12th Biennale Internationale Design de Saint-Étienne (in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region) will take place on 6 April - 31 July 2022 under the theme "Bifurcations: Choose the essential". It will feature 7 exhibitions and over 200 events.

Sponsored by Ville de Saint-Étienne, France's only Unesco Creative City of Design, and by Saint-Étienne Métropole, Biennale welcomes visitors from all over the world, designers, researchers, economic actors, intellectuals, students and others, who come to query the practice of design and experiment with its methods.

March 2020 saw a bifurcation open up in French life, a change of direction in record time. The way we lead our lives changed radically. The experience of restrictions and lockdowns, implemented simultaneously all over the world, has been a life-changing experience. Taking this test of our resilience as a starting point, thinking about negotiating these bifurcations becomes a challenge that is mobilising the design community and allied professionnals as a whole and opening a key cultural debate at the center of the issues facing our technico-industrial society.

Africa, a continent where these contemporary ecological and political challenges are pivotal, is this edition's guest of honour. One exhibition will focus on inspiring practices coming out of Africa.

Seven exhibitions will look at what is at stake in design, in important areas of everyday life : domestic spaces, cars, the body, ways of learning, modes of consumption and production. What is design already doing? What more can it do? How can it do it differently?

Learn more about the event on its website here.