Call for papers and visual essays
10 years of Eco-Social Design* and now?
Submit extended abstracts until 1 February 2026 ↘︎ all dates below
With the academic year 2015-16, the Master in Eco-Social Design started at the Free University of Bolzano. This beginning occurred after a bumpy yet enriching course of preparations that included the first By Design or by Disaster Conference in 2013. The conference kicked off our series of annual events, and provided us the opportunity to connect with other transformation-engaged actors locally and trans-locally, including several other practice-oriented degree programmes focusing on socio-ecological transformation (Transformation Design, Social Design, Transformation Studies, Social Design or similar study courses, including likewise engaged programs coming from art, architecture, social work and innovation). We added an asterisk after design* to include all such programs and practitioners. In these overwhelming times of crisis, conflict and collapse, the urgency for joining forces to support each other, to reflect, learn, strategize and act together becomes even greater. In 2026 By Design and by Disaster takes place at BASIS Vinschgau-Venosta from 21 to 23 of May.
It’s time to reflect:
What has worked and is promising for the future?
It is time to ask pressing questions and to collaborate on answers: How to respond to the turn to the far-right and other authoritarian tendencies? What to do in the light of probable collapse scenarios and ongoing conflicts, crises and catastrophes? What counters the disempowering feelings of delusion and political depression? How to co-create collective empowerment, mutual care and nourish movements? How to prepare (for) social tipping points and opening windows of opportunities? How to create trans-local and global solidarity in movements (joint struggles) and in re/production (along supply chains)? Who are our partners and allies? How to build upon and interconnect what and who is already there, to gain overarching traction? Why has our practice been defined the way it has, and how must we change it? What is our history, and what should be our future? What have we relied on that we no longer can?
What can and needs to be done now?
With these traversal questions, we propose three tracks plus one for open space and free time.
Track 1: Learning and Teaching
What knowledge and skills are needed to tackle crisis and transformation creatively? How to learn and teach them? We invite teachers, students, researchers from institutions and movements to the ongoing discussion on pedagogical approaches that empower change agents. In this year’s 10th anniversary of the Master in Eco-Social Design, we welcome reflections on past activities. Which skills and competences should be trained, shared, and nurtured in learning and teaching design for emancipatory social-ecological transformation? From critical thinking to collaborative learning and doing, we also welcome contributions that reflect on social and emotional skills, teacher development, and decolonial education, feminist, and radical pedagogies, to name just a few. How, where and with whom can and should this take place?
Track 2: Practices and Projects
This track focuses on methodological and historical reflections and case studies that explore how eco-social design* is practiced. Contributors may discuss transdisciplinary and transformative methods that address ecological sustainability and social justice, their interplay, and situations where frictions become productive. We welcome contributions deriving from participatory and co-design, regenerative and circular design, strategic and systemic design, transformation design, commoning design, materialist and revolutionary design, and design methods in the widest sense adapted from other fields. This track invites practice-based insights and situated accounts of designers and researchers collaborating with public institutions, unions, cooperatives, eco-social businesses, grassroot initiatives, commons and social movements. Here, the focus is on practical doing, methodological reasoning, and engagement as an embodied, collective and social practice. We are also looking forward to research, theories and frameworks that explain why certain approaches work better than others in specific contexts or for reaching certain aims, and how to use this knowledge to strengthen the eco-social agency of practices, projects and actors.
Track 3: Strategies and Structures
This track focusses on strategies of emancipatory social-ecological transformation and enabling structures (interconnecting organisation, alliances and mutual support unions, institutional arrangements and new institutions, commons-public partnerships and other legal frameworks, material and social infrastructures, alternative economies and commons, pooling resources and funding, etc.). Which structures are enabling desirable transformations, and which are hindering them? Which strategies help to overcome or at least deal creatively with obstacles, constraints, and headwinds?
Dates 2026
1 February: extended abstracts (1000 words; submission opens 15 January)
15 February: Notification of acceptance
15 March: Full paper submission (4000-6000 words)
Double-blind peer-review
15 April: Notification of acceptance
30 April: Registration with payment of fee
21–23 May: Conference
Tiered Pricing Scheme
The conference offers a solidary fee scheme to accommodate a diverse financial situations of participants. Details coming soon.
Image based on an artwork by Annika Tretter of the course of Peter Senoner IG: @AnnikaEileenTretter