Searching for Heterotopia.

Foucault referred to prisons, cemeteries, theaters, ships, or even brothels as heterotopias, as ‘other spaces’ that are indeed real, but at the same time embody another world. Meanwhile, the heterotopia has evolved from a cultural-historical phenomenon to a format of art and activism, urban planning and design: Heterotopias are designed. Against this background, the Department of Design at Folkwang University of the Arts ventured into an experiment from 2012 to 2019, the most exciting results of which are presented for discussion in this publication: the graduate program “Heterotopia” and the affiliated Institute for Transdisciplinary Design. 

With Rüdi Bauer, Marion Digel, Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius (Raumlabor), Alan Shapiro and Sibylle Peters (Theatre of Research), five very different artists and teachers helped shape the program. They bring reflections and experiments on the design of democratic assemblies and on design as destruction to this volume, as well as the question of what transdisciplinary design can learn from Star Trek or what stacking up actually has to do with stacking up.