Design as Diplomacy: Soft Power, Hard Materials
When ground beneath us shifts - materially, geo-politically, ecologically, design becomes an instrument of negotiation. Every material carries consequence. Every supply chain encodes values. Every object mediates between power and responsibility.
Bringing together biomaterial innovation, material and industrial systems critique, and neuroaesthetic human-centered design, this opening dialogue cuts through the rhetoric of unity to confront its frictions. Through biological intelligence, material accountability, and embodied experience, the panel argues that shared futures are engineered, not inherited, and that designers can translate distance into dialogue, friction into form, and the human and other-than-human worlds into negotiated common ground.
If design is a soft power, what hard material realities must it confront?
In Partnership with STIR World
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