Besides co-running his own publishing house, Offing Press, you may have picked up some of the books he has co-authored, including Social Matter, Social Design (2020, with Jan Boelen) and The Auto-Ethnographic Turn in Design (2023, with Louise Schouwenberg). His latest piece, A Designer’s Guide to Rogue Ethnography, is out this autumn via Valiz. We speak about the intersections between ethnography and design, education beyond the classroom, publishing after AI, and what The Good Soldier Švejk might teach designers about living through an increasingly uncertain present.
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In September, you welcomed a new cohort into the Master’s in Social Ecological Design at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Torino, of which you’ve been a co-head since 2025. What’s the genesis of the program?
My own discontent with design education. Why? Because it seems like there's a false binary. You have maker-oriented programs – which are beautiful and I really believe in making – but there's so little reflection. And then, since mid-'90s, a bunch of design schools maybe overcorrected and went too much into conceptualisation, resulting in this game where everything artistic ends up being a critique in a very non-generative way.
I love critique. But what I'm looking for in design is how we can move towards giving form to ideas and realising these in processes or in collaborations. And so in the program, we thought, how do we move beyond this impediment while still being intellectual, while still being interested in giving form? How do I then bring design into real-world situations? How can I bring design education to communities and spaces without being caught up in the vacuum of critique?
There's also a real heaviness because essentially how we see the world is how the social and ecological are entwined. In the program, we see these two parts as bound within cycles of oppression. When we talk about exploitation of migrants or women, that's related to the exploitation of nature and vice versa. It's an anarchist perspective. It sees forms of hierarchy as a root cause.
If we're going to talk about nature, well, we don't talk about it in the classroom. Maybe we go to the Alps in winter and sleep in a mountain hut where nature is not this beautiful idyllic setting. It's hostile. It's freezing and our feet are wet. We go out at night and we stare at the moon and then you hear the wolves howling and scamper back inside and realize how small we are and how kind of pathetic we are as humans. And the grandiose ambitions as designers to save the world crumble at the reality that we can't save ourselves in the grand expanse of the Alps. It’s not all hardship, we also baste ourselves under the Tuscan sun doing biomimicry and endure the sweet Autumnal winds in Sicily while working with local communities–human or otherwise.
Looking back over the past years, how have you seen design education evolve in response to the social and ecological crises we are living through?
I think design education is very much in crisis and it has been for some time. At the same time there is a desire for a new type of engaging with the world. It's not so much what is social ecological design, it's fundamentally what is design today? We look at the modernist design and we celebrate it. Why? Because it's easy to say that's design. It's a clear object. It's the birthchild of a problem-solution formulation. We can put it in a gallery. We can talk about it. We can put it in a magazine. We can describe it. We have a language for it.
And then all of a sudden, the 1990s emerges and postmodernism says, no, actually, maybe we need to break from that and formulate new social-material compositions. Now today, design isn’t bound in the same way to objects. It's moving through bodies and spaces and networks and systems. This opened up new possibilities and at the same time it’s become more difficult to engage it in meaningful dialogue. It conceals certain logics, power dynamics and hierarchies. There is a new form of pragmatism and utilitarianism at play, which I am worried about. We are denying materiality and form.
“The Auto-Ethnographic Turn in Design” – which you co-authored with Louise Schouwenberg – still continues to circulate intensely online. For the uninitiated, can you elaborate on the concept? And where do you see the potentials, but also perhaps the limits, of the “auto-ethnographic” within design practice?
Five years ago, I put a book together with Louise Schouwenberg based largely on her kind of pedagogical work at Design Academy Eindhoven. It was instrumental in promoting a type of design used as a way of understanding the self and the culture of the self. Instead of saying, I'm the invisible good designer designing for the ‘other’, it recentres the designer to the position of I'm going to make myself very much part of this. I'm going to explore myself and my own identity, traumas, human frailty, et cetera. And I saw that as a bit of a phenomena that was occurring, especially in some circles in Europe.
