In the “Global Design” exhibition, the curator Angeli Sachs takes the container – the perfect metaphor of the global village – as the starting point for an investigation into how globalisation is changing not only the world we live in but also the design sphere. How have architecture, design, graphic design, fashion, industrial and product design have changed since the 1970s? The answer lies in global networks and communication, production, trade, finance and mobility are explored via films, products, clothes, images and models by artists such as Thomas Demand, Fischli/Weiss, Didier Faustino, Armin Linke and Allan Sekula.

This exhibition describes the effects of an increasingly globalised world on design but also asks how design can respond to globalisation. How would you define global design?
We distinguish between the design of globalisation (planning and control of financial and political processes, supranational networks linked to communication, mobility, production, trade and capital) and globalised design since the 1970s, such as containers, international airports, luggage on wheels, credit cards, iPhones, T-shirts and jeans, sushi, IKEA and MTV – to name but a few. These designs are well known, accepted, readily available and work in different cultural contexts.

In what areas is design best able to keep up with globalisation and which design fields have had it hardest?
I think design keeping pace with globalisation is especially visible in all fields linked to communication, mobility and general consumption. Specialised design for a smaller public may have a harder time.

In recent years, we have seen the increasingly fashionable phenomenon of design-art, which seems conceptually the exact opposite of globalisation. How can this apparent contradiction be explained?
It is a contradiction similar to the huge phenomenon of regionalism. Design-art is probably the wish for something unique in a global world filled with standard designs.

The Nobel Prize-winner for economics, Joseph Stiglitz, writes that “economic growth may not lead automatically to the social”. How can design help restore the equilibrium?
The financial and economical recession has given an insight into these dark aspects of globalisation and its imbalance. To re-balance this situation, design should (like other fields) take responsibility for the whole process, from the raw materials to the production process (which includes working conditions) and recycling.

Does globalisation in design mean exchange and cultural enrichment or a levelling out and uniformity?
Both are possible, it depends on the example. The critical discourse on globalisation has introduced terms such as “McDonaldisation” and “McWorld” but it underestimates people’s ability within the consumer culture to receive, appropriate and creatively translate, and it is contradicted by new research concepts such as the term “glocalisation” introduced by the sociologist Roland Robertson, which describes a complex interaction between the global and the local that leads to hybrid identities in which contents from different cultural contexts are constantly brought together to form new cultural patterns.

In the midst of a global economic crisis, what has changed in the world of design?
Probably an awareness of a new “less is more”. A design that is less focused on trends but based on concepts, quality, responsibility and sustainability.