NERD 7th Heaven – New Experimental Research in Design Conference – Berlin (6–7 November 2025)

The unique epistemic and innovative potential of Design Research is increasingly recognized across the academic landscape and is in growing demand from institutions, businesses, and policymakers alike. By bridging traditionally separate forms of practice and modes of knowledge, Design Research occupies a distinctive position – one that challenges clear disciplinary boundaries, formal conventions, and implicit assumptions about secured knowledge and linear progress in traditional research fields.

Embracing this inherent openness as a strength, the New Experimental Research in Design (NERD) conference serves as a truly inclusive platform for showcasing, discussing, and critically examining the diverse ways in which design's unique perspectives and capabilities can be employed as a research competence. NERD features contributions from researchers worldwide, spanning all areas of Design Research, with a particular focus on empirical and experimental projects that demonstrate originality – or even boldness – in their choice of topics and methodological approaches.

The conference's emphasis on empirical and experimental work reflects our conviction that the discourse on the value and potentials of Design Research should be led by example: What constitutes an effective method or approach only becomes evident when put into practice. For this reason, NERD also does not adhere to any predefined topics or schools of thought, recognizing that the qualitatively new transcends established categories.

Developed and realized by BIRD – the Board of International Research in Design, which publishes the book series of the same name at Birkhäuser – as an annual event with changing venues, NERD has firmly established itself and proven its productivity as a conference format, now entering its seventh iteration.

This year's conference, NERD 7th Heaven, will take place at the studio of New Practice in Art and Technology, the research platform of the inter-institutional Master's program Design and Computation at Technische Universität Berlin and Berlin University of the Arts.