BIO 26: Designathon open call announced

The Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) is launching an open call for participation in the 26th Biennial of Design, BIO 26 – Common Knowledge, curated by Austrian design curator and cultural producer Thomas Geisler together with assistant curator Aline Lara Rezende.

BIO 26 will take on one of the greatest challenges of our time: information. Concerned with the widespread crisis in information, BIO 26 seeks to harvest the best ideas that explore ways to creatively take charge and react to it, as well as to propose experiments and present alternatives to the ways we currently deal with information and knowledge.

The open call invites designers, architects, scientists, artists, communicators, educational professionals, sociologists, and the general public on a sprint journey to revisit the fundamental structures of knowledge production and transmission in society, going back to the Enlightenment.

This year we will commission six projects for the biennial through a designathon process—a three-day intensive, hands-on, sprint event in which curious and motivated people, non-designers and designers alike, will collaborate on design challenges. Selected participants will explore real challenges posed by the BIO 26 curatorial team together with a partnering museum, library, university, botanical garden, and retirement home, as well as news and media organization to rethink their roles in the twenty-first century. Six esteemed designers will lead the groups as mentors until the exhibition presentation.

After choosing a challenge, the selected participants will actively join the first of two designathons taking place in May in Ljubljana. The six best projects selected during the first designathon—ideation to prototype—will continue to the next phase and receive funds to be developed further in a second designathon—prototype to product—taking place in July in Ljubljana.

Application deadline: April 21, 2019

Apply and learn more about the designathon process and the BIO 26 – Common Knowledge theme HERE.

BIO 26 Talks, taking place on Tuesday, April 9, 2019 in Milan, will see Thomas Geisler, curator of the 26th Biennial of Design, and assistant curator Aline Lara Rezende, and Amelie Klein, Margriet Vollenberg, Jan Boelen, Angela Rui, Maja Vardjan, and Vera Sacchetti discuss biennials of design and one of the biggest challenges of our time: information.

From November 14, 2019 to February 9, 2020, the 26th Biennial of Design, BIO 26 – Common Knowledge, will present the outcomes of the exploratory work of the winning challenges at various locations in Ljubljana, complementing the main exhibition at MAO and accompanied by a special catalogue.

Timeline
BIO 26 Talks: Tuesday, April 9, 2019 at 3pm, Ventura Futures, Base Milano
Open Call Deadline: April 22, 2019
Invitation: April 22–May 5, 2019
Designathon #1| Ideation to Prototype: May 17–19, 2019
Winners Announcement: June 1, 2019
Designathon #2| Prototype to Product: July 12–14 2019
Show Off: September 25, 2019
BIO 26 – Common Knowledge opening: November 14, 2019

The 26th Biennial of Design runs from November 14, 2019 to February 9, 2020 in Ljubljana.

BIO is organised by Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in cooperation with the Centre for Creativity, at the MAO. It is an international platform for new approaches in design. BIO was founded in 1963, making it the first design biennial in Europe. Today, it is structured as a long-term collaborative process, where teams of designers and multidisciplinary agents develop alternatives to established systems. BIO works as a testing ground, where design is employed as a tool to question and improve our daily life, among different and multidisciplinary design approaches that touch systems, production, services, scientific research, humanistic issues, unexpected conditions for the production of our habitat.

Press contact
Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO)
Ana Kuntarič, ana.kuntaric [​at​] mao.si