Early in my time as a design student one of my teachers advised “read and study about everything, except design”. She argued that attention, curiosity and engagement with the world, beyond the echo chamber of technique and academia, would make us better designers, contributors to a larger whole.

Following this guidance has led me to observe and incorporate questions, hypotheses and invitations from voices that encourage a critical revision of our ways of being in/with the world. Informing my practice through an interplay of tactics such as Achille Mbembe’s description of the world as a vibrarium, a system of interconnected, resonating bodies; Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance as a tool against alienation; Anna Tsing’s definition of emergence as the site in which new possibilities arise through relationships; or Donna Haraway’s principle of response-ability - all lending to an approach that seeks to subvert the hierarchies and imbalances of power that often put designers at odds with ethics, as they become enablers of systems of violence and dispossession.