Design workshop: Making banks – Finance and Society Network

Design workshop: Making banks
Copenhagen Business School, 10 September 2025

Organisers: FSN/OMG
Facilitators: Koray Caliskan, Annmarie Ryan
Host: Copenhagen Business School

Call for participants available here

The workshop invites participants to collectively imagine and prototype bank-making, ranging from the speculative and the central to the decentralised and even the impossible. It is a dynamic, hands-on session that demonstrates how design can open up novel ways of analysing and reconfiguring matters of concern in finance and society. Rather than treating banks as stable, taken-for-granted organisations, the workshop positions them as socio-technical assemblages of devices, human actors, representations, and networks that can be analysed and reshaped through creative intervention and organisational design practice.

Through facilitated design exercises, participants will experiment with the material-organisational infrastructures and relations that constitute banking. What would a speculative bank look like if designed around ecological assets? How might a decentralised bank function without central authority? And what can we learn from imagining impossible banks that defy existing economic and regulatory logics? Can banks work without money? What would a bank for a barter economy look like?

By blending design methods with insights from the social sciences, the workshop offers tools for rethinking finance as a site of experimentation. No prior design experience is required, nor any detailed technical expertise in money and banking – only a willingness to speculate, prototype, and reimagine.

Facilitated by

Koray Caliskan, Parsons School of Design, The New School, USA
Annmarie Ryan, Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick, Ireland

Participation is limited to 25 people and registration is required. To register for a place, please write to koraycaliskan@newschool.edu.

The workshop is organised by the Finance and Society Network (FSN) and the Organizations, Markets and Governance Research Group (OMG) in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School.