The design conference ATTENDING [TO] FUTURES will take place at Köln International School of Design of TH Köln (Cologne, Germany) on 18-20 November 2021, but will be transformed into an online event, if regulations with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic prohibit physical large-scale events.

A conference for design practitioners, researchers, educators, students, scholars, and activists, who engage in a political reprogramming of design!

Acknowledging the ways in which design (as practices, forms of knowledge, and sets of objects) is accountable for social and environmental injustice, ATTENDING [TO] FUTURES is a platform for critical perspectives that scrutinize unchallenged disciplinary norms and designerly ways of knowing, being, doing, and imagining in design education, research, and practice.

Three panels will frame practical and theoretical positions and projects that critically examine the socio-political and ecological consequences of dominant ways of knowing, being, and doing in design and explore the possibilities of subversive practices and alternative teaching-learning scenarios. Lectures, workshops, urban walks, live performances, film screenings, and discussions invite interdisciplinary exchange among designers, activists, researchers, and educators from the fields of design, art, architecture, cultural studies, and anthropology.

The conference ATTENDING [TO] FUTURES examines the ambivalent role and responsibility of design as world-making at a moment in which the world «is presented in crisis» (Ghosn, Jazairy). Acknowledging the ways in which design (as practices, forms of knowledge, and sets of objects) is accountable for social and environmental injustice, the conference invites critical perspectives that scrutinize unchallenged disciplinary norms and dominant ways of knowing, being, doing, and imagining in design education, research, and practice. Drawing on current de-/anti-colonial, post-humanist, queer-feminist and disability discourses, the conference attempts a political reprogramming of design in order to generate transformative perspectives on design education, research, and practice.