I didn't think the book would be so popular, but I think it struck a chord for two reasons. One is that it makes sense of something happening in design that people are vaguely aware of. And the second is that it can be important for a practice to start from the self as opposed to constantly projecting on to others. Occasionally, this produces really good design. But I've also seen how it leads to a kind of anti-intellectualism, how designers don't want to engage with bigger problems because they can instead engage with themselves. Designers no longer then have to engage with how maybe their personal trauma is part of a broader, systemic issue. So they just talk about it from their own position, which then leads to a weakening in the capacity for that design work to actually speak out and engage, or be linked to something bigger.
That's kind of the point of ethnography, to pull out the unseen norms. Today, many talk about the pluriverse and why it is that we have such an unbounded belief in modernist science and the logic and reason of the Enlightenment. Georges Perec has a beautiful quote: how can you tell the fabric if not for the tear? And I think for me, this is the role of design. It's not to run our hands smoothly along the fabric. It's to maybe open the fabric a little bit, to rip it. Maybe there's a bit of damage. But in doing so, we see what the fabric is itself. And only then can we deal with the pluriversal because we begin to see what our values are, as opposed to just assume that everyone else either has the same values or they should adopt our own.
And I don't necessarily think designers are the ones to do the analysis. But I think that designers certainly have a role in developing the tools; they have the courage and the fortitude to gently break things, to test in ways that might involve forms of damage, but that also requires a certain form of repair. As Marx says, the point isn't trying to understand the world, the point is trying to change the world. And I don't think mainstream academia is actually doing either of these. So for me, ethnography and design is really about observing, learning to be attuned and perhaps more than anything learning to see differently and pushing the limits of what is perception.
What kinds of narratives, practices, or voices are you trying to foreground through your editorial work at The Offing Press? Can you tell us how it began in the first place?
The Offing Press was simply born out of a desire to give voices – and spaces – to neglected communities. But not the ones one would tend to think of – the ones that struggle to get attention, funding or are simply ignored. Female textile artists over the age of 65. Polish truck drivers. We're not looking for the fashionable, excluded other, but the ones that aren't interesting for mainstream cultural spheres. It's also come to be a space for publications that don't fit in genres very clearly.
A huge part of the Offing is also both your professional relation and personal friendship with artist David Liver.
David and I are like those kids who meet somewhere on the street and then they get into trouble. Their parents probably don't want them to hang out together because they're good kids on their own, but together they're a bad thing. That's David and I. We're always coming up with weird and funny ideas and projects, but they don't fit well within institutions; they're round in some parts and sharp on others. There's a mischievousness and playfulness, I suppose, in how we see things. And so that's also maybe part of the spirit of this project.
In 2024, the Council of Europe wanted to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the European Cultural Convention on artistic freedom at the Venice Biennale. They wanted a high profile event, a party, something to boost their status. As we say in English, they wanted to have their cake and to eat it too– celebrating like Europe had reached some great zenith of artistic freedom. So we gave them an exhibition, various talks and activities–experts and locals alike– and two identical cakes that sat ominously to the side–a concrete one in terrazzo style and an edible one. It took a lot of trial and error with a Venetian designer and her mother to make these identical cakes. It was a bit of a piss-take of this faux celebration. Funny enough, today, the concrete cake sits as an exhibit in their parliament in Strasbourg.
What, for you, makes a truly meaningful design publication in the context of today?
I feel that publications are becoming increasingly human now as a reaction to AI. I see a lot more interest in interviews, thoughts on design or personal reflections on other texts. It feels like we are not as much interested in the production of knowledge in the classical sense as much as new interpretations that bring out meaning. In design education as well, there's a tension today. It's no longer about creating an object that intervenes and disrupts the system necessarily, but slowly adding something that changes the tenor, the color of the conversation. And I think that's interesting.
Maybe part of that is a shift from panic to acceptance, that maybe we're starting to accept the state of the world and not reacting to it in this tyranny of the urgent where we have to find a solution. A common term that I hear all the time is hospicing design or hospicing modernity. Design is a hospicing discipline if it is a discipline at all. So how can we just make our decline easier? More enjoyable, more beautiful, or acceptable?
