Design Drafts

In many ways, Lecong is old school in the way that all wholesale markets are old school. They are what the internet looked like before the internet – a great convergence of things in physical space all at once. And yet the internet doesn’t have the same visualising effect that a market has – the ability to take a step back and see the forest for the trees. The internet is all trees, seen one page, one click at a time. Going to Lecong is, thus, a useful way to understand our modern design landscape and the vast flows of goods in China that move from production site to container ship, to end destination, all strangely touching on this one hub of activity. I leave utterly exhausted, but somehow feeling some pieces of the puzzle connecting.

I started out wanting to figure out why a chair had become ubiquitous. In the end, however, it had little to do with any individual entrepreneur or company ruthlessly conquering a global market. Although we can pinpoint recent examples, those stories already seem to belong in the past and to an outdated model of business. Instead, the forces at work with the Chaise A are bit more diffuse, related to how completely and utterly the manufacturing landscape has been remade by e-commerce in the past 20 years. These changes may be harder to see or comprehend in the Global North, where manufacturing has already been largely stripped away by cost-cutting and union-busting, but in China, which has been a leading player in shaping e-commerce, the change is clear and present. It’s a world where images can be turned into any number of objects overnight; where entire villages are retooled into decentralised production sites for niche products online; and where a French metal bistro chair from the 1950s can become a viral production phenomenon.

Comparisons to the internet are hard to avoid, in part because the internet has become so integral to the existence of an object. We could think, for instance, about memes. Nobody knows the original author of a meme and you can’t identify where a meme gets made. It simply circulates and circulates, until people don’t find any use in circulating it anymore. Furniture today behaves like memes: you see an Instagram post with a chair, you like it, an ad pops up for more things that look like that. At the same time, a feedback loop is being pushed onto buyers and manufacturers to produce more of something. Those appear in more photographs that get circulated online, and so on and so on. By fate of the strange alchemy of the internet, the Tolix Chaise A went from being a chair with a great backstory to a threedimensional meme. In a nutshell, that’s the answer I was looking for.

If we can draw a critique of any of this, it’s not that the process is an injustice towards Tolix. I side with Schindler in thinking that the circulation of copies only helps to boost brand value. Instead, the real problem is the perverse same-sameness that this system seems to create. Charles Eames was once asked by a Swedish journalist how he felt when he saw his and Ray’s furniture being used in a Swedish airport. Eames replied that it was flattering, but surely the airport could have chosen from any number of great Swedish designs. And here is the same problem, albeit at an exponential scale. There are thousands of great chair designs that exist, and tens of thousands of designers. Factories are more flexible than ever to respond to market analysis, which itself is supposedly able to pick through an increasingly fine-grained consumer segmentation that identifies all our most personal bespoke desires. We could be awash in an eclectic rainbow of designs. And yet, here we all are, sitting on the same cold metal chair, drinking a pastis. END

By fate of the strange alchemy of the internet, the Tolix Chaise A went from being a chair to a three-dimensional meme.

Research time and travel for this piece were made possible by a Hong Kong Design Trust Seed Grant.

Delft Blue Rhymes with Fake Handbags

Words Tetsuo Mukai Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser

A few years back, I was in the city of Gwangju, South Korea, staying in a fashion district that mostly sold trendy, affordable clothes and accessories. Most were counterfeit items: Supreme box logo tees, the latest Balenciaga jumpers and, of course, fake bags styled after brands such as Chanel and Gucci. Some of these pieces were so creative and original that they could be considered sophisticated reiterations of an idea rather than mere copies, featuring new colour schemes and logos placed subversively on items that the original brand would never touch. But these fakes – which are typically now vilified as examples of the dishonest practice of hijacking someone else’s intellectual property – were not always seen this way.

Delft Blue earthenware, a Dutch pottery style that was extremely popular in the 1700s, was born out of people’s desire to own blue and white china, a coveted form of Chinese porcelain known for its sophisticated making technique and exoticised patterns. Blue and white was made exclusively in China and was widely regarded as superior in quality to its European counterparts, but the European market experienced a lack of supply following the death of the Wanli Emperor in the 17th century. This condition gave birth to the Netherlands’ homegrown version of the famous porcelain: a cheaper, tin-glazed clay version manufactured in the city of Delft. It was a creation from a time before widespread awareness of the harms of cultural appropriation, and the lack of rules and regulations against trademark infringement meant everything was fair game in the wild West.

Although Delft Blue eventually fell out of fashion, it is now valued as a collectable in its own right, not just as a cheaper knockoff. Perhaps modern counterfeit handbags, most of them made in China, will be appreciated in the future on their own merits. Already, they demonstrate mastery of many things: an ability to imitate expensive goods on the cheap; an understanding of cultural shifts and trends; and a sophisticated use of global logistics and supply chains. These fake bags can be understood as not only making profit on the back of someone else’s work but as providing a commentary on the intricate history of cultural appropriation and commerce from a non-European perspective.

In response to these counterfeits, Gucci launched its Fake/Not clothing and accessories collection in 2020, which takes inspiration from the fake Guccis of this world through design nods such as the bicolour stripe logo (instead of the original tricolour) that was commonly seen among fakes in the 80s. There is a historical symmetry here: when Chinese makers realised that Delft Blue was gaining recognition, they began creating imitations of the earthenware to export to the European market. Four centuries on, we’re completing the cycle of duplication once again.

Design Drafts #1 Is Design Just a Game?

