Not at Your Service Manifestos for Design

Not at Your Service: Manifestos for Design brings together the broad spectrum of beliefs, subjects and practices of designers at Zurich University of the Arts. It offers different approaches and insights on the present-day role and impact of design. It is not conceived as a finished project, but as a fluid document of its time.

Collaborative design, interaction within complex systems, attention economics, the ecological shift, visual literacy, gender-neutral design, "quick and dirty" design ethnography, social responsibility, the value of ugliness, death futures, immersive technologies, identity and crises, design as a transformative discipline – all of these topics are presented for debate with passion, conviction and professional expertise.

Hansuli Matter, Direktor Dep. Design ZHDK, Zürich.

Björn Franke, Vertiefungsleiter Fachrichtung Interaction Design ZHDK, Zürich.

The project Not at Your Service: Manifestos for Design brings together a wide range of voices in order to illustrate the ways in which design mutates, infects unfamiliar territories and sometimes turns into an empty word devoid of meaning, but also to show how it can open up innovative, socially relevant and cross-disciplinary fields for sustainability, technological innovation and aesthetic practices, and have a positive effect on society.