Design and Migration Societies: Co-creating Just Futures
Date and Venue
- Tuesday 3 November 2026,
- Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) - Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Landbergstraat 15, 2628 CE Delft
2026 Call for Panels and Workshops
Call for Contributions – Pop-up Exhibition
Conference Title and Lead Themes
Migration has grown into one of the most controversial and polarising issues of our time. This reality is evident across many policy practices and societal domains: from shelter, reception and housing to education, employment, healthcare, security, and culture. Many professionals are confronted with its complexities, opportunities, and dilemmas. Yet, in public debate, migration is often reduced to an issue in its own right, separate from other societal challenges. This can obscure a clear understanding of the causes and consequences of migration, and can push the interplay between migration and, for example, the housing crisis and labour market exploitation into the background.
Migration is commonly studied from the perspectives of public administration, (inter)national law and security, history, economy and development studies. However, a design perspective is often missing from the debate. This conference will explore and showcase what design, as an interdisciplinary way of thinking and practice, can offer to our understanding of the governance of migration, diversity, and inequality, and particularly to co-creating just futures and societies. There are three conference lead subthemes.
Theme 1 – Designing for migration societies
Design-based thinking and practices can affect migration societies through specific spatial logics, material conditions, and forms of governance. Everyday life is shaped by these ongoing territorial, material, and social conditions from which migration and displacement emerge and are reproduced. Consider, for example, the concentration of greenhouse farming and the meat industry, that require substantial amounts of labour migrants. Design responses sometimes open limited possibilities and make everyday life easier, but more often, they may reinforce existing inequalities. This subtheme also explores whose knowledge counts (epistemic justice), how experiences are rendered visible or invisible, and how design can avoid reproducing extractive, Eurocentric frameworks. What does ‘designing for justice’ mean from a historic and legal perspective? And what can decolonisation mean for design-based thinking and practices?
Next to its historical relevance, designing also means futuring for migration societies: what kinds of futures are being imagined, by whom, and for whom? Examples may include repair and rebuilding (e.g., of war damage), political imagination, and the role of design in supporting futures grounded in spatial and epistemic justice rather than in mere crisis management.
Theme 2 – Designers for migration societies
Design is not a neutral act – it is always shaped by assumptions, intentions and goals. This implies the need to explore positionality, ethical perspectives, and practices of designers, as actors embedded in larger power webs. The role and positionality of designers in the context of migration societies raise questions about design agency, design justice, responsibility, accountability, and socio-spatial inequality. Who is protected, who is exposed, and who is held responsible? How do designers affect rules and legal frameworks? How does history shape designers' positionality?
This subtheme explores and opens the discussion on spatial justice, legal justice, reparative justice, epistemic justice, and the uneven distribution of responsibility across states, institutions, and actors.
Theme 3 – Design for migration societies
This subtheme explores outcomes, infrastructures, and material consequences. Designs, (designed) strategies, and their outcomes may manifest themselves in various ways in migration societies, for example, in asylum seeker centres, border walls, housing policies for status holders, databases, and laws, such as the Dutch Spreidingswet and the ‘Rotterdamwet’. Less visible but certainly influential are emergency settlement standards, or practices such as resource extraction, pollution distribution, and water governance that shape the spaces, ecologies, and infrastructures of migration.
Design plays an ambiguous role in contexts of conflict, migration, and displacement. It can reinforce exclusion and violence through refugee camps, borders, hostile infrastructures, militarised spatial arrangements, and technocratic governance, but it can also contribute to dignity, care, repair and rebuilding, and more just spatial and institutional responses. For example, how do design thinking and practice contribute to reparative infrastructures accountable to displaced communities?
Program & Exhibition
The conference will include several keynote speeches by renowned scholars (two in the morning, one in the afternoon), a range of parallel panels, and longer design workshops spanning two panel slots. A Call for Panels and Workshops will be issued as soon as possible.
Moreover, we will organise a pop-up exhibition showcasing examples of research, design and arts-based approaches to aspects of contemporary migration societies. Students from LDE-affiliated master tracks will be invited to submit a poster (in a predefined format) digitally; it will be printed for them and exhibited during the conference.
Program Committee
Convenor and conference chair: Reinout Kleinhans (Faculty A&BE).
Members: Annemiek van Boeijen (Faculty IDE), Marh Echtai (Faculty A&BE), Antonio Cantero (Faculty A&BE), Dirim Dinçer (Faculty A&BE), Srijith Balakrishnan (Faculty TPM), Johan Ninan (Faculty CEG),
Co-convenor: Alex Huang & Maria Schiller (LDE GMD Executive Office).