Het Nieuwe Instituut x Disegno

Contents 1 A Love Letter 6 Idle Browsing 12 Between Fox Traps and Hero Bait 20 Architecture School: Pay to Play 26 When the Words Don’t Exist

Editors Delany Boutkan (researcher, Het Nieuwe Instituut) d.boutkan@hetnieuweinstituut.nl

Oli Stratford (editor-in-chief, Disegno) oli@disegnojournal.com

Deputy editor India Block india@disegnojournal.com

Senior creative producer Evi Hall evi@disegnojournal.com

Subeditor Ann Morgan

Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali ak .com Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@ak .com

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnojournal.com

Design Drafts laureates Gijs de Boer, Chinouk Filique de Miranda, Kathryn Larsen, Malika Leiper, Bianca Nozaki-Nasser and Andrew Pasquier

Commissioners Aric Chen (general and artistic director, Het Nieuwe Instituut) Francien van Westrenen (head of agency, Het Nieuwe Instituut)

Design Drafts jury members Aric Chen, Marjanne van Helvert and Nanjala Nyabola Special thanks to Maureen Mooren (art director, Het Nieuwe Instituut), the Het Nieuwe Instituut research team (Janilda Bartolomeu Leite, Kirtis Clarke, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Marten Kuijpers, Setareh Noorani, Federica Notari, Wietske Nutma and Carolina Pinto), and Marina Otero Verzier (head of Social Design, Design Academy Eindhoven and former director of research, Het Nieuwe Instituut)

Contact us Studio 3, the Rose Lipman Building 43 De Beauvoir Road London N1 5SQ disegnojournal.com

Het Nieuwe Instituut Museumpark 25 3015CB Rotterdam hetnieuweinstituut.nl

One of the pleasures of contemporary design is its complexity. Although design is often still principally addressed through the lens of industrial manufacturing, contemporary design culture has come to be understood through a multitude of different points of view. As our understanding of what a designer is, and in what languages to speak about the profession, has grown more complex, so too has design emerged as a means of reimagining social systems, of exploring diverse cultural identities, of navigating commerce, and much more (or, alternatively, none of the above).

Given this multiplicity within the field, what does it mean to write about design today? In spring 2022, Het Nieuwe Instituut (the Netherlands’ national museum and institute for architecture, design and digital culture) partnered with Disegno to launch the first edition of Design Drafts, a programme that aims to nurture up-and-coming design writers and forms of writing. Following an open call, a small group of designers, writers and researchers were invited into the programme.

Over the course of the summer, Het Nieuwe Instituut and Disegno’s teams worked with the applicants to develop original pieces of long-form design writing around the programme’s central theme: is design just a game? The writers were invited to interpret this provocation in any way they chose – a critique of solutionism; an analysis of gamification; an assessment of the field’s own internal structures – and were encouraged to explore alternative formats and futures for design writing.

In the coming pages, we are very proud to share the work that the laureates of the first edition of Design Drafts produced. From graphic novels, internal monologues and reframed design histories, to love letters and memes, the results are experimental, insightful and personal, exploring fresh perspectives in design discourse.

A love letter with Bianca Nozaki-Nasser

There’s no way this letter will be exhaustive, or even fully explanatory. But that’s rarely the case with love letters anyways.

When we think of love letters, it’s easy to focus on their sweetness. But to me, a love letter is not just about the exchange of adoration or praise. When I think of love letters, my mind goes to the gift that is Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989. This collection of letters is a glimpse into the intimate friendship of two revolutionary lesbian, Black, feminist writers. One of the things I love about their correspondence is that Parker and Lorde constantly push each other’s thinking forward. They remind us that love is not free from discomfort. Actually, it is their mutual love that carries them through moments of tension towards courageous questions and productive conversation. In The Black Scholar’s 1973 interview with James Baldwin, Baldwin calls forward the very thing about love that continues to bring me back to Lorde and Parker’s letters. “If I love you,” he writes, “I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

I believe that love letters are the perfect place to struggle through difficult questions.

I’m currently writing to you from Los Angeles (occupied Gabrielino-Tongva land), but I grew up in Orange County, the home of Disneyland and West Coast American conservatism. When I was three, my mom framed a scribble that I insisted was Big Bird and I’ve been calling myself an artist ever since. During my more formal design education, I heard a lot about how designs often start with science fiction. I was taught that design is a tool that helps define our world through spaces, objects and systems. At its core, science fiction is a tool too. Through speculative storytelling we imagine far off futures and explore their potential consequences. It made sense that we would marry the two.

Take a look at Black Mirror, a Netflix show about a not-so-distant dystopian future that re-popularised the connection between design and science fiction. The show vignettes fictional pieces of future technology, such as in ‘Be Right Back’, an episode exploring the AI clone of a widow’s recently deceased husband, powered by his social-media data (of course). The show’s portrayal of the future evokes a visceral response: the clone that was meant to soothe the widow’s suffering inevitably haunts her as a not-quite-living reminder of her loss. Each episode of Black Mirror moves these kinds of far-off futures from something you think about to something that you can actually feel.

For designers, one of science fiction’s most useful requirements is the necessity to suspend disbelief. In order to be immersed in possibility, you must, for at least a few moments, ignore the current constraints of reality. Audiences are shown how science fiction and design can be powerful tools for world-building, but at the same time the worlds that designers dream of will never exist in a vacuum – even in our imaginations, what we create unwittingly embodies systems of power. In this sense, Black Mirror acts as a provocation: are we really building new worlds or are we just redecorating old ones?

In her book Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin situates designs as physical realisations of narratives. Not unlike Black Mirror, Benjamin shows us that objects reflect legacies of beliefs and systems that are typically presented to us as neutral or universal. Computer code, for instance, is something that Benjamin identifies as acting as narrative, operating “within powerful systems of meaning that render some things visible, others invisible, and create a vast array of distortions and dangers.” But instead of only speculating about the future, Benjamin’s work traces the insidious past of white supremacy to the present.

Consider the spirometer, a medical device used to measure lung function that is designed to automatically adjust for race. This adjustment assumes a smaller lung capacity for Black and Asian patients compared to their white counterparts. In practice this means that a Black person’s decline in lung function would have to be 17 per cent greater than a white person’s before they would be able to qualify for access to disability resources. This design feature for racial difference in lung function originates from chattel slavery. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia used the belief of biological differences between racial groups to uphold the idea that forced labour improved the lung function of enslaved people. This false argument was repeatedly used to justify the gruesome violence of chattel slavery.

