The 29th Biennial of Design – BIO 29 will take place between 19 November 2026 and 4 April 2027. It is organised by the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in collaboration with the Centre for Creativity (CzK).


Under the title Soft Fields, curated by Martina Muzi, with Ro Pérez Gayo, associate research curator, BIO 29 examines how knowledge enclosed within research, industrial and infrastructural environments can be opened, redirected and redistributed through design practice. The curatorial concept asks how design operates not only inside structured systems, but also along their edges, where access is partial, information is uneven, and responsibilities are shared. How does industrial or scientific knowledge circulate beyond laboratories, factories and technical documents? How can it enter public, social and spatial experience? And how might design function as a collective agency rather than an individual solution?


A soft field is not a site, object, or category. It is a condition where intentions meet constraints, where knowledge is applied differently, and where values and relations are reorganised. As such, soft fields are spaces of negotiation rather than control. They emerge from the tension between globally exported design strategies and the urgency of local social, ecological and economic realities. In response, Soft Fields asks how design can engage these conditions without reinforcing them. Design is understood as a situated, multidisciplinary practice that takes position within friction, asymmetry and structural opacity. Rather than resolving complexity, design operates within it, revealing hidden processes, translating specialised knowledge, and reshaping relations between institutions, environments, objects, and everyday life.


BIO 29 is organised as a soft, adaptive structure that supports collaborations across design, research, education, industry, and local communities. Rather than following a fixed model, the biennial functions as an evolving infrastructure that allows different forms of collectivity, self-organisation and context-responsive practice to emerge.


Organizational Framework – A Soft Infrastructure


The organisational framework connects design practices with interdisciplinary research, cultural and educational institutions, industry partners, and local knowledge holders. Through intertwined clusters of collaboration, BIO 29 enables the co-development of plural and intersectional projects that respond to contemporary social, ecological, technological and political urgencies. Governance is understood as a multi-scalar and relational process, shaped by negotiation, shared responsibility and shifting roles, rather than rigid hierarchies.


The organisational framework is designed by learning from the legacy of BIO (initiator of collaborative design work productions, pedagogical-oriented and locally situated) and reframing it into an expanded intersectional process where autonomy of the making and sharing of resources is negotiated by individual or group participants together with the curatorial team. It is composed of four frameworks developed in parallel and in connection to each other.


Experimental Practices


This supports the development of new design-research projects through collaboration between selected designers, the curatorial team, local expertise in Slovenia, and institutional and industry partners. While a shared thematic orientation provides a common point of departure, each new design-research project is a locally situated case developed through its own methodology and in response to its specific context, needs and working conditions. The production platforms invite designers to participate through the BIO 29 – Soft Fields open call and commissions.


Works of Resonance


This brings together projects already developed in other geographical and cultural contexts that engage with questions central to BIO 29. These works function as resonant agents rather than references, contributing parallel investigations that expand the biennial’s field of inquiry and generate new connections without being reduced to models or solutions. These projects are invited to be part of the publishing outcomes of the Biennial and contribute through their voices, media, techniques and strategies to generate an expanded geography of contemporary design practices.


Extended Transmissions


This connects BIO 29 with designers, collectives and initiatives operating in diverse localities through satellite projects and parallel activations. Instead of exporting the biennial’s structure, this platform engages with existing practices, reactivating or amplifying ongoing activities that resonate with BIO 29’s concerns and modes of engagement through design.


Afterclass


In the Biennial process, this framework functions as a laboratory for understanding local practices in relation to international design urgencies, and as a curatorial experiment for supporting the development of the other BIO 29 frameworks.


It operates as a transversal layer, engaging with interdisciplinary research, cultural and educational institutions, industry partners, and local knowledge holders and their ongoing inquiries, projects and expertise for the formulation of the publishing outcomes. It directly connects with local agents and their sites of work, documentations, publications, archives, stories and processes.


Agents – A Collective Anatomy


In its effort to move beyond traditionally defined roles, address power imbalances and prioritise diversity, BIO 29 experiments with alternative distributions of where agency circulates across people, practices and contexts. Participation is organised through varying levels of implication, presence and contribution, allowing different voices to enter, withdraw, and reconfigure the process. Knowledge is approached as a shared resource that exceeds disciplinary boundaries, encouraging collective formulation and choral authorship before, during and beyond the biennial.

Within this collective anatomy, coordinators support the articulation of collaborative processes across clusters, design-research projects and exhibition production, while the curatorial team remains attentive to contextual shifts, offering guidance without directing outcomes. Participants of the Production Platform (individual practitioners or collectives) selected through the open call form the core of each case, developing project proposals in dialogue with promoters, local knowledge holders, and institutional partners.


Documentarians translate these processes into experimental forms of narrative, mapping and reflection, while artistic and creative voices offer periodic stimulus and perspective. Extended Transmissions agents and Works of Resonance contributors bring in situated practices from other contexts, expanding the biennial’s collective intelligence. Afterclass visualise and materialise the process contributing to the publishing of the BIO 29 as Soft Infrastructure.


Publishing – A Laboratory of Formats


BIO 29 treats publishing as an expanded practice. Exhibitions, printed matter, digital platforms and public programming are understood as mediating and amplifying devices for ongoing research processes. These formats do not simply present outcomes, but collect, translate and materialise the biennial’s conceptual frameworks and collaborative experiments. Publishing becomes a space for testing how knowledge circulates, how processes are made visible, how design can participate in society, and how different forms of expertise can be shared across contexts, disciplines and publics.


Through research and experimentation with processes and configurations of agents, BIO 29 explores hybrid organisational structures that incorporate diverse forms of knowledge, actors, and ways of working. Attention is given to narrative, mapping, measuring, indexing, and other experimental formats that allow processes to be traced, translated and amplified. In this way, publishing becomes a method for questioning established design protocols, challenging normalised systems of production, and opening space for alternative forms of organisation and activation of design work or collaboration with design work.



The publishing outcomes are:

• Exhibition at the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) and other spaces in Slovenia in the frames of BIO 29