Design Campus Opening

This summer, the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Dresden will launch its ambitious Design Campus, and summer School.

Design Campus 
Part internal think tank and part external connector and incubator, The Design Campus is a curatorial-driven, interdisciplinary, and future-oriented platform for rethinking the world’s biggest questions through design practices and culture. Rooted in contemporary global issues, in dialogue with historical and transdisciplinary knowledge, the Design Campus hopes to foster big, idealistic, systemic, utopian thoughts back into design practice, and to rethink the role of decorative and applied arts museums on the way. The goal is to explore new grounds and search for better ways forward. We want to challenge the way we navigate a world in crisis, in all its complexity, charting a new course and a possible different directions by design.

Part of this initiative is a yearly summer School on themes relevant to both the museum, and its future projects, and to the wider world. Each year, as part of its six-week summer school program, the Design Campus offers a series of one-week workshops, led by world-renowned creative professionals.

The Design Campus summer program is a ​“School of Utopias”. It is a visionary design school set to explore complex problems, dream bold ideas, and collaboratively build new ways forward. Curated by a different Head of School each year, the curriculum will investigate a specific theme. The students and faculty will explore the research question through a series of workshops, lectures, talks, exhibits, and other public programs. 

Summer School 2021  
Theme: Design & Democracy
This year, the appointed Heads of School are design curators and critics  Amelie Klein and Vera Sachetti. The inaugural summer school of the Design Campus will investigate the many connections between Design and Democracy. The six-week-long program will probe design and its involvement in democratic processes, exhibiting the social and political dimension of the discipline. The program advocates a broader understanding of design, especially where the borders between disciplinary silos blur and design becomes a tool for mediation and translation. This highlights design as an instrumental tool in the unravelling of democracy but also essential for its reconstitution. 

What 
Design Campus Summer School,  
Class 2021 – Design & Democracy 
Weekly workshops, lectures, talks, guided tours, exhibitions and fun  

When 
Summer 2021 
July 18, 2021–August 28, 2021 
Applications open on March 15, 2021 

Where 
Kunstgewerbemuseum
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden 
Pillnitz Palace & Park 
Dresden, Germany 

Who can apply?
Curious, restless, dreamer of better places, creative, fearless, social, collaborative, interested, engaged, inquisitive, designer, architect, artist, scientist, curator, journalist, engineer, developer, photographer, filmmaker, skilled students, recent graduates or young-professionals, open-minded people: welcome!

Why 
Great chance to think and dream big, with like-minded people, learn new skills, get involved in future projects in the museum, its environs, and its network, and perhaps change the world by design. 

How 
Applications open on March 15, 2021. 
Stay tuned and sign up to our newsletter to get to know first-hand about the summer school’s workshops, programs, and how to apply: Designcampus.org 

The Design Campus is the Think Tank and R+D platform of the Kunstgewerbemuseum as part of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Through its four pillars: the Museum, the School, the Lab, and the Network, the Design Campus will be a space for recalibration and empowerment of creative practitioners to take action on the many changes, challenges and uncertainties of the 21st century.