Despite many calls to eliminate racial correction from the spirometer’s design, race correction is still used today to inform everything from surgical anaesthesia to pulmonary function for patients recovering from Covid-19. Studies released in 2021 from the University of San Francisco and Columbia University found that, as a result of race-based formulas, fewer Black patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and other lung diseases are diagnosed correctly compared to white people with the same test results on a spirometer. Designs do not just provoke the future, but also give power to the past. The refusal to design and adopt a new spirometer is a choice that, nearly 200 years later, continues to execute the violence of white supremacy.

Regardless of a designer’s intent, design choices tell us a lot about who we deem worthy of wealth, power and even life. These design choices are not accidents, but reflections of the worlds we choose to build.

So, whose worlds are you building? I told you that I live in Los Angeles, where, according to the 2020 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority count, more than 66,000 people are currently unhoused. Year after year, there are countless hack-a-thon-esque open calls asking for designers to “design for good” and “solve homelessness”. Responses to these types of calls for work can be varied, but frequently operate on speculative neoliberal political imaginaries.

In her essay, ‘The Co-Constitutive Nature of Neoliberalism, Design, and Racism’, designer Lauren Williams explains that “inappropriately scoped problems and the designed media and interventions that respond to them[…] rely on hyper-individualised interpretations of systems-scale problems.” Proposals such as winter jackets that transform into tents for the unhoused (a design solution that resurfaces every few years) privilege an individual designer’s entrepreneurship over the realities of the problem they are claiming to address. This type of

capitalist solutionism invites us to live inside the imaginations of people so empowered by privilege that they’ve turned social design into a game they aspire to win, sustained by individualism shrouded in good intentions.

If designers fail to understand or even acknowledge their own relationship to systems such as white supremacy and capitalism, then it is impossible for them to speculatively reimagine them. Without this starting point of self-awareness, designerly attempts to solve social issues just become objects that uphold them. Unfortunately, all the cleverly designed paper straws in the world won’t offset the weekly carbon contribution of celebrities’ cross-town private-jet commutes.

But, as I’m writing this to you, I have to admit something: I feel pressure, if not obligation, to perform the same type of solutionism that I just critiqued. It is a practice to remind myself that the expectation to provide a silver-bullet solution or a neat prescriptive list of actions to address the roots of imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist, ableist patriarchy is exactly what I’m calling for designers to abandon. But, we do have to start somewhere. At this moment, all I can really offer is how I’ve begun to piece things together for myself.

In his book Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon, one of our most influential anti-colonial theorists, states that the coloniser does not recognise the humanity of the colonised. In response to this, Fanon proposes an inverse reality that he calls “the real leap [of] introducing invention into existence.” I mentioned how science fiction’s suspension of disbelief has been cited by some as a starting point for design, and Fanon asks the colonised to do the same: to begin by suspending their own disbelief in order to reject the limitations of colonisation and recreate themselves. “[It] is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis,” Fanon writes, “that I will initiate my cycle of freedom.”

Those people who have always been the first to experience the impacts of collapsing societal systems – queer and/or trans, Black, Indigenous, people of colour, working class, immigrants, people with disabilities – have always taken “the real leap” that Fanon describes. Whether it is asking you to imagine a world without prisons, police brutality, or borders, these communities have always been at the forefront of the suspension of disbelief. Not as futurists, but rather as people recreating themselves, sometimes without any other choice, to initiate their own cycles of freedom.

For the last four years I’ve worked as a designer and creative director, partnering mostly with progressive grassroots organisations and community organisers to mobilise our communities to take action on issues that matter to them. Working with organisers has shown me an entire body of work, a history of speculative world-building, that designers rarely study.

Social movements are not just about fighting injustice, they are also about constructing alternatives to what exists. Organisers begin with a similar challenge as designers do: to create and physicalise narratives that represent a preferred future.

Moms 4 Housing, formed in 2019, is a collective of marginally housed mothers “uniting mothers, neighbours, and friends to reclaim housing for the Oakland community from the big banks and real estate speculators.” In November 2019, the collective occupied a home that had been vacant for years in a historically Black neighbourhood in West Oakland. The house was owned by Catamount Properties, a subsidiary of real-estate investment firm Wedgewood, which has a history of buying hundreds of Bay Area foreclosed homes and renovating them to flip for profit.

The mothers occupying the home were met with an eviction notice, issued by Alameda County officers, armed with AR-15 rifles and dressed in tactical gear, who stormed the house with armoured vehicles. The mothers stood their ground in the face of this militarised response. Even after losing their eviction appeal in court, the group occupying the property went toe to toe with Wedgewood, and won. Less than one week after being served their eviction notice, Moms 4 Housing leaders announced an agreement with Wedgewood Inc., the City of Oakland, and the Oakland Community Land Trust to acquire the home. After their win, Moms 4 Housing received calls from groups advocating for equitable housing all over the world. Less than six months later we saw similar successes for groups such as Reclaiming Our Homes Los Angeles and Reclaim SF in San Francisco.

Moms 4 Housing’s “real leap” created a rip in reality, a portal from the present to a future in which homes were returned into the hands of the communities from which they had been taken. adrienne maree brown, a Black, queer, writer, organiser and facilitator, says that these abilities – recreation of the self, resistance of the present and reimagining the future – are what make all community organising science fiction.

I need to be clear, by sharing this I am not asking for designers to become community organisers. It is dangerous to conflate the work of designers with the work of local activists. However, what I am asking is what would it look like if more designers joined social movements? Not participating in a hack-a-thon, or a design-for-good project, but actually beginning, en masse, to invest in building relationships with people leading this type of radical world building.

Design is more than decoration. Remember the spirometer? We know that design can make us conscious of the things we don’t see. Social-justice movements do not need you to show up with design solutions. Social-justice movements need you, designer, to build trust and add your skills to the pile with humility. To share your expertise for infusing beliefs and values into the spaces, objects and systems that will carry us into the future.

