DGTF Symposium 2025 "Planetary Experiments: Environments by Design"

This year's symposium of the German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF) took place on June 13, 2024, at the Technical University Dresden. The event titled "Planetary Experiments: Environments by Design", brought together leading scholars at the intersection of design and the humanities to explore fundamental questions about shaping our planetary future and highlighted the urgent need to understand design as a critical practice in the context of global environmental change.

The term “Planetary Experiments” encompasses both the physical manipulation of landscapes and atmospheres and the ethical concerns and societal imaginaries that accompany such interventions. The symposium investigated the far-reaching implications of a world increasingly rendered a design object through practices like geoengineering and large-scale infrastructural projects.

Speakers addressed critical questions such as: What is at stake when our planet becomes a subject of design through technological interventions, and what are their underlying logics? How does design co-produce our understanding of nature and shape human-environment relations? How can design be discussed beyond traditional categories like objects, interfaces, or corporate structures? And how might design function as a mode for rethinking issues of planetary control, responsibility, and agency?

The symposium sought to bridge theoretical and practice-based artistic research approaches and particularly emphasized intersections of design with Environmental Studies, Political Ecology, Blue Humanities, Geography, Science and Technology Studies, as well as Urban Planning and Architecture. In light of the challenges of the Anthropocene, new theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches are required to reflect on the responsibilities and possibilities of design interventions in planetary systems.