Keynotes

designing design

Kim Albrecht (Folkwang University of the Arts)

Day: Monday, 31.08.2026
Time: 09:30 am – 10:30 am
Room: LX 1205 (Audimax)

The motto “Transforming Interactions” deserves a moment of reflection. What exactly do we transform, and why? This keynote proposes information design as a way of observing the interfaces, computations, and data structures we inhabit, and of turning that observation into a mode of thinking through designed structures.
The premise is simple and unsettling: we design the world, and the world designs us back. What and how we are is shaped by the systems we embed ourselves in: how we work, how we move through cities, how we communicate, how we find love. Nowhere is this clearer than in our digital lived realities, where interfaces and data structures quietly determine so much of everyday experience. Following the notion of ontological design, designing is never only the making of things; it is the making of what we are.
If interfaces are ontological, then information design can function as a second-order observation: a practice that renders the structuring structures visible. Across a series of projects, I will trace what this looks like in practice. By the end, I will ask what it means to design not only for what our systems make present, but also for what they displace, neglect, or leave unseen.

About Kim Albrecht

Kim Albrecht designs information to investigate socio-technological constructs. He is a professor of information design at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, a principal at metaLAB at Harvard, and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Through investigative practices, Albrecht renders visible the modes and perspectives data constructs onto the world. Positioned between scientific, philosophical, and artistic practice, the resulting diagrams graph how design designs the realities around us.