The Wilhelm Braun-Feldweg Prize for Design-Critical Writing, or ‘bf prize’ for short, which has been promoting design-critical discourse among students and graduates since 2004, is being awarded for the ninth time this year, coinciding with its 20th anniversary. The competition is open to students enrolled in design courses and graduates within two years of completing their studies. The winning text is traditionally published in print.

Charlotte Singer-Fischer was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1999 and graduated in communication design from the Hochschule Darmstadt in the spring of 2024. In her winning paper, the author tackles these burning questions: Is artificial intelligence (AI) a threat to nuanced communication? How will our language change? And how well can a machine really understand us?

According to the jury, her work provides ‘a tour d’horizon of the field of intelligent systems from a designer’s perspective’. Excerpts from George Orwell’s ‘1984’ run through the text as a reminder of the manipulative potential of AI. From the author’s perspective, intelligent systems are neither to be feared nor condemned, idealised nor ignored; instead, they must be used consciously. The key lies in how we shape the technology through our use. The paper ‘Between the Lines. KI – schöne neue Zukunft?‘ (Between the Lines. AI – Beautiful New Future?) was published in the series ‘Designkritische Texte’ by the Swiss publishing house Niggli, with a foreword by bf Prize 2024 mentor Reto Wettach.

The bf Prize jury also gave special mentions to two other works: ‘Seemannsgarn’ by Bastian Thürich from the Berlin University of the Arts is a literary exploration of entanglements, imagination and reality. It recounts an introspective journey of the narrator who encounters a series of remembered and fictional scenarios. Nari Haase from Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle, was awarded for her work ‘sichtbar nachhaltig – Überlegungen zu einer ökologisch lesbaren Ästhetik‘ (Visibly Sustainable – Reflections on an Ecologically Legible Aesthetic). In it, she uses her perspective as a textile designer to analyse the semiotics of sustainability in specific projects, asking how invisible factors such as pollutants can be made visible.

The bf prize is awarded by the Wilhelm Braun-Feldweg Foundation, which was established in 2023. The prize’s namesake, Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Braun-Feldweg (1908-1998), was a pioneer of industrial design in Germany. In 1958, he founded the Industrial Design Department at what is now the Berlin University of the Arts, where he taught until his retirement in 1973. In addition to his work as an educator and designer, he wrote numerous books and essays that contributed significantly to critical reflection on design and explored its role in modern societies.