The Production Platform supports new design-research projects developed in Slovenia in collaboration with local expertise, institutional partners, industry actors, and communities. It offers a flexible structure for collaboration, site visits, and knowledge exchange, emphasising situated experimentation and collective learning.

Under the title Soft Fields, curated by Martina Muzi, with Ro Pérez Gayo, associate research curator, BIO 29 examines how knowledge enclosed within research, industrial and infrastructural environments can be opened, redirected and redistributed through design practice. The curatorial concept asks how design operates not only inside structured systems, but also along their edges, where access is partial, information is uneven, and responsibilities are shared. How does industrial or scientific knowledge circulate beyond laboratories, factories and technical documents? How can it enter public, social and spatial experience? And how might design function as a collective agency rather than an individual solution?

A soft field is not a site, object, or category. It is a condition where intentions meet constraints, where knowledge is applied differently, and where values and relations are reorganised. As such, soft fields are spaces of negotiation rather than control. They emerge from the tension between globally exported design strategies and the urgency of local social, ecological and economic realities. In response, Soft Fields asks how design can engage these conditions without reinforcing them. Design is understood as a situated, multidisciplinary practice that takes position within friction, asymmetry and structural opacity. Rather than resolving complexity, design operates within it, revealing hidden processes, translating specialised knowledge, and reshaping relations between institutions, environments, objects, and everyday life.

BIO 29 is organised as a soft, adaptive structure that supports collaborations across design, research, education, industry, and local communities. Rather than following a fixed model, the biennial functions as an evolving infrastructure that allows different forms of collectivity, self-organisation and context-responsive practice to emerge.

We invite local and regional designers and interdisciplinary practitioners, working individually or collectively, to apply.

Applications are open until 26 February 2026.

Apply: Submit your project via the online form >>