Designing Connections

The latest iteration of BIO, Ljubljana’s design biennale, aims at the full socialization of design and miraculously succeeds.

- Brendan Cormier

What good is a biennale? It’s an increasingly urgent question across the art and design worlds as a palpable biennale fatigue sets in. It afflicts both practitioners—who take on paltry commissions in disparate locations with vague promises of prestige—and critics, who out of a deep fear of missing out feel compelled to board more and more low-cost flights to keep tabs on the next big thing.

The reason for biennales’ proliferation seems commonsensical in a way that is already dated. It’s premised on that early millennial rhetoric of “creative cities,” first propounded by Richard Florida and then regurgitated en masse by civic officials the world over: the idea that local economies will succeed only by building up creative capital, attracting smart people, and, through a certain magical alchemy, creating innovative things. And so cities as far-flung as Shenzhen, Istanbul, and Seoul are now all competing for our attention, through architecture and design biennales in different guises.

Meanwhile, in the unsung city of Ljubljana, Slovenia, an entirely different approach is being taken. In a curious twist of history, Ljubljana happens to host Europe’s oldest design biennale. Called BIO, it was founded in 1963 to promote consumption of Yugoslavian products, operating as a fairly standard industrial design showcase for most of its existence. It was only in 2014 that the biennale’s host institution, MAO, repositioned the event as a live experiment in which different stakeholders would be brought together to explore design’s potential to instigate positive change in its broadest sense. The first renewed version tasked teams of designers from across Europe with working on various projects that investigated local Slovenian conditions. The results were understandably messy, sometimes surprising, but on the whole it was a valiant effort at testing out new ways for a biennale to operate.