In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D. G. Kelley explains that “making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us.” This work will not, and should not, fit into a project-driven studio practice. Designers in pursuit of contributing to transformational change must challenge the neoliberal values that underpin contemporary design and commit to building their own long-term relationship with movements. Not an easy task, but a necessary and worthwhile one.

I know I said that love letters were not about praise but, before I go, I would like to take a moment to give flowers to groups such as Decolonising Design, the Design Justice Network, Intelligent Mischief, and all the other designers around the world who have been laying

the foundations to engage in the delight, struggle and messiness of this work.

Earlier, I also mentioned the limitations of love letters. But I’d like to reconsider that.

In Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin shared how his love for America is what fuelled his criticism of it. “I love America more than any other country in the world,” Baldwin wrote, “and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” I am eternally grateful for the patience and friendship of the community organisers, activists and cultural workers who have allowed me to learn and grow in real time as we work together. I am the first to admit that I don’t have all the answers. During these last four years, someone told me that no one knows everything, but together we know a lot.

I hope that as we work towards building new worlds, we are also pushed to criticise them, perpetually.

With love, Bianca

Idle Browsing with Chinouk Filique de Miranda

Did I lose her? I probably just misplaced her somewhere. Or did I hide her? On purpose? Why would I… oh, here we go. I just needed to find the right gesture. A swipe with all five fingers on the trackpad makes her reappear in the top left corner of my screen. Somehow, this always happens when there’s a seasonal shift taking place – an abundance of tabs start accumulating in my private browser. As it happens, I’m either looking for inspiration or waiting for items to drop in price. My intention is not always to purchase a lot of things. It’s more like each new tab embodies a suggestion. Or rather, hints towards a promise. A promise in which the item of clothing displayed in each tab reveals something I wasn’t aware that I was searching for. A feeling. An attitude perhaps… an implied change in character that might occur beyond the screen. It’s a bit far-fetched, I know. Honestly, most times I keep these tabs open for no reason other than to just browse. I like looking at nice things. To imagine that with every percentage drop in price, these items become further removed from what they once were and move closer towards what I might need them to be. This process – one where I sit aimlessly in front of a screen and fall down the vortex of digital window-shopping – is tinged with distraction. I often jump not only from one site to another, but from product, to text, to association, to different tab – losing my train of thought as each impression leaves an imprint on my subconscious. I only get confronted with the impact of this imprint later. Something weirdly specific will do it. The almost inorganic green colour of my celery juice (yes, I’m that person) triggering the memory of a description. I think the colourway of the item in this case was “Chlorophyll Silver”. Greens are great for your health and wardrobe, we suggest bagging this for your sartorial wellbeing.Browns The actual item in case? I honestly don’t remember, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be an actual bag. I was all the way down the rabbit hole by that point. That’s probably why I tend to lose sight of the myriad browser windows that accumulate somewhere around the digital bend. The multitude of tabs and their content form a deep haze of imaginary reality. I seem to be in search of nothing, but I’m open to

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whatever the recommended list tells me I need. Like her. The one I thought I lost earlier but, luckily, had just misplaced. A cult find? A closet hero?Net-a-Porter A companion piece? For those cool and misty mornings in the mountains. Binoculars (for bird watching or just to see things closer) in one pocket, a pocket knife for foraging (meadow mushrooms… wild garlic… prickly nettle…) in the other.

Danielle Cathari The start of a journey, then? I mull over these sartorial snippets and suggestions, offered as descriptions and captions through an amalgam of fashion and digital culture. These statements, so beautifully written in their own way, make me feel like I’ve landed in a novel. They help me formulate my untapped thoughts, and allow me to fictionalise my feelings and aspirations. Today, I can be this person: elegantly understated, Net-a-Porter a less frivolous, repurposed classic.

Danielle Cathari And tomorrow? Tomorrow I’ll be active,the one who knows how to have fun.

Net-a-Porter I’ll wear my emotions on my

sleeve,We’re Not Really Strangers and I’ll be ready for adventure.

Danielle Cathari The perfect personality is just a tab away. They’re all mine, unfolding through the cluttered stack of tabs that accumulate along this jump-shift-journey. Think of them as a gesture of my independence: I can shed my old self and make room for a new, better version, whenever I want. Whenever I feel that something speaks to me. Time and time again.

It’s ridiculous, actually. And I can’t get my head around it — am I one person or just a bunch of my favourite fictional characters, all glued together? I do get embarrassed thinking this way. A bit self indulgent, isn’t it? Best to just not say these things out loud. So back to the screen, where each tab lets me silently unpick my character, splitting me into multiples, flattening out the all-encompassing person I am. These tabs lay out the different women I aim to be. The different selves others might need me to be. The one who handles situations with care and knows when to ask the right questions, because asking questions is an artform.We’re Not Really Strangers Or the trouble maker, someone who knows how to demand space,

Browns steamrolling everything in my way. It’s a shape-shifting selfhood – a selfhood that lives in-between the target bubbles of online marketing. Every now and then, I wonder what aspect of this ever-evolving self actually makes me feel good. Maybe it’s the constant state of newness; the fact that I have freedom of choice. The option to pick and choose who I want to be in any situation. The ability to feel safe and secure.

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Well, I’m not sure when or how this happened, but at some point my online self, the aesthetic and carefully curated one, has become my only self. The self I use to navigate day-to-day life. It now determines what speaks to me and what doesn’t. It lets me find myself in the visuals I see, the texts I read. The way items and objects are referred to as being person-like. I think about this extensively – how garments and accessories are described online and characterised through the narrative that surrounds them. The rhetorical power they uphold. The suggestions of a new dawn, a new day, Matches Fashion a new me that they reiterate. This new me seems to exist everywhere, but mostly in these crumbs of online fiction.