For design to pivot in this way, requires a shift in how designers perceive the world. Instead of viewing the world around us as stable, predictable, rational etc… We need to see it for what it is–weird, irrational, sensual, contradictory, messy, conflictual, sticky, uneven and much more. Therefore we also need forms of research that can respond to these.
And perhaps I shall add “the rogue” – to reference your upcoming book. I got stuck on the blurb that reads something like: “Instead of standing back to observe, the book proposes ten experimental approaches that intervene in the field: they disrupt, defamiliarize, stage, map hidden forces, and re-enchant the ordinary.” Does it mean you are abandoning observing altogether? Is the “arts of noticing” cancelled?
My colleagues in social anthropology hate me when I claim that designers and artists make better ethnographers than they do. But it’s true. Part of this is because we live in a material world and artists and designers can navigate this beautifully, almost as a dance. There is a sophistication here in how they can find constellations in the everyday that are otherwise hidden. Beyond this, there’s the courage to push what is acceptable, a courage not to care about what is considered ‘knowledge’ or ‘valid’ and this opens up new avenues for thought.
The book is born out of a deep epistemological ambition to loosen the tight fist of knowledge. To let go, to re-enchant, to break things a bit, to embrace contradiction and the sensual and the profane. The world is far too weird, contradictory, and vibrant to be understood through the knowledge models that we use today which are based on static and fixed modes of observation and analysis.
As a response, I developed, alongside a number of colleagues and students, 10 different methodologies for seeing otherwise, doing ethnographic research. This might mean gaslighting your neighbour or blocking traffic during rush hour.
Is there anything that continues to draw you to Czechia today? Do you feel there are particular sensibilities, histories, or approaches within Czech art and design culture that resonate with your own thinking?
What I love about Czech culture is that it is so foreign to who I am that I find it challenging and troubling in many ways. There is something about it that feels rather unintentional, whereas I grew up immersed in anglo-utilitarianism. I think of the film Capricious Summer. Nothing really happens in the film, and yet it is such a beautiful movie. Things simply unfold. One of the major events is that it starts raining, if I remember correctly. It's the weather, some minor humiliation, the atmosphere of everyday life, and a kind of provinciality.
I feel that many other cultures tend towards either a deeply sceptical, dark, almost nihilistic approach to things, or grand narratives and sweeping ideas. You find these tendencies across many literary cultures, especially your neighbouring countries. The Czechs have something different. It's the sweet, tender flow that doesn't need to tie everything into some larger framework. It's the pub philosophy, the wisdom of the everyday. And I think, for me, how it fits into ethnography is the attention to the quotidian. It's a sensitivity and a dignity towards the moments we take for granted.
This distrust of grand narratives, maybe because of Czech history and all the narratives imposed upon it, I empathise with, especially as a researcher. I feel like all these big narratives are always being pushed in terms of how you do research, what knowledge is, how a discipline functions. And this offers another way. It's a quiet critique. It's The Good Soldier Švejk. It's like saying, I will work in academia only so much, maybe also slightly sabotaging it, because my real work is elsewhere. And I find that inspiring. Did Švejk indirectly influence the current movement of ‘quiet quitting’? He feels very relevant today.
What do you think the Czech cultural experience might offer us in navigating the (social, ecological, and other) uncertainties of the present?
When I see the direction the world is going politically, economically, ecologically, I think it's really important to turn to thinkers from the twentieth century who were living through a similar era. As we move towards new forms of democratic capture, authoritarianism and bureaucratisation, rereading and rewatching Czech literature and films has been very inspiring for me. It's having beautiful walks in the countryside or a dip in the river. It's keeping a certain tenderness and melancholy.
In this way of embracing the everyday, like in Capricious Summer, maybe we can hospice the world, live within decline but not be tragic about it. This gentle irreverence, slight irony and self-deprecation mixed with a deep appreciation for beauty and social relations gives us a format for living within today’s polycrises without collapsing into panic or relinquishing our agency. I think the Czech experience teaches us how to avoid getting lost in the cause so we don't lose sight of what we're fighting for, which is the everyday.
