Interview with Claudia Banz

What does social design mean for you?
It’s still a utopia.

Could you give some directions of how you would define social design?
Without wanting to use the word utilitarianism, for me social design is a principle in the sense of Jeremy Bentham’s creating the best possible world for the greatest possible number of people.

What are you doing or showing at Utrecht Manifest? Could you explain how these activities relate to social design?
I am curator of the exhibition Unresolved Matters in the Centraal Museum, which throws light on the theme of social design from a more historical perspective. Many of the questions that are raised at the moment regarding the task and responsibility of design and designers go back a long way, in fact they are almost timeless questions about the desire for a better and more just world. Around 1900, particularly in Germany and the Netherlands – inspired by England – there was an increasing concentration of social reform initiatives to form a more overarching social reform movement. Much of what we take for granted today, such as garden cities, allotments, and heat-resistant glass go back to these reform movements and are an expression of social design. This exhibition aims to focus on several facets of social design between 1900 and 1970 in a new, dialogic way that we hope will also appeal to the visitors. The title is programmatic: according to me, when we talk about social design, we are always talking about unresolved matters.

What are the most urgent topics that need to be discussed?
The biggest challenge is to design the ecological turn in such a way that future generations too will be able to live on our planet. In this context I call for a third Enlightenment in the sense of overcoming the hedonistic era.