Award
Details and nomination procedure
We welcome nominations for the Artful Integrators Award 2026, to be presented in person in Milan, Italy during PDC 2026. Please download the call for nominations here. The nomination deadline is January 20th, 2026. Please send your nomination by filling this form by midnight, 20 January 2026 (CET).
The Award is intended to recognize outstanding achievement in the area of participatory design of information and communications technologies. Where traditional design awards have gone to individual designers and singular objects, the Artful Integrators Award emphasizes the importance of collaborative participation in design, and a view of good design as the effective alignment of diverse collections of people, practices, and artifacts.
The award will go to a group of people who together have worked out, in an exceptionally creative way, new forms of participation in design. While no single element of a design might be particularly extraordinary in itself, the combination of design processes and resulting possibilities should be.
The group that wins the award will receive free registration of one person to attend the PDC 2026 in Milan, Italy, including a contribution for travel and accommodation.
Chairs: Anna Seravalli and Frederick van Amstel
Email: pdc2026-design@polimi.it
SELECTION
Procedure
The Artful Integrators Award Chairs will evaluate the received nominations and reach a consensus regarding the awardee for 2026. The evaluative criteria includes the following:
1. What are the core values of the project? What is it trying to change and how?
2. What kind of participation does the project allow/encourage/build? Is the project transferable to other people or places? How is the project sustainable or durable?
3. What makes the project’s integration look artful?
4. How is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? Does the project propose creative new forms of integration, even if the final product is not (yet) fully realized?
All participants will be notified of their results, whether or not they receive the award.
The conference organisers will provide a letter of invitation to the winner who will require an Italian visa.
PDC: PEACE, DIALOGUE, COEXISTENCE
Designing for living together.
The Participatory Design Conference 2026.
WHERE
Campus Bovisa Durando
Politecnico di Milano
Milan, Italy
