20 Years of BIRD – 30 Books on Design Research

In its 20th anniversary year, the Board of International Research in Design (BIRD) releases its 30th volume: “NERD III – New Experimental Research in Design – Positions and Perspectives”. Edited by Tom Bieling, Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi, the book explores how design can respond to today’s multiple crises. Featuring contributions from researchers across the globe, it highlights a diverse range of experimental approaches – from more-than-human design and co-species production to algorithmic critique and feminist engagements with new materialism. To celebrate the double anniversary, the series will from now on be published in a new, fresh layout.

As a key message, the book points aut that Design cannot be separated from the cultural, political, and ecological values that shape it. It both produces and is produced by these contexts. Against the backdrop of global crises such as climate change, war, inequality, and digital transformation, experimental design becomes a way to explore new forms of knowledge, responsibility, and care. The contributions in this volume demonstrate how designers dissolve boundaries between theory and practice, human and nonhuman, technology and nature through practice-based research. Each project—whether working with bioreceptive textiles, the vitality of salt, prosthetic bodies, or AI participation—reveals how experimentation itself can generate insight.

The works presented in discussed in the book engage with living materials, cohabitation, and non-linear processes, challenging Western ideas of permanence and control. They address how design can rethink power, consent, technology, and difference, showing how uncertainty and failure can become productive forces. Together, the authors propose a research ethos grounded in openness, humility, and critical engagement—positioning design as a practice of becoming, unmaking, and reimagining in a time of ontological crisis.

Contributaions by Svenja Keune, Ariel Cheng Sin Lim, Delia Dumitrescu, Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, Barbara Pollini, Julia Ziener, Franca López Barbera, Athena Grandis, Torben Körschkes, Axel Meunier, Florian Porada, Dulmini Perera, Joseph Lindley, David Philip Green, and Jozef Eduard Masarik.

Tom Bieling, Michelle Christensen & Florian Conradi (Eds.) (2025): NERD III - New Experimental Research in Design: Positions and Perspectives. BIRD Board of International Research in Design, Birkhäuser, Basel/Berlin. ISBN 3-035628807. 204 Pages, 29,- EUR.