http://www.hfg-ulm.de/455.html?&L=1
The Aesthetics of Accountability
Since 2006, the Ulm International Forum for Design (IFG Ulm), with its advertised promotion program “Designing politics – The politics of design“, has focused on the question of the designer’s responsibility and the democratic quality of design.
The IFG Ulm GmbH, acting on behalf of the HfG Ulm Foundation, promotes architects, designers, urban planners, artists, researchers or publicists with the worldwide largest endowed sum of 50.000 Euro per year. The endowment goes back to a discourse that was first opened more than fifty years ago by the founders Inge Aicher Scholl, “Otl” Aicher and Max Bill.
Using design, the founders were searching for a reaction to the barbaric Hitler Regime, since “culture and politics belong together, because it’s not about awareness or truth but […] about a sensible exchange of opinions on the sphere of public life and the common world, and furthermore about the decision what this world should look like in the future, which things shall appear in it.” (Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture”, 1968).
The IFG Ulm consciously embraces this tradition, a tradition that is rooted in the conviction that the process of creating design is not limited to purely aesthetic, technical and commercial factors; and that design also accrues from the social and political sphere and vice versa.
“Design needs a creative sanctuary in order to be effective. What we search with the IFG are projects that develop a fundamental qualification on in-depth thinking”, explains Dr. Regula Stämpfli, Director of the IFG Advisory Board. “Design projects promoted by us must look beneath the surface of design work”, states Dr. Dieter Bosch, CEO of the HfG Ulm Foundation and Managing Director of the IFG Ulm GmbH. “Design should be seen as an action that has a lasting effect on the economic, political and cultural sphere.”