Bianka Majer
(she/her)
I am a designer focused on people, culture, and the places that shape identity. Rooted in research and driven by lived experience, my practice sits at the intersection of communication design, sound, and systems thinking, using design as a tool for social connection and cultural celebration. I am drawn to the stories that communities carry and the spaces where those stories go unheard, and I believe design has a responsibility to amplify them. My work explores how design can exist in public space in a way that is ambient, accessible, and genuinely felt by the people who encounter it. I believe the most impactful design points are personal and nuanced, and they don’t ask you to seek them out.
My work explores how culture, heritage, and belonging can be woven into everyday experiences, making the invisible visible and the unheard audible. I see design not just as a means of communication, but as a form of activism: a way of building empathy, fostering integration, and creating a more generous understanding of what it means to share a place.
Common Threads
Common Threads is a live-streamed, evolving document of Glasgow’s multicultural identity. A city-wide sonic campaign working towards more integrated and empathetic cultural relationships, it places site-specific listening posts across Glasgow’s neighbourhoods, where soundscapes representing each local area’s culture play on a rotating schedule throughout the year. Common Threads was born from a belief that the immigrant experience should not be carried quietly or apologised for. It should be celebrated, shared, and woven into the fabric of the places we call home.
These soundscapes are built from field recordings, community contributions, and live sonic capture, and they constantly evolve with the communities they represent. Archiving within an institution builds over time into an ongoing sonic history of Glasgow’s cultural landscape. The campaign runs year-round, moving through stages of community engagement, feeding back into the next in an expanding spiral of impact. Outcomes include three original soundscapes, a campaign guide, a visual identity system, a public submission archive, a short film, and legacy artefacts that communicate the campaign’s future potential.
Common Threads questions who gets to be heard in public space, whose culture is considered part of a city’s identity, and what it truly means to belong. It seeks meaningful disruption through sound and genuine connection through shared experience.
A short film exploring Glasgow's multicultural identity through the voices and sounds of its communities.
