Silvio Lorusso on the state of design

Silvio Lorusso is considered one of the most challenging and inspiring voices in the contemporary design field. As a lecturer at the Design Academy Eindhoven and author of the much-discussed What Design Can’t Do, he poses sharp questions about the role of design in a world facing social and ecological challenges. Through his work, he opens up new perspectives and encourages designers to look beyond form and function.

Silvio lives and works in Lisbon and is one of the speakers at the Design Debate 2025 in Eindhoven, part of Dutch Design Week. Below is a Q&A between Silvio and Mieke Gerritzen as a starting point for a broader discussion.

Mieke Gerritzen: “You wrote the book What Design Can’t Do, and that in itself is quite a negative title for a field that used to make people genuinely happy. Design was originally conceived as something that would make the world more beautiful. I’m a designer myself, and I know from experience that all my friends—many of them intellectuals doing heavy theoretical work—would often have a smile on their face when they dealt with me. After all, I was from the world of design; it stood for something visual, light, and beautiful, something that makes people happy. How do you see that? Don’t you like beautiful things?”

Silvio Lorusso: “Oh, I love beautiful things. The question is: does design culture love them too? It seems to me that, over the past decade, design culture has largely eschewed the category of the beautiful—traditionally conflated with the useful—in favor of that of the right, the fair, and the just. Now, the beautiful can also be good, but the idea of goodness put forward by design culture has often been aspirational, gestural, and at times in direct opposition to the beautiful, deemed ‘formalist’ and therefore naive and self-indulgent. As a writer, I tend to pay attention to words, so I couldn’t help but notice that this political aspiration gave rise above all to a vacuous and rhetorical mode of expression—a kitsch of good intentions. Since this style is devoid of any charm and vitality—it is actually a non-style—I had to look for beauty elsewhere, sometimes finding it in authors and works more or less pessimistic about design. After all, books are designed things, and there are many ‘negative’ design books that are tremendously beautiful.”

Mieke Gerritzen: “You were trained as a designer, but at some point you shifted from making to theory and thinking about design. That turning point must have come from somewhere—was it the people you met during your studies, or your own view of the world? For me, the turning point came in 1998, when, as a graphic designer for cultural organizations, I found myself having fewer content-driven conversations and more discussions with marketing departments. I then decided to stop working on commission and, as a response, wrote my first booklet: Everyone is a Designer, Manifesto for the Design Economy. Can you tell me about your turning point?”

Silvio Lorusso: “I like to think of my evolution as a practitioner as a process of dematerialization: from industrial design, to graphic design, to coding and media art, and finally to theory and criticism. Only recently did I decide to fully devote myself to writing. For me, writing is first and foremost a stylistic endeavour: it’s really about how you say the things you want to say. Writing also involves actual complexity: you must choose among almost infinite combinations between a word and the next, and between a word and each of the others. Finally, writing is frugal: in an art and design world increasingly aligned with ‘content creation’ and therefore characterized by a maximalist, baroque ‘rich media’ drive—showing your face for the algorithm, adding interactivity where it’s not needed, adding soundtracks to posts—there is something almost seditious about combining a handful of simple signs, available to all, with just a notebook or a text editor at hand, in the hope of touching someone’s heart.”

Mieke Gerritzen: “You teach at the Design Academy Eindhoven, a unique institution renowned for the many influential designers who have studied there and not directly tied to a university. I’ve always found that special, especially since most art schools don’t have that kind of independence. Now it seems that DAE is moving more toward a university model, while there are countless universities in the world but only a few truly independent art academies. Personally, I would have found it more interesting if DAE had continued to pursue its own path, separate from the classical academic methods with their emphasis on theory and research. How do you see this?”

Silvio Lorusso: “The ‘theoretical turn’ in design is a larger phenomenon, and holds true for many academies in the Netherlands and abroad. This is not something a single institution can resist or even oppose, because as soon as students leave the classroom, they encounter events where artists and designers talk like PhD researchers with an activist bent. This state of affairs also affects the type of design work presented, which tends to fall either into what Claire Bishop dubbed ‘research-based art,’ characterized by the aesthetic display of an overload of information; or into expressive, declarative projects, such as faux pickets in gallery spaces—‘painted protests,’ to borrow the title of Dean Kissick’s somewhat inchoate article. As an educator, I find myself in a tricky position, because while I’m into writing and theory, as a tutor I encourage students to make work that enacts something instead of merely declaring it. In fact, one of my favorite design principles is Stafford Beer’s POSIWID: ‘the purpose of a system is what it does’—not what it says it does.”

Mieke Gerritzen: “Designers have filled the world with unnecessary things, and technological innovation has contributed to pollution, depression, depletion, and overheating. In fashion we now see designers creating less for the market and more for the museum—clothing as art, reflection, and discussion. Do you think the role of the designer is becoming redundant and shifting toward philosophy and reflection, or is there still a future for designers who want to make things?”

Silvio Lorusso: “In What Design Can’t Do, I framed this reflexive shift of the ‘cultural designer’ as a form of impotence, a ‘pedantry of the spirit’: if you cannot influence the design of things, what you’re left with is to think deeply about them, pointing out ethical failures, voicing indignation, and so on. This is particularly evident with technologies such as AI, whose course is difficult to direct. To be clear: I don’t mean to say that reflection on our designed environment is worthless—after all, it’s what I do as a writer—but I’m interrogating the role of ‘criticality’ for what it does. If my theory is correct, the question becomes: which systems can designers, as concrete individuals in specific contexts, help shape and transform? I’d say plenty. Instead, if we choose to stay within the realm of reflection, the measure of its value, for me, is a straightforward one: can design culture generate ideas that are taken into account beyond design contexts? Here’s a challenge, which is also my own.”

Silvio Lorusso, Italian writer, artist, and lecturer at the Design Academy Eindhoven, based in Lisbon, contributed to the book and will be one of the speakers at Design Debate 2025 in the Next Nature Museum. Tickets can be purchased through the Design Debate 2025 ticket page.

The book NO Design Manifesto, Design Beyond Shame (Bis Publishers) will soon be available in the webshop of the Next Nature Museum. For further reading, see the online longread The No Design Manifesto: Curb Your Enthusiasm by Mieke Gerritzen, Silvio Lorusso, Geert Lovink, and Ned Rossiter, published by the Institute of Network Cultures.