The design community often promotes the notion that design can revolutionize the world, as if it carried some noble essence able to generate positive impact on its own. “The power of design” is the phrase I keep hearing. This romantic narrative does real work: it hides the role design plays in perpetuating the very problems it claims to solve. Designers are trained to fix. We take a brief and resolve it. The trouble is that the brief arrives late, long after the important choices have been made about what the problem even is. Working only on what we are handed, we reproduce what already exists.
The trap is structural. The commercial framework rewards shallow briefs, tactical timelines and innovation theater, and it pushes depth away by design rather than by accident. Real transformation starts further upstream, at the point where we can still shape what counts as a problem, what passes for a good solution and who gets to decide. Beyond the marketing of positive impact and empathy, designers reach constantly for concepts that need revising when they try to address social problems or to co-create with the people those problems affect.
My unlearning journey
The Codex is a collection of concepts and references that holds my unlearning journey and many years of teaching materials gathered across sub-disciplines. It situates design within a materialist, critically reflective and ecologically radical framework, offering an alternative lens for understanding and navigating design practice today. With the Codex, I offer a materialist introduction to the confluence of design and politics for anyone wishing to refine their ability to approach problems from a perspective distinct from the conventional neoliberal one. I want to provide adequate resources to exert a more significant counterforce against the system that relentlessly exploits and harms our world.
The Codex proposes a conceptual toolbox that helps designers avoid reproducing capitalist structures in their work, while building their capacity to oppose and challenge that system. The Codex serves, therefore, as a reflective space on the expansive and intricate intersection of design and politics. This compendium is a work in progress, a continually evolving project open to revisions and expansions as I keep experimenting, learning and unlearning.
Sharing
My design approach, shaped by some of anarchism’s core tenets, advocates a collaborative practice defined by open access to knowledge, self-governance and shared learning. Drawing on Free Schools and Critical Pedagogy, it encourages an anti-capitalist and critical practice of design built on curiosity, imagination and creativity, challenging market-driven norms. I support a design practice grounded in open knowledge exchange.
Imagery
Using artificial intelligence (MidJourney), I experiment with a visual environment that opens a representation space for the Codex’s content. I aimed to move past cheerful teams on sticky notes and the stereotypical vector characters of web design (like my V1).