Open Call: Design Drafts #4Open Call: Design Drafts #4

Drawing from STIR’s understanding of the Global South as a position rather than a place, and from diaspora as a generative condition rather than a loss, Design Drafts #4 themed Design Dialects examines what happens to design knowledge when it travels through migration, digitisation, the violence of standardisation, and the generative chaos of adaptation. In response, it asks what new critical languages for design writing are waiting to be built that are specific, located and in movement?

Although often perceived as a broken or informal version of a language, a dialect is in fact a fully formed system of communication that emerged from a specific community, history, condition or movement. Dialects develop along different social and historical trajectories, often travel through uneven routes of exchange shaped by colonial histories and ongoing geopolitical inequalities, and tend to be unevenly recognised by institutions that determine what counts as ‘proper’ language.

Design knowledge might be thought of as operating in a similar logic as it emerges from situated material logics, cultural grammars, and specific ways of inhabiting the world. In its circulation through education, production lines, digital platforms, supply chains, trade routes, and global markets it is translated, adopted, adapted, repurposed, reinterpreted, copied and often detached from its context of origin. Yet, the institutions that archive design, the platforms that circulate it further and the canons that legitimise it are often not built for all those movements, exchanges and connections. In their gaps and mistranslations, entire traditions of making, thinking and moving have often been lost, extracted, appropriated, or rendered illegible within dominant taxonomies.

Nieuwe Instituut and STIR invite writers, practitioners, critics, and researchers to submit proposals that trace how design knowledge is produced, translated, and reshaped across different contexts: whether through craft traditions, migration, colonial histories and neo-colonial currents, digital infrastructures, informal economies, or institutional frameworks. Contributions may take the form of essays, written design experiments, speculative propositions, fiction, visual arguments, love letters, poems, or other hybrid formats.

Questions to think with (you do not need to answer these directly in your application; they are here to support your thinking):

• How does design knowledge travel; and what does it become when it arrives somewhere it was perhaps never meant to go?
• What design dialects exist in your own practice, locality or community? What design dialect is spoken fluently but never written down, archived or transferred beyond the people who already know them?
• What would a design criticism look like that refused the standard; and instead wrote from the dialect, in the dialect and for the dialect?
• In an era where everything is transmitted, what information still refuses to be delivered; and what does that refusal design in itself?
• Your own piece of writing in Design Drafts #4 will live online, will be read on devices, and discovered through social networks. How does the medium frame the dialect?

Please send your submission to designdrafts@nieuweinstituut.nl before 15 May 2026, 00:00 CEST.

Please submit in a PDF file, in English*:

• A short overview of the topic you propose that responds to the open call and a fitting writing format (an essay, article, interview, piece of fiction, poem, visual essay, a.o) (max. 250 words)
• Who are you? A short introduction (max. 100 words)
• Where can we find you? Full name, country of residence, email address, and telephone number.

*We understand that English proficiencies may vary and that English may not be the applicant’s first or primary language, nor the language their proposal lives in. While proposals should be submitted in English, we welcome different and experimental approaches to translation and language use, including hybrid ways of language use. This can include partial translation or a mix of languages where relevant. All proposals will be considered on the sole basis of the criteria specified above, regardless of English language skills. Proposals should, however, be as thorough and specific as possible. We are not able to offer translation support. Applicants with reasonable adjustments and specific needs are encouraged to contact designdrafts@nieuweinstituut.nl about the availability of any support services.

Following this open call, five selected applicants will be commissioned to write a contribution to the online publishing platform of STIR in collaboration with Design Drafts. All writers will develop their pieces provisionally between June and November 2026 in one-on-one meetings with the editors, in group settings and individually. Each of the five selected writers will receive a fixed fee of 750 EUR.

A pre-selection of applications will be made by the STIR and Nieuwe Instituut teams. An international jury will then select the five writers. The jury will be announced soon.

Applicants are encouraged to submit a proposal with interests in architecture, design, and digital culture, or any practice in between. No experience in formal publishing and design writing is required. We also do not ask for a CV and there is no age limit to this open call.

For inquiries and submissions, please contact designdrafts@nieuweinstituut.nl.

Design Drafts is a growing writing and publishing network dedicated to investigating and drafting what it means to write about design today. Through collaborations between the Nieuwe Instituut and different magazines and publishing platforms, the series sets out to stimulate emerging forms of design writing and discourse. Essentially, Design Drafts instigates a collective search for new languages to write design in.

Previous editions of Design Drafts include Design Drafts #1 in collaboration with Disegno Journal (London), which was released in September 2022 in a publication available separately and as part of Disegno 34. Design Drafts #2 was released in 2023 in collaboration with New York-based magazine PIN-UP. And as part of a collaboration spanning 2024–2025, Design Drafts #3 was developed in partnership with Journal Safar, Issue 9, published between Beirut and Montreal.

STIR is an award-winning global media house and curatorial agency founded in 2014, dedicated to fostering creativity across design, architecture, art, and creative technology. STIR bridges disciplines and geographies through critical storytelling and curatorial initiatives that spark dialogue and celebrate innovation. Its digital magazine, STIRworld.com (launched in 2019), publishes daily, in-depth editorial content exploring contemporary socio-political and cultural themes through a creative lens. With contributions from a global network of writers, it highlights emerging voices and leading thinkers, offering a pluralistic perspective on the ideas and practices shaping the future.