Two oft-heard assertions inform today’s understanding of design: “everyone is a designer” and “everything is design.” It is within such professed design panism that designers (struggle to) articulate their role and position. But more than being a mere description of a reality, design panism is an interpretative framework, a rhetorical instrument and a semi-conscious expansion agenda. In a two-day seminar, we broke down the conflicting meanings of these statements in order to elucidate their consequences on the designer’s identity and sense of realization. By analyzing texts spanning more than half a century – from Norman Potter to Keller Easterling, from ...

Extinction Internet is not merely an end-of-the-world phantasy of digital technology that one day will be wiped out by an electromagnetic pulse or the cutting of cables. Rather, Extinction Internet marks the end of an era of possibilities and speculations, when adaptation is no longer an option. During the internet’s Lost Decade, we’ve been rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic under the inspirational guidance of the consultancy class. What’s to be done to uphold the inevitable? We need tools that decolonize, redistribute value, conspire and organize. Join the platform exodus. It’s time for a strike on optimization. There is ...

I Read Where I Am contains visionary texts about the future of reading and the status of the word. We read anytime and anywhere. We read of screens, we read out on the streets, we read in the office but less and less we read a book at home on the couch. We are, or are becoming, a different type of reader. How will we grapple with compressed narratives and the fluid bombardment of text? What are the dialectics between image and word? How will our information machines generate new reading cultures? Can reading become a live, mobile social experience? To ...

When everything is destined to be designed, design disappears into the everyday. We simply don’t see it anymore because it’s everywhere. This is the vanishing act of design. At this moment design registers its redundancy: our products, environments and services have been comprehensively improved. Everything has been designed to perfection and is under a permanent upgrade regime. Within such a paradigm, design is enmeshed with the capitalist logic of reproduction. But this does not come without conflicts, struggles and tensions. Chief among these is the situation of design in a planetary procession toward decay. Our dispense culture prompts a yearning ...