FORM / FUTURE 2026 conference in Berlin, curated by Dara Sepehri, portrays a discipline that no longer wants to limit itself to designing objects, spaces or interfaces: it wants to enter the systems, decisions and imaginaries through which we shape the future.
Perhaps the most important question to emerge from FORM / FUTURE 2026 was not what design will be able to do in the years ahead, but at what point it needs to intervene in order to have a real impact. Judging by the talks held on 10 September at Berlin’s Flughafen Tempelhof, the answer seems to be: before the solution takes shape. Before the brief is closed, before a technology is implemented, before a product is defined, or before a system becomes too rigid to rethink. It is no coincidence that the second edition of FORM / FUTURE took place in the year Berlin celebrates twenty years as a UNESCO City of Design, under the motto “Process & Principles”. At the heart of the conference was the question of how design thinking can evolve from a set of tools into methods, principles and positions capable of influencing organisations, society and politics.
Yet the talks pointed towards an even broader reflection. Design appears to be entering a phase in which many of the boundaries that once defined it are becoming unstable. Artificial intelligence is making previously specialist activities widely accessible; environmental and geopolitical crises require us to think in terms of systems rather than individual products; and growing technological complexity makes the ability to translate abstract innovation into understandable and trustworthy experiences increasingly important. Even design thinking, now established in companies and business schools, is being critically examined to understand whether its widespread adoption has weakened its ability to challenge the context in which it operates.
Against this backdrop, FORM / FUTURE suggests that the future value of design may depend less on the ability to produce forms and more on the ability to design conditions: conditions for making decisions, understanding, building trust, imagining, collaborating and turning abstract possibilities into genuinely desirable experiences.
If FORM / FUTURE left us with one genuinely actionable idea, it is probably this: the next leap in design is not about producing more design. It is about bringing design thinking, sensitivity and responsibility into the places where the decisions we will one day call the future are being made today.
Cross-cutting themes
- From designing outputs to designing decisions
Traditionally, designers enter the process once strategy, the business case and the problem itself have already been defined. Several speakers instead argued that design needs to be involved in shaping the decisions themselves. Michael Biel described Berlin as an ecosystem in which design, technology, business and public administration need to form a “living working structure”; Stefan Franzke showed how UX, accessibility and user-centred design have become essential in turning complex technological innovations into tools that people can actually adopt. The same principle applies within organisations. Claudia Friedrich argued that measuring design only through ROI and final outcomes means overlooking the value it creates throughout the process, when it reduces ambiguity, establishes a shared language and improves collaboration and decision-making. Diana Belodedov brought the discussion into the professional sphere, encouraging designers to move closer to the contexts in which priorities, strategies and roadmaps are defined.
- If design enters decision-making, it needs to understand systems
Moving upstream also means looking beyond the individual artefact. Alice Rawsthorn presents design as an “attitude” rather than simply a profession, illustrating this expanded role through examples ranging from humanitarian design, telemedicine and legal design to mobile healthcare facilities, flood-response systems and resilient architecture.
What these examples share is not a particular type of output, but the ability to reconfigure relationships and resources so that a system works better for the people who use it. It is also a response to the reduction of design to styling: just as AI makes formal production cheaper, the ability to understand complexity, dependencies and consequences becomes more valuable.
- Emotion is not decoration: it is part of the project’s infrastructure
Alongside this systemic perspective, FORM / FUTURE brought emotion back to the centre as a concrete design parameter. In the I FEEL SPACE panel, Bettina Böhm and Teerapat Amnueypornsakul discussed space as a condition for creating genuine human connections; Mario Weck showed how light, more than the light fitting itself, creates atmosphere; and Felipe Sánchez Luna described sound as a material capable of changing emotions, behaviour and our perception of space.
Jessica McGowan similarly proposed conceiving a brand from the perspective of what a person feels, leaving visual identity and logo development to the final stage. Research presented by Corinna Kühnapfel and Nicole Ruta strengthens this view: form, nature, art and human presence influence perceived safety, belonging and curiosity. Wonder can even become an “epistemic emotion”, capable of stimulating exploration and knowledge. Designing therefore means asking not only what a person will be able to do, but also what they will feel and what behaviour may follow from that experience.
