Open Call: Design Drafts #4

Details

Nieuwe Instituut and STIR launch an open call for Design Drafts #4, inviting submissions exploring the theme Design Dialects, which focuses on how design knowledge travels, transforms, and is reshaped across cultures, contexts, and systems of power.
Five selected applicants will be invited to participate in writing, editing, and developing sessions with the editorial staff. The contributions will be published on STIR.

Open Call
The 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:
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?

Submission Deadline
Please send your submission to [email protected] before May 15, 2026, 00:00 CEST.

Submission Guidelines

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.

*The Nieuwe Instituut understands that English proficiencies may vary. We also recognise 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 basis of the criteria specified above, regardless of English language proficiency. Proposals should, however, be as clear, thorough, and specific as possible. Nieuwe Instituut is not able to offer translation support. Applicants with reasonable adjustments or specific needs are encouraged to contact [email protected] to discuss available support services.

About the writing trajectory
Five selected applicants will be commissioned to write a contribution to 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.

Selection Process

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.