2027 DESIGN FUTURES
STUDENT FORUM CALL FOR SESSIONS!
Design Futures Forum 2027 is seeking session proposals from practitioners and educators working to build community power through how our cities and spaces are designed. We welcome designers, planners, organizers, builders, artists, policy makers, and more to submit a session that grows student capacity to envision and co-create a world that centers community care and liberation as we dismantle systems of harm.
If you’ve never submitted a proposal or have been unsuccessful in the past, we encourage you to try this year. And whether you’re a seasoned professional or in the early stages of your career, we welcome you to apply!
We also welcome workshop proposals that draw from experiences, skills, and practices specific to the local context in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. We encourage submissions from practitioners who may not think of themselves as being part of built environment disciplines and want to share their expertise.
University of Minnesota will host the 15th annual Forum from Monday June 7th - Friday June 11th 2027 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Schedule
- Tuesday November 10th, 2026: RFP Released
- Monday, January 11th, 2027: Deadline for proposals
- Friday, February 19, 2027: Successful applicants notified
WHAT IS THE DESIGN FUTURES STUDENT FORUM?
Design Futures Forum (DFF) creates education and community building spaces that reimagine the role of the designer towards community power. We are inspired by practices of Design Justice, Just Transition, and transformative justice. Each year, approximately 70 students from 14 different universities come together with faculty and leading practitioners in the field to dive deep on spatial justice and community-based design. Our aim is to provide a space for rigorous learning, radical imagination, and caring relationships that models the world we seek to build.
DESIGN FUTURES STUDENT AUDIENCE
Design Futures students are leaders in community-driven design and spatial justice. Sometimes student participants are enrolled in programs where they are studying built environment disciplines such as planning, architecture, landscape architecture, real estate, or urban design. Some students come from other design and visually-oriented disciplines, including fine art, illustration, graphic design, interaction design, etc. Students from programs such as social work, public health, urban studies, anthropology, sociology, engineering, and business also participate, often bringing specific approaches from their disciplines. Design Futures participants are primarily selected by their schools and are all enrolled in undergraduate or graduate programs. Students come with varied levels of experience and exposure to the topics addressed in Design Futures workshops. Practitioners and university faculty often also participate in sessions, though students remain the focus audience.
CONTEXT: THE DESIGN FUTURES CURRICULUM
While not part of this RFP, the Design Futures Core is a critical track in the program. It will provide the foundational knowledge mentioned above and will be taught by an invited group of leading practitioners. The courses planned to be taught as part of core curriculum in 2027 are as follows:
DESIGN FUTURES ELECTIVES
In addition to the core, there will be several Design Futures Electives, which is the focus of this request for proposals. We are in search of sessions that contextualize, advance and provide practice space for practical skills in designing places of belonging, liberation and healing.
Sessions might explore questions such as:
- What does it take for a community-driven process to be truly accountable to communities most impacted by systemic harm?
- How can we create spaces that are based on caring, sacred relationships to land, our ecosystem, and each other?
- What organizing methods can we learn from to resist and disrupt current harmful trends and plant the seeds for more generative futures?
- What liberatory practices can we learn from to develop radical and rigorous imagination?
- Where has architecture, design, city planning, policy, or public art been on the leading edge in supporting social movements, and what can we learn from these examples?
- How can we make decisions in alignment with our values? What might guide us if we lose motivation or get lost on our path?
Sessions are often one of the following formats:
- Practice spaces that allow students to engage in multiple senses in the learning process and construct their own knowledge. This could involve a combination of short instruction and case study examples, large group discussion, small group collaborative activities, games, co-creating something together, body movement, and engaging in the outdoors.
- Strategy sessions for students to bring their knowledge together to create a collective strategy or brainstorm.
These are just examples; we are very open to your ideas and what you think future leaders in community-driven design and spatial justice need to know! All topics and approaches that are applicable to students dealing with the built environments are welcomed.
Strong workshop proposals must:
- Fit into a 2 hour time slot
- Be interactive experiences for all participants. While it may be necessary to have a lecture style introduction to the workshop, it should be brief and prepare the students for some kind of hands-on, interactive learning experience. Any lecture-style portions should not exceed 15 minutes.
- Go beyond theory. Emphasize practical applications so students walk away feeling clear about how they might apply the workshop to their design practice.
- Create connections between participants
- Be appropriate for a multi-disciplinary group. While the majority of participants are attending schools of design and/or planning, we also have participants coming to this work from different fields such as urban ecology, engineering, public health and others.
- Directly address how your own work addresses systems of harm
- Provide a “takeaway for practice” handout or resource (e.g. best practices, case studies, community engagement workshop planning, etc.)
- Be accessible to folks with different access needs (e.g. visual, mobility, sensory). Design Futures will be collecting access needs requests during registration and will share any relevant needs with facilitators.
HONORARIA
Design Futures will provide a $2100 honorarium (covers both the stipend and travel) for each non-local facilitator, for up to two facilitators for a total of $4200 available for each workshop. Facilitators coming from the Minneapolis area will be paid $1500 each. Any workshops that include additional faculty beyond two members, will be expected to fundraise any additional monies. Honoraria will be issued at the time of workshop delivery. Alternative payment schedule is possible and can be discussed individually as needed.
SELECTION PROCESS
All workshop proposals submitted are reviewed in full by the selection committee. The committee is composed of at least 5 members; the Design Futures Executive Director, two members of the Advisory Board programming committee, two representatives from the host institution.
In addition to assessing the quality of the workshop proposed, the selection committee has a mission to foster a diverse faculty cohort and will take into consideration the backgrounds of the workshop presenters (in terms of gender, race, age, professional affiliation, geographic location, and career advancement) when making its final decisions. We value intergenerational spaces and we encourage proposals from practitioners with less than five years of experience to design and facilitate workshops they would have liked to experience in the early stages of their career or in their education.
Though exceptions can be made, priority will be given to workshop facilitators that are available to attend the first day Opening Circle and Framing of the Forum (Monday, June 7th). We will be creating shared agreements and laying the foundation for relationships and building a community of practice during the week. We hope that facilitators will be a part of the Opening Circle and available for students prior to their workshop. Design Futures faculty are also expected to put aside at least a day and a half of their time to participating in Forum events so the students have more of a chance to get to know you—most of our colleagues find that attending other sessions is quite beneficial to their own professional development and deeply rewarding to be in community with other practitioners, faculty and students.
Please be advised that only one application per institution or organization is permitted.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS