As part of Panel IV , which focuses on Visions of the Future in Knowledge Transfer , three presentations will take place.

Click here for the symposium program overview.

Lecture I

Europe faces a policy vacuum of historic proportions—and we have created it ourselves. Exploration—research, studies, visions of the future—was conducted in the back rooms of the economy, while old business models were refined with German thoroughness into technical and organizational behemoths. The result: a decoupling of economic and lived reality from better knowledge, will, and feeling—coupled with an abundance of visions of the future that the majority no longer believes in, and a shift in the authority to define and interpret as power shifts globally. But a vacuum opens up new possibilities!
The old tree falls with a crash—but the young forest grows quietly: A renaissance of science founders is actively tackling long-postponed challenges, not through innovation management, but through creative destruction in the Schumpeterian sense. Billions are flowing into deep tech—more than ever before and at a rapidly increasing rate. Supporting these startups requires a different approach to design and practice, one measured by impact. As shapers, we can and must imagine more than mere “creative civilians”: freed from a culture of risk aversion, inconsequential experimentation, and caution as a method—radical in self-reflection, radically eclectic when dealing with declining mandates, and demanding when it comes to the conditions that make impact possible in the first place. For radical thinking and action, in particular, require care, prudence, and room for development. “Exploration to Market Impact” means: stepping outside the framework of the vision of the future, building, scaling—filling the vacuum rather than measuring it.

This lecture will be held in German.

Lecture II

People who do not believe in a future they can shape have little reason to champion democracy. After all, democracy requires not only criticism of the present, but also ideas and visions of how things could and should be better in the future.
How we think about, talk about, and visualize the future is therefore always political—and we, as communication designers, play an important role in this. Do we portray the future as fixed or as something we can shape? Do we make visible whose perspectives and ambitions shape a vision of the future? Whom do we invite to join the discussion and help shape it?
From climate protection to technological development to wealth distribution, countless values, emotions, worldviews, narratives, and power structures shape our current visions of what tomorrow might hold. How we shape debates about shaping the future is a blend of critical design, critical futures studies, strategic communication, and classical foresight: How do we effectively bring about change—and how do we reflect on what kind of change we actually want and why?
To this end, the design perspective will be combined with insights from applied foresight contexts, and we will discuss how shaping the future can be both effective and responsible.

This lecture will be held in German.

Lecture III

Can design make us aware of perceptual habits and even transform them? This contribution outlines approaches from cognitive science, phenomenology, and anthropology and conceives of our interaction with material and social environments as a dynamic contact: We do not passively receive stimuli but proactively generate knowledge-based predictions and match these predictions with the actual stimulation. Our contact with the world is also dynamic because we explore, shift perspectives, perceive and think with objects, appropriate spaces, and because something drives or motivates us (from movēre: to move). Two perspectives can be contrasted here: One focuses on the motive of uncertainty-reduction. This concept implies that we get stuck in a loop as we reduce uncertainty to familiarity. Another perspective, however, conceptualizes perception as an open exploration of potentials for sense-making. Accordingly, design can either try to avoid uncertainty by aligning itself closely with a group’s practices and preconceptions. Or it can challenge habits through interventions, change the meaning of things, relations or actions during play, or foster counterfactual and speculative thinking to change our view of the present. In doing so, it might reveal problems and consider needs of various human and non-human agents. Can design thus enable us to see the world anew, and which contexts of design allow for a disruption of perceptual routines?

This lecture will be held in German.

• • Prof. Carl Frech