The endless scroll of products becomes a bit chaotic and overwhelming, but the product texts read like short stories or anecdotes. They create intimacy. The distance that once was, the distance between object and person, has collapsed. I’m the object, ready to be observed and placed in a certain (con)text. Much like the queen on a chess board, the most important piece. Browns They’re simply reminding us that you can give yourself better in any area of your life, but you have to believe you’re worthy of it first. We’re Not Really Strangers I’m fine with that. It puts me in conversation with myself and the times in which we live. Sometimes it even mirrors the way I digitally connect with others. Through bits and pieces that reflect this niche-ly curated self. It might appear difficult to some, but it’s not. Not really. I promise. Anyway, aren’t we all just reflections of how we want to live? The selves we collectively aspire to be?

I’m a millennial, a generation that was told we could grow up to be anything, anyone, we wanted. If we could just envision it and work towards it, possibilities would be boundless. In reality, we’re often not the selves we dreamed of becoming. We’re not even sure what we should dream towards in their place. I guess this is where descriptive margins fill the void. Where carefully created snippets hold some unnoticed power over us.

It’s triggering really. The way online snippets, or editors’ notes, Danielle Cathari seem to act as a gateway towards a universe we curate for ourselves, subtly prompting us to participate

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in that fantasy. It’s not unusual for me to get lost in the rhetoric of these garments. Sometimes they represent a journey, allowing you to embark on yours. Browns Some address our mental state, because there always seems to be an area of our lives in which we’re settling, when we don’t feel worthy of more, may it be big or small. We’re Not Really Strangers Some gesture towards a mutual understanding; being in the know. Although, these ones often read more like a whisper: they’ll keep you informed through a mix of unfiltered one-to-ones, connecting you with those who share your modern attitude towards it all. HURS The descriptions that stretch around these products suggest that we need them to be more than a tool. That, if we allow them to, they will make us smarter or better equipped to manage certain situations. You must’ve noticed them by now. The product descriptions woven into these lines. No immediate call to action. Just emotive vocabulary that reads like a love letter or a private conversation I could imagine having with a friend: did you notice the days are getting longer again? we made it through winter. this is your light at the end of the tunnel. and time to get your shit in order. I feel like you could use a little serotonin rush from getting something nice for yourself. you deserve it. and if that’s not in your current budget or you just don’t feel like shopping, you know there are some other ways that help your brain release some happy chemicals. will stop rambling now. please don’t buy anything you don’t need. Disruptive Berlin You see how sophisticated they are? Although that’s probably not the right word here. Cunning, actually. These odd puzzle pieces seem to almost fit within our natural back and forth. Almost. I’ve been trying to tell you, in my own way, that I find these texts unsettling. Instead of discarding these emotionally laden attempts to connect with me through the screen as a mere byproduct of marketing, I find myself preoccupied by their textual modifications and disturbances. At some point, this preoccupation faded into fascination. I guess we are attracted when text imposes on us on a personal level. When it confides in us, or when we’re able to identify with the sort of person we imagine speaking these words. With every promise of something well-crafted and glamorous, Moda Operandi we revel in the idea that a change in our aesthetic self will resolve any glitch in the relationships we have with garments. The characterisation of these products, inadvertently help us to characterise ourselves. Really, I

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should be speaking for myself here, but I’m almost certain that I’m not alone. Self indulgent? Yes. Delusional? I hope not. Anyway, let’s circle back to her. The one I thought I’d lost. The one that you forgot about. Don’t worry, I almost forgot about her too. So, let me describe her to you. It’s just a first impression — but first impressions matter. She’s a bit loose on the shoulders, which will make her perfect for a date, or a night out with friends. Super flattering and versatile, she will go with everything.Disruptive Berlin And, because she’s delicate, made from good stuff, I’ll only wash her on a gentle cycle. Scratch that, I’ll do it by hand. I’ll safeguard her from the imperfections that pop up over time. Procrastinate her unraveling. And if they do show up? She won’t be replaced. Because her slight imperfections are not to be considered defects, they just add to her value and unique character.Luisa Via Roma

Net-A-Porter – net-a-porter.comDanielle Cathari – daniellecathari.comWe’re Not Really Strangers – werenotreallystrangers.com Browns – brownsfashion.com Disruptive Berlin – disruptiveberlin.com HURS – hurs-official.com Luisa Via Roma – luisaviaroma.comModa Operandi – modaoperandi.com Matches Fashion – matchesfashion.com

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Between Fox Traps and Hero Bait with Gijs de Boer

A square image, listing 46 titles of design genres, set in Times New Roman, roughly ordered in two columns, on top of a highly saturated picture of a taxidermy fox. Some of the genres seem to have been added later, squeezed in to maintain alphabetical order. The Stoned Fox is a meme often used to signal unease, but this version has been deep-fried: it looks like it has been through many rounds of compression from online re-sharing. The meme’s author, @neuroticarsehole, seems to be expressing a discomfort with these design genres, re-frying the image as if their unease has grown more extreme with each added genre.

I like the idea of design discourse as a place for designers and critics to come together – through symposia, schools and magazines – to figure out roles for designers that can be more helpful than harmful to our world. When that balance feels off in design practice, discourse can respond by analysing what has gone wrong and proposing ways of doing otherwise. But what if something in design discourse starts to feel off? @neuroticarsehole’s meme distils a lingering discomfort that I recognise from my own experiences. Even though I appreciate that there have been so many attempts at finding different roles for designers, I’ve started to grow suspicious. Seeing all those genres together makes me cringe. They sound pretentious – more like studio start-ups than gathering places to explore different roles.

In a series of tweets from March 2022, @neuroticarsehole argues that the proliferation of design genres within discourse is a result of market pressures. “Design discourse itself has been commodified,” they wrote, “causing an academic overproduction of design genres that all promise emancipation one way or another, but eventually just perpetuate a ‘false consciousness’ by assuming that designers had the agency to resist the logic of a capitalist economy within the scope of their individual careers.” In other words, the inflated claims of design discourse about designers conquering capital could, ironically, be themselves products of market pressure.

It seems a plausible explanation, particularly if we look at some of the claims that @neuroticarsehole often quotes from current mainstream design writers: “design can transcend the logics, structures, and subjectivities of capitalism,” (Matthew Wizinsky); “how capitalism took hold of graphic design, and how to escape from it,” (Ruben Pater); and “designers can take hold of, dismantle, and rewire some of the abusive structures of capital,” (Keller Easterling). These claims have all been taken from promotional texts for publications (respectively a publisher’s summary, book cover, and interview) and, even though the books that they promote are likely more nuanced, the claims are all reduced to a power promise, divorced from any limits or doubts. Let’s call them hero bait – invitations to a designer to play the role of a saviour, carefully crafted to the sensibilities of anybody who feels stuck at their desk doing non-meaningful work. It is difficult not to hear the undertone of a sales pitch every time a writer proposes a new design genre. This marketplace of ideas can quickly become an arena of voices, all seeking attention through bluff, exaggerated differentiation, and seductive offers. But with so much emphasis on promises, where does critique go? @neuroticarsehole fits within a wider wave of meme pages that are critical of their respective disciplines, including @dank.lloyd.wright in architecture, @freeze_magazine in art, and @bluefoamdust in industrial and interaction design. These pages draw me in because they voice a critique that feels less present in other discursive spaces. While mainstream design discourse – that which is backed institutionally through systems such as book deals, teaching or curatorial positions, and speaker fees – can seem to be under pressure to promise emancipation, it is through memes that lingering suspicions over those same promises can find a home. In this respect, I read @neuroticarsehole as marginalised design discourse.

Yet with such a split – mainstream positivity on the one hand; marginalised suspicion on the other – can discourse still function well? Can it still be a place where hopes and suspicions, proposals and critiques, are measured against practice? Even if we agree that the currency of mainstream design discourse is hope, perhaps evading doubt is not necessary to garner attention. Is there a way to tempt our hero designer with another kind of call to adventure: not with a mythical elixir of power, but with a journey of exploration that may challenge and transform them? How to attract designers to the adventure of actually wrestling with a position that is still unresolved?

The Fox Trap I can roughly trace my path in the design field through the genres featured on the Stoned Fox meme: from Transformation Design to Speculative Design at the Technical University Eindhoven, then Posthumanist Design via philosophy and Auto-Ethnographic Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven, where I studied for my master’s and now teach. With every jump, I shifted further away from design as a mode of object production towards one of knowledge production. Designers as knowledge workers may perform cultural critique, raise awareness, and conduct research-through-design. Even when objects are produced (and they still are), they primarily function to generate, gather, or represent knowledge.

In this context, I’m tempted to read both design memes and design genres as contemporary design products: different ways in which knowledge takes shape and reaches others. To understand how both function as calls for designers, we can analyse the design choices behind how they present themselves.

For the design genre, we can take a simplified version of the hero bait claim: “design can fix capitalism.” The examples of discourse that @neuroticarshole cites all follow this structure. A declarative sentence, in the present tense, stating its content as matter of fact: subject (“design”) – action (“can fix”) – object (“capitalism”). This form seems functionally optimised to maximise the power promise, centring agency on the side of design-subject, while capitalism is framed as a passive object to be worked on. This purity seems to make hero bait function well as a gathering place for hope, but is less welcoming to people who harbour suspicions. There is no padding, no “maybe”, no question mark; no verbs that go both ways, such as: “Would

designers be able to respond to the structures of capital?” While this would likely be a more accurate description of the content of the book being promoted, it may not easily excite a prospective reader. It literally doesn’t have the same power.

But language doesn’t have to be used literally. Critical memes show other design techniques, such as irony. These memes may use the exact same words, but subvert their meaning through imagery or graphic design. We see this when @neuroticarsehole writes “transcending the logics, structures, and subjectivities of capitalism” above a painting of a dragon (“capitalism”) devouring a hero (“post-capitalist design”).

For those in on the joke, irony can function as a gathering place. I feel recognised by this meme because it relies on shared knowledge that it doesn’t need to explicitly express: namely, that the statement is a quote from a book summary (which @neuroticarsehole disagrees with). In the face of institutional and systemic wrongs, meme pages offer a sense of belonging with others who share similar experiences. Yet through irony, the meme also creates a separation between its in- and out-group. While it offers me community, it distances me from what is being mocked. When writing about disillusions in design discourse, writer and artist Silvio Lorusso also notices this double-edged sword. “Irony functions as a means of coping with a feeling of powerlessness and irrelevance,” he says. “When switched on, the ‘ironic detachment’ mode allows us to alienate ourselves from collective and individual miseries. For this, we pay the toll of disengagement.”

While irony may function well in gathering suspicion, this same detachment makes it insufficient to attract designers to an unresolved position. Instead of a challenge, it seems to offer a way out. The in-group position of a critical meme allows me to look down on the “foolish” out-group, as if I hadn’t also been seduced by the hero-designer position in the past; as if I don’t experience a very similar kind of relief when I like a meme ridiculing that same hope. Detachment allows me to play the role of the outsmarting fox – a position as safe and resolved as that of the saviour. Instead of baiting the hero, the ironic meme becomes a fox trap. It offers resentment as a revenge on seduction. But staying close to seductions may actually help us to find ways of dealing with them.

As design genres gloss over global issues as mere problems for designers to solve, so ironic memes paint mainstream design discourse as stupid, and the disillusioned designer as being above it. Both offer me salvation, either as hero or fugitive. But I don’t want discourse that tempts me into adopting detached positions. I want discourse that can offer community and hope but also challenge me: invitations that don’t let me get away so easily.

So, how can a call for designers function as a gathering place that can host both hope and suspicion – both the humble hero and the fair fox? In the attention economy, it seems we can only have the pure hope of hero bait, or else the generalised suspicion of the ironic fox trap. But keeping both feelings close? Nuance doesn’t stand a chance. Maybe @neuroticarsehole was right: it’s too late. Discourse, both mainstream and marginalised, has been commodified.

Mentor memes As I scrolled deeper through Instagram, looking for some hope, I found posts with affirmations, those empowering statements that you read to yourself in the hope that they will come true: “I always find a way.” But I don’t buy it. It sounds like a claim from a design genre, or like the dog in the burning house meme: “This is fine.” Was there not, anywhere on Instagram, some messy hope? Then, suddenly, I noticed something.

