FORM/FUTURE
3 min readOn 10 September 2026, the former Tempelhof Airport hosted FORM/FUTURE, an international design conference marking twenty years of Berlin as a UNESCO City of Design. Its theme was “Process & Principles”. The programme moved between business, ecology and policy, from hospitality and city branding to circular economy, legal design and food for astronauts.
Transforming Design
Alice Rawsthorn opened the day. Her books, from Hello World and Design as an Attitude to Design Emergency, written with Paola Antonelli, resist the reduction of design to styling. One sentence stood on the screen behind her: design as “an agent of change which can help us make sense of what is happening and to turn it to our advantage”. Read that way, design is less a discipline of objects than a way of responding to upheaval, whether technological, social or ecological, and of steering where it leads.
The value of design in an AI-native business
In the afternoon, a panel moderated by Robin Auer of IBM began from an uncomfortable premise. If drafts, variants and even code can be generated in seconds, the output of design is no longer scarce. The question was what takes its place: the structure behind the screens, the decisions about what a system should and should not do, and the responsibility for those decisions.
LifeTeachUs
Every week, lessons are cancelled at German schools, while many students leave school feeling unprepared for life. Ludwig Thiede has been working on that gap for ten years, by his own account, and LifeTeachUs is the result. Through an app, schools request volunteers from trades, companies, public institutions and clubs, who fill free periods with practical LifeLessons, on site or online. Each LifeTeacher is trained and vetted before the first lesson. The non-profit has grown to more than 12,000 volunteers and around 200 partner schools, and in 2026 it was named Didacta Start-up of the Year. What it designs is not an object but a service: the matching, the onboarding, and the rules that make it safe for a stranger to stand in front of a class.
Transforming Design
Alice Rawsthorn opened the day. Her books, from Hello World and Design as an Attitude to Design Emergency, written with Paola Antonelli, resist the reduction of design to styling. One sentence stood on the screen behind her: design as “an agent of change which can help us make sense of what is happening and to turn it to our advantage”. Read that way, design is less a discipline of objects than a way of responding to upheaval, whether technological, social or ecological, and of steering where it leads.
The value of design in an AI-native business
In the afternoon, a panel moderated by Robin Auer of IBM began from an uncomfortable premise. If drafts, variants and even code can be generated in seconds, the output of design is no longer scarce. The question was what takes its place: the structure behind the screens, the decisions about what a system should and should not do, and the responsibility for those decisions.
LifeTeachUs
Every week, lessons are cancelled at German schools, while many students leave school feeling unprepared for life. Ludwig Thiede has been working on that gap for ten years, by his own account, and LifeTeachUs is the result. Through an app, schools request volunteers from trades, companies, public institutions and clubs, who fill free periods with practical LifeLessons, on site or online. Each LifeTeacher is trained and vetted before the first lesson. The non-profit has grown to more than 12,000 volunteers and around 200 partner schools, and in 2026 it was named Didacta Start-up of the Year. What it designs is not an object but a service: the matching, the onboarding, and the rules that make it safe for a stranger to stand in front of a class.
#formfuture#transformationbydesign#cityofdesign#tempelhof#designconference
September 2026
