TIME IS PRESENT. Designing the Common is the title chosen for the 4th Porto Design Biennale edition, which begins on october 23, with an inaugural program that extends through Sunday, october 26. It invites a shift in our daily perspective: instead of critically tackling the anxiety of modern temporality, it suggests to observe the potential of qualitative time. The present is  not seen as a crisis to overcome, rather as a gift filled with collective possibilities waiting to be activated. This perspective fully inhabits the now rather than projecting into speculative futures.

Considering time as a shared resource and design as a political practice, the 4th edition of the Porto Design Biennial intervenes in the typical temporariness of these events, changing their structure and formats. Applying an affective and tentacular logic, it is a living process that actively produces new social relations, forms of organisation and modes of collaboration.

Activating interventions between the cities of Porto and Matosinhos, it consolidates a permanent, co-participated offer for citizens. We call these interventions Happisodes because they have a generative function, and we hope they will all bring joy, hope, and collective care to the construction of the Common. Design interventions that structure space differently inevitably restructure time differently.

At Casa do Design, the main exhibition TIME IS PRESENT. Designing the Common gives voice to more than 60 authors — partly selected by Open Call. Organised according to the most participatory common factor — our emotions — the exhibition reveals how designers collectively prioritise the relational, collaborative, and qualitative dimensions of shared experience over the extractive logic of contemporary capitalism.

This affective approach also extends to editorial formats, as seen in the exhibition catalogue and in Parallaxes: Common Stories, a collection of short fiction seeking to uncover possibilities for resistance and joy.

 

Porto Design Biennale is organised by esad—idea, Research in Design and Art, and promoted in collaboration with two municipalities (Porto and Matosinhos), in partnership with ESAD — College of Art and Design.