When I first saw this meme, I thought it was ironic. The image, the blur, the text glow – it all seemed designed to ridicule the sentence, “This summer will change my life.” But there are so many of these memes: “Overthinking is a foreign concept,” “I am Joy Of Missing Out,” “My social media presence contributes to world peace.” There seems to be something more going on.

To understand how meme creator @afffirmations overcomes cynical fatalism (posting 10 similar memes every day), we have to read one level deeper. Enter post-irony. In Gabriella de la Puente’s review of @afffirmations for The White Pube, she writes how “post-irony uses insincerity to convey completely sincere feelings and thoughts[...] It has this new awkwardness because of the irony it passes through to get here.” Consider the following readings of @afffirmations’ meme. Pre-ironic: “This summer will change my life.” Ironic: “This summer will change nothing.” A post-ironic reading may be something along the lines of: “I hope this summer will change something.”

Something started to change. I was beginning to read these memes as the attempt of a cynic to feel hopeful. And it spread: like pulling tarot cards, these memes make me look for a specific way in which they are true for my life. I’m seduced to a position of hope, but not without being reminded of its utopian nature. I can choose to believe them, but I can’t claim they will offer salvation. As a design technique, post-irony offers a way to propose agency without claiming that it is absolute: the summer-subject may not change everything, but that doesn’t mean it can’t change something. If @afffirmation can be a place of hope for a cynical generation, can design writers use post-irony to reach cynical designers?

Some may worry: isn’t post-irony just masking against criticism? Is it anything other than a verbal sleight of hand that hides behind irony? I don’t believe so. In post-irony, the ambiguity is not whether what’s being expressed is ironic (it clearly is), but rather to what extent it can still be read as sincere in spite of its irony (and because of it). Post-irony is less about evading criticism and more about embedding it – including your doubts so as not to stop you from articulating hopes. Still, if proposals already embed their suspicions about what they are offering through irony, then irony cannot operate as a mode of critique. Where does the fox go?

Scrolling through many oversaturated images, I stopped at a dull-looking post: plain-black text and grainy drawings set against an off-white background.

In this comic, meme creator @avocado_ibuprofen articulates a suspicion around the idea of collective artisthood. I recognise this suspicion

Six custom design affirmation memes.

and the difficulties of creating something together – the idea of collective artisthood can often feel unreachably utopian. Yet at the same time, @avocado_ibuprofen denies me the kind of ironic comfort that allows me to feel above this idea. Looking at the comic, I still feel a little guilty for my individualist desires – my position is conflicted, unresolved. Underneath the post, someone had commented: “sometimes you’re so good it hurts.” @avocado_ibuprofen deliberately designs their posts to not resolve the issues they raise. “I’m aiming for[...] something open-ended/self-contradictory enough that I don’t get stuck ‘defending’ my ‘position’ in a faux-conversation online and losing critical life energy,” they wrote in March 2022. Perspective seems to play an important role here. The comic talks in the second person, but its use of “you” feels less like it’s addressing me directly, and more like a separate character in a story.

It’s not necessarily clear if the suspicions of this character are also those of the author. Personally, I am tempted to read the second-person viewpoint as auto-fictional: a way for the author to talk about their own struggles by fictionalising them as those of a character. Yet given that the comic is clearly a fiction, I’m never quite sure where to position the author. This ambiguity of auto-fiction suggests a mode of expressing conflicting parts of oneself without reaching any resolution.

Could auto-fiction be a way to voice messy suspicion? Can it provide a viewpoint where I’m not looking down on the field, but one where I can be both seduced by a genre and still suspicious of some of its claims? By fictionalising their suspicion, @avocado_ibuprofen allows the meaning of claims to change from literal (“Collective artisthood is a silly myth”) to something that is entertained between two different positions (“Would collective artisthood, while sounding good, not be hard to square with certain artistic desires?”).

Entertaining design discourse @afffirmations and @avocado_ibuprofen offer language tricks that enable going beyond straightforward syntax. Postirony and auto-fiction make meaning less stable, placing it between hope and suspicion. I like how they both seduce and trouble me, inviting me as a reader to position myself amidst their complexity. But is there room for this performative register of language in design discourse? Could design genres sell their hopes for the field in ways that still admit doubt? Could design memes articulate their suspicions from a position that acknowledges the seductions of the field they feel deceived by? Can more entertaining calls to adventure really transcend the pressures of capital?

I’m not sure. Which design hero is waiting for a post-ironic book that ridicules its own promises? Which fox is feeling deceived, but still wants to be challenged by an auto-fictional meme? Not much stops “entertaining” discourse from just being laughed at. My proposal, my genre of messy design discourse, relies on a vibe shift; on people being so disappointed with false promises and self-serving critique that they need something else. I find myself caught up in my own struggle: how to propose a path without offering a definite destination of salvation? How to express both my hopes and suspicions? Let me learn from memes.

Architecture School: Pay to Play with Kathryn Larsen

When The Words Don’t Exist with Malika Leiper

In 1953, King Sihanouk declared Cambodia’s independence, bringing an end to the 90-year-old protectorate of France. Vann Molyvann, a student living abroad who would go on to articulate the aspirations of this post-colonial modern nation as its state architect and head of public works, received the news in Paris.

The oars of the wooden fishing boats dipped in and out of the river’s choppy waters. Down by the Seine, Vann sought refuge from the click-clocking of hurried wooden heels on pavement, whilst above him Quai Malaquais teemed with rush-hour traffic.

A word had taken shelter under his breath – or rather, a lack thereof.

There is no term for “designer” in my mother tongue. For the longest time, I’ve been using អនករចន neak rochana.

1 How do I speak about design when the words don’t exist? Vann pondered.

On this particular evening in the atelier, when Professeur Arretche launched into one of his frequent monologues on modernist design dogma, Vann felt a familiar rupture inside of him – the same captive energy that befell him in the classrooms of the លីសី lycée.

