive and strategic in engaging with democracy as an essential foundation of our coexistence, and how design will have a part to play in that engagement. “Democracy is a mindset and a cultural technique. Neither of those are a matter of genetic makeup, but of acculturation. Democrats do not magically spring up all by themselves, reliably or automatically. But neither do they arise by chance. And that is where design comes into play.” The issue at stake does not concern designing election posters or creating corporate design for political parties. Design can make a critical contribution to strengthening our democracy—for example, in designing democratic processes: “People don’t become democrats by being able to rattle off a flawless list of government functions or German electoral law in a school exam, but by experiencing democracy, its essential nature. And that essential nature proclaims: I am not a subject. I am a human being, with the right to make key decisions concerning my own life as part of a social group.”
If this is to happen, experience of self-efficacy is crucial. Perhaps in the form of active political involvement in one of Germany’s many national professional design associations, from the AGD, BDG, DDC, Illustratoren Organisation, and tgm to the iGDN, Universal Design, and the VDID. Or in their umbrella organization, the Deutscher Designtag (DT). Founded nine years ago with the goal of bringing the diversity of design together under one roof, turning the spotlight on areas of potential, and representing the industry—comprising over 360,000 designers and 60,000 design companies in Germany, and generating sales of around EUR 20 billion—in matters of policy.
In recent years the DT has issued a series of position papers setting out the involvement of the industry and all its possibilities in political processes, such as those related to sustainability and design, as well as in the call to appoint design specialists to the German government’s Council for Sustainability Development. Or with the design campaign for the education sector entitled “Design Skills are Future Skills,” setting out the opportunities created for society and the economy when children and young people are introduced to creative design techniques and methods at an early stage. With designers’ participation, the DIN-SPEC standard for easy-read German was developed to provide a visual form accompanying the language used, thus expanding the opportunities for people with reading and comprehension difficulties to access any written communication.
Design shapes community. It can build social bridges, create spaces, and change perspectives. As a discipline that systematically shapes the future, design is always political; it can decisively shape, or share in shaping, political processes and thus strengthen democracy, particularly where the issue is to design processes that aim beyond mere efficiency and optimized results; instead, the aim is to “provide space for conflicts,” as Jörg Sommer expresses it. “Not only allowing self-efficacy, but actively encouraging it. Focusing on debate. And allowing imperfection instead of concentrating on pliability. It’s a slow, intensive, laborious process, but one that has no alternative. Democracy becomes strong when it is practiced.”
DIVE’25, the German design congress debuting in 2025 as part of the mcbw’s extended program, will serve to establish design as an instrument of community and democracy as well as a driver of innovation and sustainability. DIVE’25 will bring together visionaries from the fields of design, politics, business, and science, embracing perspectives beyond the boundaries of individual disciplines, and examine the social, transformative, ecological, and cultural relevance of design in audience debates. DIVE’25 will unveil future perspectives for and with design, and extend an invitation to build networks and develop new projects. An invitation to join the dialog on, before, and behind the stage.
Der Beitrag zu Designtag erscheint außerdem im mcbw magazine 2025.