<aside> 📅
Friday 22 January 2027 • University of the Arts London
</aside>
Design is deeply entangled with growth-driven production and consumption – from everyday objects to buildings and cities – yet spaces to imagine what design might mean when economic growth is no longer treated as a necessary or desirable organising principle remain limited. Degrowth scholarship has focused primarily on economic indicators, policy instruments and critiques of GDP; it has paid less systematic attention to the design decisions, product lifecycles and material practices through which growth is normalised in everyday life. An emerging body of scholarship has begun to connect design with degrowth, but there remains limited agreement about what degrowth means for design practice and how its principles might be translated into the decisions, methods and systems through which design operates. Without an account of design practice, degrowth remains largely aspirational as a programme for material transformation.
Hosted by the Decolonising the Arts Institute (University of the Arts London), Propositions for Design Beyond Growth is an interdisciplinary symposium asking how degrowth can be turned from a critique into something designers can work with. We invite designers, researchers, makers, repair practitioners, architects, economists, activists, policy makers and manufacturers and anyone curious about how design and degrowth intersect, to share tactics and strategies for moving design beyond growth-driven production and consumption, towards sufficient, durable, repairable and equitable material practices.
We are not looking for conventional academic papers. We invite concise 10-minute propositions responding to a single question:What would design need to do differently under degrowth?
Each proposition will be followed by questions from a moderator and a collective audience response, creating space for every idea to be interrogated, challenged and developed together.