Fluid – Design Forum and NGO Flux are hosting the FLUID 2024 regional Awards for Young Designers: “SUSTAINABLE OPTIMISM”.
Applications are open for young (18–35 years of age) graphic designers, illustrators, design&architecture students, visual artists, photographers, architects… from Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Albania.
The three awarded authors will have an opportunity to take part in a joint exhibition or presentation @ FLUID #13/2025.
This year’s edition of the FLUID Design Forum explores how optimism in design can help in responding to the complex issues of contemporary society, in which ways it can contribute to solutions but also how it can harm the efforts to address pertinent societal issues.
Each participant or group can submit a maximum of three posters: either three separate posters or one series of three posters.
Details about this year’s topic are available within the Fluid #12 Statement and Conditions.
Now, almost a century later, the ‘will’ mentioned in Antonio Gramsci’s famous quotation is no longer adequate. It is corroded by experience: a string of unfulfilled expectations, the breakdown of enlightenment heritage, civil and democratic paradigms, the collapse of modernist processes, permanent political and social crises, and the threat of ecological cataclysms.
This year’s edition of the FLUID Design Forum explores how optimism in design can help in responding to the complex issues of contemporary society, in which ways it can contribute to solutions but also how it can harm the efforts to address pertinent societal issues.
Design theory and practice are not exempt either. They became impotent through a compromise with capital. The market spectacle took the most brilliant ideas, appropriated and commodified them. Likewise, design theory and practice accepted compromises and took comfort in the understanding that they were inevitable.
If contemporary design does not lack optimism, is that design fake, is it cynical? Is it a consequence of choosing not to look at the broader context, or is it simply the result of a lack of information, myopia, or inexperience? If none of those things exist, what are the possible foundations for design optimism?
What makes it sustainable: realistic, authentic, selfless, and sensible? What can give vitality to design today while preserving higher goals? Can optimism be the very object of design thought and practice? Could design be more than just a means to an end?
Please check the official website for further information.
