Theories, voices and case studies around design and the 21st century.
I have written a book!
The New Design Museum – Co.creating the Present, Prototyping the Future (Park Books, 2025) maps a new landscape of institutional practices that reveal how spaces of culture dedicated to design and architecture are transforming – their missions, programs and outreach platforms – to respond to an ever-expanding outlook of design as a field of actionable research that is deeply involved with contemporary entanglements of techno-social, political and material nature.
It features ideas, voices and case studies from leading international institutions as well as independent initiatives which attempt revisiting methods and canons of conventional museological traditions to respond to the transformed nature of the discipline in the 21st century and the planetary scope of its practical and discursive remit.
From research agendas, to modes of audience engagement and cooperative structures, their juxtapositions inform novel understandings of the role and agency produced in and through institutions as they endeavor to remain both relevant and sustainable platforms of collective engagement.
The book explores a composite thematic spectrum covering from global design practices invested in decolonizing and queering agency, computational, ecological and indigenous knowledge, as well as presents alternative educational and collaborative frameworks of institutional development.
The New Design Museum integrates essays from the author, 15 conversations with directors and chief programmers from established institutions worldwide and a selection of 16 case studies by independent organizations and entities made to highlight the breath and urgency of the addressed topics and their articulation across diverse mediums and platforms (festivals, websites, programs, spaces, etc).
The book aims to facilitate a needed conversation around the critical importance of institutions of culture in our contemporary societies as engines for the production of knowledge where a democratic politics of mutual care and purpose can be rehearsed and exercised. The propositions and actionable ideas collected wherein intend to offer arguments for productive debate around their state and fate in face of the precarity abating on the systems and infrastructures of culture nowadays – whether threatened by conservative political agendas, corporate co-option or outright defunding.
In so doing it wishes to offer inspiring examples of how design can mobilize the collective imagination towards futures of resilience, hope and participation.
Follow my Substack to get insights and bonus contents from the book, starting April 2025.
Designed by Offshore studio.