Cumulus Design Declaration (2025)

In June 2025 the Cumulus Association, the international association of art, design and media schools, adopted a new design declaration to replace the position it had taken at Kyoto in 2008. Its own opening paragraph explains why: given the pace of change and the contemporary challenges society faces, the association set out to revisit the Kyoto Design Declaration and reaffirm design's commitment to society and the planet. The revision was not a drafting-committee exercise. It ran for two years through surveys, workshops and discussion forums involving associates representing 400 educational institutions and more than 40 institutional partners, with semantic and data analysis alongside. The document has five sections and each carries one move. From Human-Centered to Planet-Centered argues for a paradigm shift away from human-driven development toward planet-centred design as the basis for an interdependent coexistence between humans and non-humans, on the grounds that every design action has an impact on the entire system of life called Earth. Rethinking Sustainability credits the Sustainable Development Goals with driving real change in policy and production while arguing that what is now needed is a paradigm shift toward a new contract with nature, and alliances across institutions, disciplines, civil society and government to promote regenerative cultures. Inclusiveness and Togetherness states that conviviality must be redesigned to promote social justice and strengthen trust, and that design needs a permanent agenda promoting empathy and care as drivers for peace. Design in Plural is the section that reaches furthest. It observes that cultural exchanges and information flows run mainly from dominant regions to the global south, states that decolonising design needs to happen so that innovation benefits localities, and calls for a pluriversal approach that reconnects with diverse knowledge from indigenous wisdom to science and holds a deep responsibility to each community and to the different ways of being in the world. The final section, Disruption with Rapidly Changing Technologies, treats artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and cognitive sciences as transforming what is understood as human, names information surveillance and augmented technologies as post-human realities, and argues that designers are well placed to envision possible futures in transdisciplinary teams. This is a declaration by an association of schools, not a law and not a professional code. It binds nobody, carries no compliance mechanism, and creates no obligation on any student, teacher or practitioner. Its weight is the weight of who wrote it: several hundred institutions that between them educate a large share of the people who will practise design over the next decades. One correction is worth recording for anyone comparing this record against earlier project notes. An internal reference report of 2026-08-12 described the declaration as having five pillars named regenerative design, radical inclusivity, transdisciplinary collaboration, decolonising practice and an ethic of care. That is a fair paraphrase of the substance but it is not the document's own structure, and this record follows the headings the declaration actually prints.