KISDtalk with Bianca Kóczán

What if we designed the way we work together as carefully as we design our projects? In her KISDtalk, designer Bianca Kóczán presents the Greenhouse of Colleagueship and explores how collegiality itself can become a design task. At the heart of the talk are questions of visibility, competition, shared authorship and solidarity.

The Talk

📅 17 November 2026
🕠 5:30–7:00 PM
📍 KISD, Room 11

Which action of a colleague repaired something in you? And when did you make someone invisible so that only you could be seen? These are the questions asked by the Greenhouse of Colleagueship, a small walk-in house I designed with Philipp Stingl and Mara Recklies for the DGTF conference 2026. Cards collect acts of repair. Visitors carve experiences of erasure, exploitation and complicity into its linoleum walls, such as competition over scarce resources, the appropriation of others’ work or their own silence. The walls are later printed. Design education today speaks a lot about care, participation, intersectionality and planetary transformation, mostly with communities out there in mind. The closest community remains undesigned: our own colleagues, whose working relations are shaped by fixed-term contracts, classism and the logic of the “good” CV.
Bringing theory and practice together, the talk follows the greenhouse through further iterations. These include Status wo? Klassismus und Mode, localizing design stories, an Our Ways of Working Walk, and a box camera at ITB Bandung with which everyone takes one picture: blurred, opaque, yet legible to all who took part. In these iterations, shared authorship, de-canonisation and solidarity become practices that can be designed. This raises a question about our role: what if we designed the way we work together as carefully as we design our projects? The greenhouse is coming to Cologne, and everyone is invited to step inside.

Bianca Kóczán
is a Berlin-based designer, doctoral researcher at the AkBild Vienna, and a guest professor of Interior Architecture at BURG Halle. Her transdisciplinary practice connects Research-through-Design, design education, and design histories with a situated approach to social justice, class, and accessibility. Raised in East Germany with a postmigrant working-class background, she treats this lived experience as an epistemological resource. As a guest professor and lecturer in Conceptual Fashion Design, lecturer in intersectional design histories, interim professor of Fashion Design, Visiting Professor of Fashion and Industrial Design, and acting professor of Design Studies, she designs seams and layerings, in this sense contact zones, in which the potentials of an encounter between theory and practice unfold. With 10+ years of teaching, research and practice across institutions like BURG Halle, Esmod Berlin, GIU Cairo, HBK Braunschweig, HfK Bremen, HTW Berlin, ITB Bandung and UDK Berlin she advocates for marginalized perspectives to inhabit design ecologies and educational spaces structurally. Her research spans critical inquiries on solidarities and adjacencies in Berlin fashion scenes and digital media; locates design stories and facilitates counter-archives; practices colleagueship as a site of social design; and elaborates demonstrators as boundary objects beyond visual and performative methods and new foundations for eco-social and transformative design education.

Project photo © Bianca Kóczán
Portrait photo © HTW Berlin