My crazy day trip to Vienna was totally worth it, not only did I meet very interesting designers and researchers at the UNDESIGN Symposium but also did I find my own ideas and thoughts about the state of design confirmed. Considering our complex contemporary world of crisis and “peak everything”, as Dr. Catharine Rossi put it, Design needs to take on new tasks. The presentations showed current directions that all question our doings in the anthropocene and suggest a reductive, redistributing, craft and repair-focused approach. The speakers agreed that design has always been a collective social project and that a critical view on things have always been inherent to design. The discussions reminded me a lot of Fritjof Capra’s writings where he describes the transition from the human centered anthropocentric perspective to the ecocentric world view, in which we understand ourselves as inseparable from our habitat and the need to protect it. It was an intense and inspiring day in Vienna, too dense to summarize it really.

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