The German Design Institute is an independent and speculative structure, resulting from a growing discomfort with the lack of visibility of experimentation, research and discourse in design. Design is a socio-cultural practice. Objects of design act as societal elements and they inform our common understandings. Since long, design got more and more subsumed in the field of economy, hence other values dropped out of focus. At the same time design evolved as the ubiquitous ‘soft-power’, applied to all aspects of life, determined by algorithms, political agendas or economic potentials. In the digital age everything turns into an object of design, be it behavioural systems, individual social structures or political movements. The German Design Institute claims the need to question those developments, their inherent structures and modes of operation. Therefore we seek to foster the production of different, multiple and diverse design-perspectives and the widening of channels for display, dissemination and discussion in the field of design.