SHIFTING REGIMES –
CHANGING ORDERS
World Design Capital 2026 – Design & Democracy
DGTF Conference as part of WDC2026 in collaboration with Normative Orders (Goethe University Frankfurt/Main, Kunstgewerbemuseum/Design Campus SKD and Design and Democracy
June 25th – 26th 2026
Call for Abstracts
Ecological urgency, technological acceleration, and political fragmentation destabilize the conditions under which democracy and design unfold. The conference interrogates their entangled trajectories amid shifting normative frameworks and changing regimes of power. It conceives design as a site of democratic contestation and democracy as a designed order, foregrounding their reciprocal capacity to structure imaginaries, practices, and institutions.
As democratic institutions face populist, technocratic, and post-political pressures, design becomes a crucial site of both contestation and possibility. We ask: How do design discourses and practices respond to and co-shape emerging configurations of power, participation, and collective life? What regimes of sense-making, visibility, or action does design enable—or foreclose? How might design contribute to rethinking democratic agency, inclusion, and accountability amid collapsing certainties?
This call invites contributions that critically examine design’s intersection with democratic systems under pressure: from contested infrastructures and algorithmic governance to citizen-led co-creation and institutional reconfiguration. Through interdisciplinary dialogue and practice-based inquiry, the conference aims to surface approaches and questions that push beyond normative assumptions, foregrounding design as mediator, amplifier, or disruptor within changing democratic landscapes.
We welcome contributions from academics, practitioners, activists, artists, and others working at the intersection of design and democracy. Contributions may take the form of papers, visual essays, projects, workshops, or interventions, addressing one or more of the following topics:
Democratizing Institutions of Civic Life
Civic institutions play a significant part in disseminating, instituting, and mediating democratic practices in our everyday lives. From housing cooperatives to schools, and from museums to neighborhood activism, this track explores where and how democratic practices are enacted and what they leave in their wake. How do they build community, whom do they include or exclude, and what role do they play in repositioning these institutions of civic life in our contested present? How do local democratic innovations reshape larger systems of power?
Spaces of Assembly as Arenas of Constructive Conflict
Public spaces have always been at the heart of democratic negotiations. Whether physical or digital, it is where different perspectives, interests, and voices converge. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonistic democracy, this track understands public spaces as places of constructive conflict: difference, contradiction, and dispute do not threaten democracy; rather, they form its living foundation. Both analogue and digital spaces offer the opportunity to make dissent visible and productive. How can we design these spaces to remain open, accessible, and adaptable, enabling democratic debate and ensuring that the future remains open to diversity?
Digitality and Democracy
Platform infrastructures, data-intensive classification systems, and automated decision-making regimes increasingly structure civic participation, public discourse, and state governance. Yet these same systems normalize opacity, surveillance, and technocratic authority. This track interrogates design’s entanglement with algorithmic governance, data extractivism, platform capitalism, and digital coloniality, while seeking counter-practices that reclaim technological agency and reimagine infrastructures for democratic accountability.
Democracy and Design Education Institutions
Design and art schools and universities reproduce hierarchies of knowledge, power, and access, while simultaneously claiming to foster criticality and innovation. This track interrogates the politics of design pedagogy and institutional governance: how curricula, accreditation, and funding regimes shape democratic agency—or constrain it. Can design education cultivate capacities for democratic renewal, or is it structurally bound to reproduce the technocratic and market logics that undermine democracy itself?
Intersectional Feminism and Ecological Futures
The ecological crisis is inseparable from histories of colonialism, patriarchy, and racial capitalism. Intersectional feminist perspectives reveal how design has been complicit in sustaining extractivist economies, gendered exclusions, and ecological harm, while also offering tools for care, resistance, and reimagination. This track examines how feminist and decolonial approaches can reconfigure design’s role in shaping democratic ecological futures, asking how practices of interdependence, justice, and solidarity might unsettle dominant imaginaries of governance, sustainability, and innovation.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit an extended abstract of max. 400 words (excluding references) that clearly outlines your contribution’s central argument, approach, and relevance to the conference themes and selected track. All abstracts will undergo a double-blind peer-review process.
Authors of full papers (4000–6000 words) will submit finalized contributions after the conference, subject to another round of peer review.
The conference will be held in English.
Important Dates
March 27, 2026 – Abstract Submission Deadline
April 5, 2026 – Extended Deadline
April 26, 2026 – Notification of Acceptance
June 25–26, 2026 – DGTF Conference, Goethe University Frankfurt
August 10th, 2026 – Deadline Full Papers
Fall 2026 – Publication of Proceedings
Publication
The conference explicitly welcomes a wide range of formats, but also provides the opportunity to publish full papers in the proceedings following the conference (to be published in the fall of 2026). The proceedings will be published digitally with ISBN and DOI.
Submission platform
To submit your abstract, please register with Conftool and follow instructions: https://www.conftool.org/dgtf2026
For any inquiry, please write us at conference@dgtf.de
Bibliography
Crawford, Kate. 2021. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press.
D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren Klein. 2020. Data Feminism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
DiSalvo, Carl. 2022. Design as Democratic Inquiry: Putting Experimental Civics into Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds.Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Forst, Rainer. 2017. Normativity and power: Analyzing social orders of justification (C. Cronin, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Halpern, Orit. 2022. The Smartness Mandate, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press
Landemore, Hélène. 2020. Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Latour, Bruno. 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity.
Miessen, Markus (ed). 2024. Agonistic Assemblies: On the Spatial Politics of Horizontality. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Milan, Stefania, and Emiliano Treré. 2023. Mending the Digital: Confronting Digital Modernity with Lessons from the South. Cambridge: Polity.
Moellendorf, Darrel. 2022. Mobilizing hope: Climate change and global poverty. Oxford University Press.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. London: Routledge.
Nothias, Toussaint. 2025. An Intellectual History of Digital Colonialism. Journal of Communication, Volume 75, Issue 5. Oxford University Press.Reybrouck, David van. 2016. Against Elections: The Case for Democracy. London: Bodley Head.
Vergès, Françoise. 2019. A Decolonial Feminism. London: Pluto Press.
Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs.
DGTF in cooperation with In collaboration with Normative Orders (Goethe University Frankfurt/Main, Kunstgewerbemuseum/Design Campus SKD and Design and Democracy
Website: Conrad Weise Finn Steffens
key visual/graphic design:
Leonie Egge
