2025-2026 Theme of the year
This year at POLIS, we want to confront the pressures, contradictions, and responsibilities that shape who we are as designers.
In a moment marked by political polarization, educational reform, ecological crisis, and the precarity of creative work, we see an urgent need to step back and reflect:
"what is our responsibility as designers?
Where do we find—
and where do we lose—our agency?"
POLIS commits to becoming a space for critical engagement, where students, educators, and practitioners can openly question the norms of our discipline and the structures shaping our education. Guided by transparency and reflexivity, we aim to uncover hidden biases and challenge the invisible pressures that define studio culture and professional practice.
We stand for agency and resistance, whether in everyday moments or through more radical forms of design. We recognize the importance of solidarity and care, fostering a community where vulnerability is seen as strength. And we aspire to celebrate the plurality of knowledge, valuing academic, cultural, activist, and informal ways of learning.
Within the umbrella of agency, our vision unfolds across four interwoven strands,
Agency in Design: Plural, Intersectional, Indefinite
Exploring power, positionality, and the choices we make as designers; recognizing intersectional perspectives; and questioning what forms of agency are possible both within and against institutions.
Education Under Pressure
Reflecting on whether students still hold agency amidst institutional politics, burnout, and global crises shaping higher education.
Designing Otherwise
Questioning what it means to seek “alternatives,” and whether this risks reproducing hierarchies of knowledge and solutions.
The Labor of a Designer
Examining whether professional practice truly provides the agency it promises—or perpetuates exploitation, precarity, and complicity in systems of harm.
Through these strands, POLIS becomes not just a platform, but a living collective of critique and imagination, grounded in the lived realities of students, and responding to the urgency and complexity of this moment.
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