Vita
Felix Kosok is a design researcher and graphic designer. He completed his doctorate in 2020 at the HfG Offenbach on the aesthetic-political dimension of design. He has been a Communication Design and Design Theory professor at the German International University Berlin since 2021. Since 2024, he has been the director of the design discourse for World Design Capital Frankfurt RheinMain 2026 under the motto of “Design for Democracy”.
Talk
What if the most political act a designer can perform is to stop making decisions for others? Felix Kosok explores design as a practice of distributed creative agency — one that doesn’t solve problems on behalf of people, but opens the conditions in which others can begin to imagine and shape our shared world. Moving beyond participation and transparency, his argument concerns the culture of freedom that democracy depends on.
Part of Block 3
The Berlin Format
Design in Everyday Life Design as everyday infrastructure — from democratic form to the typography read by billions.