- It is not enough to make a system work: we also need to ask whether it deserves to work
Greater influence also brings greater responsibility. Felix Kosok criticised the transformation of design thinking into a universal problem-solving toolkit: a tool capable of optimising processes without necessarily questioning the structures that produce them. His idea of “effective anesthesia” describes precisely the risk of making a system more efficient without asking whom it serves or whose interests it reinforces. Critical design thinking therefore does not require yet another method. It requires awareness of one’s own position, the ability to live with disagreement and a willingness to question the way problems themselves are framed. Not every improvement is automatically progress.
- Between criticism and hope: to change the future, we first need to be able to imagine it
Nicole Zabel offers an ideal counterpoint to Kosok’s caution by starting from the climate crisis and highlighting the opposite risk: fully understanding a problem while no longer being able to imagine an alternative. Technological solutions often already exist, but cognitive dissonance and pluralistic ignorance can prevent knowledge from becoming action.
For Zabel, people need to believe both that a realistic solution exists and that they can play a part in it. Design and storytelling therefore become tools for making a positive future visible without denying the seriousness of the present. Her three principles — beautiful, sustainable, together — suggest that for a transformation to be adopted, it needs to be not only right, but desirable. Kosok and Zabel thus define two complementary responsibilities: critically questioning the present and making an alternative concretely imaginable.
- Artificial intelligence makes execution cheaper. Judgement becomes more valuable
The panel on AI highlighted above all a shift in where value lies. Andrea Goebel sees artificial intelligence as both a collaborator and a new design material, while clients now expect not only experimentation but also speed and tangible business value. Julian Dorn introduced the crucial issue of trust in AI agents, particularly in sensitive sectors, while Lucas Pinheiro Teixeira highlighted how AI allows small teams to explore and visualise possibilities that were previously out of reach much more quickly.
Yet precisely when generating alternatives becomes easy, knowing how to choose becomes more important. Value therefore shifts towards judgement, taste, context, craft and responsibility. A fast answer is not necessarily a good decision.
- Design skills need to enter the places where decisions are made
The evolution of digital tools and AI is making the boundaries between designers, developers and project managers less distinct. For Diana Belodedov, however, the point is not to defend a professional title, but to bring design skills closer to decision-making. The ability to work with ambiguity, assess the human consequences of a choice, test hypotheses and quickly adjust direction is also valuable in project management and strategy. Her own move from UX into project management illustrates this point: design creates greater value when it contributes not only to improving a solution, but also to defining the problem and the priorities that should be addressed.
- Circular economy: where design meets geopolitics, supply chains and business
The circular economy brings these reflections into the industrial sphere. Susanna Minato-Torkler describes it not only as an environmental issue, but as a resilience strategy in the face of commodity prices, dependence on imports and fragile supply chains. Designing for circularity therefore means considering durability, repair, reuse, disassembly and end-of-life from the outset. Marius Pohl highlights the need for collaboration between companies, because no organisation can independently close loops that extend across entire value chains. Christian Harbeke adds an emotional dimension: a product that is beautiful and desirable enough to be kept and repaired can remain in use for longer. Systemic sustainability and personal attachment ultimately meet.
- A new equation: rationality, emotion and responsibility
Perhaps the most significant convergence to emerge from FORM / FUTURE lies in overcoming the distinction between “strategic” and “sensitive” design. Trust, belonging, desirability and perception are not marginal effects: they shape behaviour and therefore influence economic, social and environmental outcomes. Design consequently takes on a broader and more delicate role. It needs to understand systems, consciously shape experience and question the consequences of what it enables. The greater its ability to influence, the greater its responsibility.
Design should not predict the future. It should help choose between different futures. By the end of the day, FORM / FUTURE appeared to have progressively shifted the fundamental question of design. For a long time, that question was: how should this thing be made? It then became: how can we solve this problem? Today it seems to be changing again: what conditions do we need to create for a desirable transformation to become possible? This means recognising that products and services are not isolated entities, but the result of decisions, incentives, values and structures; that people’s behaviour depends not only on the functions available to them, but also on trust, perception and emotion; and that a technically possible future is not automatically a desirable one.
