Hope- Reclaiming the Future

We are excited to announce the By Design and by Disaster Conference 2025 (DDcon25), taking place on 8–10 May 2025 in South Tyrol, Italy. In its annual conference, since 2013 the Master in Eco-Social Design is bringing together people and organizations from diverse fields such as design, art, sciences, activism, rural–urban development, alternative agricultures, etc. We offer a lively mix of talks, workshops, walks, exhibitions, paper presentations, good food, drinks, music, dance, connection, and exchange. The focus in 2025 is Hope – reclaiming the future. We start with a call for papers and visual essays ↘︎ more about key dates and double-blind peer-review. Soon we will also publish calls for hands-on workshops, 7 x7 talks and walks.

›Everything will be fine‹ is not the kind of hope we are concerned with. Instead of this naïve attitude, we look for practices, stories, structures, strategies, and theories that revolve around hope and nourish the engagement towards a good life for all, at least dignified lives on a living planet. To ›never believe a prediction that doesn’t empower you‹ as Sean Stephenson [2] told us, does not mean to ignore the escalating crises and disasters. We want empowering hope of action, not ignorant hope of illusion and escapism. ›Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will‹ Antonio Gramsci wrote it in his prison letters in 1929 [3]. Still, let’s acknowledge that many hold on to illusions because coping with those brutal realities is overwhelming and depressing: Climate catastrophe, biodiversity extinction, extreme inequality, wars, enormous suffering, forced migration, murderous border regimes, rise of the far-right and other authoritarian, racist and sexist forces, you name it… plus the inertia, the greenwashing, the hegemony of normality and the violence defending it, the anticipatory obedience, the manifold powers against an emancipatory social-ecological transformation… plus failing dialogues, pointless negotiations, empty promises, lost battles, backlashes, disappointed hopes, exhaustion, frustration, anxiety, anger, sadness, the feeling of being trapped, powerless, desperate and hopeless – even if de facto privileged. Discouraging. Let’s face it together. Not alone. And find out how to cultivate and care for hope – empowering us and others to engage in irresistible ways. So it spreads. ›It is time to re-learn hope.‹ (Halloway 2022:15)

With Donna Haraway, we are ›impatient with two responses […] to the horrors of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene: 1. a comic faith in technofixes‹ and market solutions, ›2. […] a position that the game is over, it’s too late, there’s no sense trying to make anything any better, or at least no sense having any active trust in each other in working and playing for a resurgent world.‹ [4]. Struggles for reformist improvements, e.g. better wages, social welfare and environmental protection, are not contradicting commitment and hope for a radically better society. According to Frigga Haug it requires ›building connections among fragmented struggles, about creating a space of orientation which can re-contextualize the struggles and move them forward.‹ [5]. In parallel to ›the art of politics‹ as she calls it, Spaces of other logics are co-created, which enable ›with Michel Foucault: the art of not being governed in this way, with Bini Adamczak: of not being identified in this way, with Jason Moore: of not having to live in this way.‹ [6]  Through building, maintaining and defending such Real Utopias (Wright 2010) people are learning to act and to become differently, to extend imaginaries of the future by prefiguring them, to create attractive narratives and images, to interconnect, multiply and extend – moving towards solidary and sustainable modes of re*production. Commons ›can form cracks in capitalism everywhere. When the ice melts, we become the water that breaks the walls.‹ (Habermann 2024:127). With these lines Friederike Habermann ends her recent book, and we are looking for contributions to the conference ›to win back hope, not as an abstract idea or empty slogan, but as a collectively crafted and lived reality.‹ (Eschmann & Nehe 2024:13) [8]. 

›Hey, but isn’t this a design conference?‹ you might wonder. We respond with Herbert A. Simon that ›Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones‹ [9]. Accordingly, we are looking for design/art practices that resonate with thoughts on hope and transformation outlined above, and related research, strategies and practices. Design as service. Art as freedom. Design and arts can contribute to desirable change. Also, by making use of ‘classical’ elements and qualities of design as a discipline: good typography, concise visualisations, beautiful illustrations, functional constructions, clever details, elegant materials, etc. It matters what for and how.