Mapping The Design World turns into Mapping Crisis Design

Four years ago, we wrote by way of introduction to “Sinking but still Singing. About Life, Surviving and Design in an Upside-Down World”, a text on the future of design in the catalogue of the Interieur Biennale in Kortrijk, Belgium: ““Now that chaos is the new world order, and crisis no longer an exception but the new normal it’s impossible to predict what the future will hold for the next generation of designers. All yesterday’s design principles are being replaced by their opposites. Designers don’t have a choice: they must all be different if they want to survive. It’s no longer enough to think outside the box. What we need now is to develop a whole new box.” That may still have sounded like some far-fetched Science-Fiction back then to many, but not since the world fell victim to the global Covid 19 pandemic, and the many events that followed in a chain-reaction, such as the worldwide Dark Lives Matter uprise. Since the many challenges and opportunities also call for urgent action and a total rethinking of design and culture in general, Mapping The Design World decided to offer a platform for this, and to change its name into Mapping Crisis Design to underline this ambition – that had been there since its founding in 2011 anyway. Check the FB page of Mapping The Design World / Mapping Crisis Design.