Welcome

Staying with the Unknown: Anticipation 2026

The 6th International Conference on Anticipation invites you to engage with the unknown as a generative condition for rethinking how futures are sensed, imagined, and made. Anticipatory modes become sites of inquiry, experimentation, and negotiation with uncertainty. How do we act without guarantees? What does it mean to design in the presence of uncertainty, rather than despite it? How can anticipation become a collective, ethical, and situated practice in the face of systemic crises and shifting imaginaries?

The Anticipation 2026 edition centers practices that stay with complexity, those that problematize rather than solve, slow down rather than accelerate, and cultivate plural ways of knowing. Anticipation 2026 brings together a transdisciplinary community of scholars, designers, artists, theorists, educators, planners, and activists. We come together to share, question, and recompose the conditions under which futures are thought, contested, and performed.

Hosted at Politecnico di Milano’s Design Department, this edition proposes design as a critical site of anticipatory engagement, a place where design is understood as an open, reflexive, and anticipatory practice. Here, design operates beyond disciplinary boundaries, engaging with world-making, resisting closure, and enabling plural ways of knowing and imagining what could be. Design engages with unmaking as much as with making; it embraces the provisional, the collective, and the situated. This conference extends and amplifies these practices, seeing design as a dynamic force capable of disrupting normative futures and imagining otherwise.

Join us in Milan to stay with the unknown, and to anticipate otherwise.