This year's Swiss Design Network Conference 2012 in Lugano focuses on the dialectical relationship between design and disruptive ideas, practices and innovations.

In particular, we recognize that interaction and interactivity have become core concepts, questioning and reshaping a world of rapid change in society, sciences and technology. In addition, one could argue that design and design processes from all design fields – including fashion design, visual communication, interior design, industrial design, product design, and so forth – share a dominant role in making proposals for future interactions between the built world, human beings and systems. Thereby interaction and interactivity – in the sense of interaction design or in a broader sense as social interaction between actors – currently appear as promising concepts for the discourse of disruption and radical change in economy, culture, politics etc.

What do designers do to fundamentally change accepted rules (or to completely remove them) or to radically change the context and the environment in which these rules operate?

How do designers re-think and hack the taken-for-granted? How do they create and communicate new perspectives on the use of existing artifacts? How do they invent new ways of participation and how do they visualize the obvious and the unforeseen? How do they disrupt their own ideologies? How do designers react to and interact with disruptive changes and innovations? Furthermore, do designers disrupt or will they be disrupted?

The conference is looking for projects which identify, describe and invent design practices, processes, methods and strategies which provide the potential for sudden and substantial change in value systems. Disruptive Interaction aims to investigate and discuss the capability, the responsibility and the agency of design in areas of disruptive change.