At Odds: Why Design Needs Debate Again
PublishedNot every interesting project at a design festival is an object. At this year's 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen, one of the most compelling installations contains neither a new...
Not every interesting project at a design festival is an object.
At this year's 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen, one of the most compelling installations contains neither a new chair nor a new lamp. Instead, it offers something increasingly rare: disagreement.
Created by designers Silvio Rebholz and Sina Sohrab, At Odds: An Archive of Debate turns Copenhagen's independent publishing space Bladr into a temporary archive of design criticism. Nearly 200 texts line the walls - letters, essays, interviews, manifestos, and arguments written by designers who believed that public discussion was an essential part of practice.
Visitors are invited to browse, photocopy, and assemble their own publication from the material they find most relevant.
The gesture is simple, almost deliberately low-tech. A photocopier sits at the centre of the exhibition.
Yet the project asks a surprisingly contemporary question: why has critical writing become so difficult to find in creative industries today?
Design has never lacked opinions. Historically, practitioners openly challenged each other through publications, essays, interviews, and public debates. Ideas were tested, criticised, defended, and refined. Disagreement wasn't seen as conflict; it was part of the discipline itself.
Today, much of that conversation feels harder to locate.
We are surrounded by more content than ever, yet much of it is promotional. Product launches, campaign imagery, trend reports, and carefully managed narratives circulate constantly, while critical reflection increasingly happens behind closed doors, if it happens at all.
That observation extends well beyond industrial design.
Fashion, art, publishing, and visual culture face similar questions. Independent media platforms continue to emerge, yet thoughtful criticism often struggles to find visibility within an ecosystem driven by algorithms, speed, and engagement metrics.
Perhaps this is why At Odds feels particularly relevant.
The exhibition isn't nostalgic for a pre-digital past. Instead, it reminds us that creative disciplines grow through conversation, not consensus. The archive assembled by Rebholz and Sohrab isn't presented as a definitive history, but as an invitation to participate, to read, question, disagree, and contribute.
At a moment when design is increasingly asked to address environmental, social, and technological challenges, the ability to debate ideas openly may be as important as the ability to produce new objects.
The most interesting thing in the room might not be the archive itself.
It might be the assumption behind it: that design culture is something we actively build together, one argument at a time.
