Johanna Mehl @ DGTF 2026: 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

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?

conference website

Johanna Mehl will examine designers as agents of institutional critique, tracing a specific historical moment when design practice and poststructuralist skepticism converged in early 1970s California under the rubric of the free school movement.  She will map a range of playful pedagogies and educational experiments initiated by designers and architects—from teaching design and planning to children, to redesigning the classroom as an enabling environment—as well as gatherings such as the Freestone Festival in 1970 and the IDCA conference in 1972, both dedicated to exchanges among design, education, and institutional reform.