How can art in general, and design in particular, critically contribute to social change? This paper examines the cultural intervention in the public sphere in Wrocław, Poland, through the project HUG carried out over three months in 2015. Drawing on the Habermasian concept of the public sphere and Charles Taylor’s notion of social imagery to articulate the specificity of Poland’s problematic attitudes towards difference, we demonstrate how this participatory cultural intervention opens a safe space of lifeworld for a human encounter, in which empathy and understanding have a potential for naming exclusion and transforming identities
