Design doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It reflects, reinforces, and sometimes resists the systems that shape our world. At its best, design can be a force for connection, care, and change. At its worst, it can entrench inequality, extractive practices, and corporate control.

Design After Design is a series of five essays that interrogates design not just as a discipline, but as a site of tension—between intention and impact, aesthetics and ethics, creation and consequence. Travelling from Romania to our laptops, across Indonesia, through social movement ecologies, and into the future, the series platforms imaginative and critical writing for a changing design world.
We invited five writers to question, critique, and reimagine the design lifecycle: from BEFORE—the research, histories, and conditions that shape how things begin, through DURING—the processes, power dynamics, and decisions embedded in making, to AFTER—the systems, consequences, and lived realities that unfold long after launch.

The essayists are Veronika Valtonen, Ana Elena Chiță, Andriew Budiman, Gemma Copeland, and Sara Kaaman.

Together, these five essays trace the messy entanglements of design practice through social movements, tired bodies, archipelagos, national memory, and speculative fiction. Each text offers a steady hand in an unsteady world—not as an invitation to remain still, but to move forward into the unknown, together and more connected.