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Think global
Act nodal

Approach

Transformative reflexivity

Encourage designers to critically assess and evolve beyond traditional design paradigms, fostering innovation and sustainable practices through self-awareness and questioning established norms.

Collective empowerment

Advocate for democratizing design knowledge, promoting collaborative creation, and embracing shared governance and learning as pillars for enriching and diversifying design solutions.

Guiding towards preferred futures

Highlight the essential role of design in guiding society towards shared visions of the future that honor the planet’s ecological limits and fortify strong social foundations, ensuring pathways to sustainable and equitable futures for all.

Exploration

Inward exploration

In today’s Anthropocene era, being an explorer means embarking on a journey inward rather than outward, delving deep into the layers of our own planet rather than seeking new horizons. The focus has shifted from global to local, from expansiveness to sustainability. The age-old spirit of boundless curiosity and discovery is now accompanied by a sense of urgency and necessity, driven by an awareness of the planet’s limitations and the consequences of capitalist activities.

21st century explorers are not just cartographers of the land but also mappers of ecosystems, identifying how the human and non-human forms of intelligence and the living and non-living entities on Earth interact. They work to repopulate our understanding of the world with a more nuanced and subtle sense of its complex biodiversity and geological processes.

Exploration today is not about conquest but coexistence, about learning to inhabit a world that is reactive to our actions and teeming with life that we’re only beginning to understand. It is about creating new maps that include not just the boundaries of lakes, mountains, seas and terrestrial continents but also the boundaries of ecosystems and our place within them.

About this site

With this site, I’m opening up a space to share my experiences, perspectives and explorations. Here’s the overall scope of what I am building here.

  1. Weaving critical materialist thinking with design practice: I stand by the idea that the bridge between design and critical theory must constantly evolve and collaboratively grow. This philosophy is echoed throughout this site. It all started as a method to tackle the challenging issues I’ve observed in design practice and now, it has morphed into a dynamic platform where I try to collect some key concepts to orientate action and learning for my students and sometimes my clients.
  2. Open-sourcing my consultancy’s model: A big chunk of the 2023 focus has been put into pulling back the drapes on the inner workings of my consultancy. Handling client expectations can get tricky, especially when they’re deeply entangled in the pillars of capitalismneurocapitalism, conservative thinking and complexity blindness. This space serves as a small platform where I will try to open source my consultancy’s core model, giving you a behind-the-scenes tour, or how to sell run and deliver discovery research interventions.
  3. Speculative and critical exploration into alternative futures: I am starting to enjoy more side projects and personal explorations. I’m playing in the space between Chat GPT and MidJourney. I use Chat GPT as a research and generative tool. It has been mind blowing for now and I look to share more how to produce speculative and critical design experiments using AI.

Picture this site as a slow-motion blog-as-a-toolbox, a playground for building an open system and an open invitation to join the discussion.

I plan to keep this open and free. All work here is published under a Free Culture Attribution 4.0 International Creative Commons Licence (CC BY 4.0). Genius steals.

All field Photography, Poster Works, Dektat Archives and Logos archives are copyrights of Pascal Wicht or their respective owners in the case of commissioned work for clients.

Nota Bene

How to start

As a strategic designer, I often work with clients who are struggling with challenges that seem strange and hard to approach.

In almost every case, these challenges start with a fuzzy situation that needs to be de-fuzzed like a symptomatic issue that requires further examination.

So, don’t worry if your challenge seems weird, unclear or ambiguous – you’re probably on the right track. In this very upstream phase of the challenge process, your intuitions are key.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
— Albert Einstein

Let’s explore the future together

Whispers & Giants
Pascal Wicht