2

Perhaps it was because of the letter from his father that he had received that morning, a reminder of the immeasurable duty awaiting Vann as the first Frenchtrained architect of Cambodia. Or maybe it was the ease with which his classmate, Henri, slipped in and out of conversation – the fluidity of his comments jeering in contrast to Vann’s immovable silence.

Still ruminating on the substance of this term, Vann remembered asking his mother its meaning once. “You know I don’t speak បរំង barang,”3 she had snapped in frustration.

And before she would even entertain the thought, it floated away, bobbing and dipping with the force of the currents. Like a split coconut in the water, the word was an empty vessel awaiting its delivery into diligent hands.

Vann left his contemplative angst at the river’s edge and began walking to the café to join Ngo and Sayed. Seven years had passed since they all arrived in Paris on a government scholarship. As close friends, they often found themselves side by side, sketching, painting, and studying the works of great Roman, Greek and French architectural styles.

Ngo’s uncle was the famous Lê Đức Thọ, the Vietnamese freedom fighter affectionately known as the Hammer on account of his uncompromising revolutionary fervour.

The Hammer spent most of Ngo’s adolescence imprisoned in a cage in the South China Sea. Nevertheless, the French guards had the inmates perform Molière plays, improving their minds with good French literature in fulfilment of their civilising mission.

Maybe it was his uncle’s penchant for French theatre that sowed Ngo’s early interest in scenography, eventually putting him on the same steamship as Vann on their way to Paris.

As he neared the Boulevard Saint-Germain, Vann recalled the scrutinising glances of the passengers on the train bound for Marseille last month. Ngo had insisted on paying a visit to Unité d’habitation – it was the last time the three were together.

It wasn’t the novelty of the piloti that struck a chord in Vann, it was the reference to an architecture of his homeland. Though the wooden, stiltraised structures of his childhood were not reinforced with steel and concrete, a rush of familiarity surged through him as he passed under the cool shadow of the building’s open ground floor and ascended its exterior walkways. Had Le Corbusier spent time in Indochine?

Standing on the rooftop, observing the city with a bird’s-eye view, a hunger swelled inside of Vann. He heard his father’s voice, “សងគមរសសរនិយម Sangkum Reastr Niyum4 awaits you.” What form should he give it? The vision was becoming clearer.

It was dark by the time he reached the Café de Flore. His two companions were seated under the vestibule in the red glow of a heat lamp. Plumes of smoke amidst a sea of bodies wafted from the tables surrounding them. Young men and women chattered into the night.

Traversing the sidewalk, Vann caught the gaze of Henri, from Arretche’s atelier, and seated next to him was an unfamiliar face. The man was introduced as Richard, an American writer here to complete his second novel. Seeing Vann, Sayed beckoned them over.

“So, what is this big news we’ve been waiting to hear?” Sayed asked once the five men settled into their cramped wicker chairs.

“I’m not going to Rome. I bought a ticket to Saigon to join my uncle,” Ngo announced.

How could it be? Vann’s stomach lurched. He thought they were just here to bid a temporary farewell to Ngo, on his way to live and study at the Villa Medici – the first Indochine ever to win the coveted residency!

“How can you expect me to watch from a distance when the deafening cries for freedom are finally being heard all around the world?” Ngo continued, clenching his fists with urgency.

1 អនករចន Neak rochana (ne-ah ro-cha-na): Craftsperson. Decorator. 2 លីសី Lycée (lee-say): The French school system where Molyvann received his high school education. Derived from the French word for school

“lycée”. The adoption of French terms into the Khmer language – mode, plan, patrimony – bear witness to a legacy of European domination, which at its height in 1914 claimed 85 per cent of the earth’s surface as dependencies, protectorates, dominions and commonwealth. 3 បរំង Barang (ba-rang): French. France. Foreigner. White man. 4 សងគមរសសរនិយម Sangkum Reastr Niyum (sang-koom ri-yast nee-yoom): The People’s Socialist Community. The political party led by Prince

Norodom Sihanouk that heralded nationwide modernisation efforts from 1953-1970, when Vann Molyvann would construct his most ambitious public projects – the Independence Monument (1958), Chaktomouk Conference Hall (1961), the Olympic Stadium (1963), and the Institute of

Foreign Languages (1971) – earning Phnom Penh its reputation as the “Pearl of Southeast Asia”.

“Freedom? The only freedom is in our craft, my friend,” Sayed replied despondently. He had no intention of returning to a partitioned India. Daily news of the violent outbreaks of nationalist fervour sweeping his homeland beckoned him deeper into the solitude of his brushstrokes. For now, Van-Gogh, Cezanne, and Gaugin were his gods.

“But isn’t it dangerous?” Henri wondered aloud. “Just last week I read over one thousand people were killed by a Viet ambush,” he pressed.

At that point, the newcomer, Richard, began to chuckle. “I wonder what the headlines in the Vietnamese press were,” he said to Ngo, taking a drag on his Pall Mall.

Then, leaning forward with his palms clasped on the table, he continued: “I’m curious – for how long have you all been at the école together?”

“Seven years,” the four said in unison.

“So you must know the proportions of the Vitruvian man?” The American’s thick-rimmed glasses magnified the golden brown of his exacting eyes as he posed the question to the table.

“Why is that relevant?” Sayed chuckled.

“It’s a serious question,” Richard insisted.

“The complete face,” Sayed began, “that is, chin to hairline, is one tenth of the human body.” Then, spreading his thumb and pinky fingers wide and bringing them to Henri’s face, he continued: “The head – chin to the crown – measures one eighth.”

“Fascinating. And that Corbu fellow. What’s his name?” Richard pointed to Vann. “The Maligned Man?” “You mean The Modular Man?” Vann corrected him.

“Right! The Modular Man. What are his proportions?” Richard directed his question back to Henri.

“He is one-and-three-quarter meters tall. Two-point-two-six meters with his arms overhead,” Henri said, raising his hand and accidentally beckoning a waiter.

“Now, how tall, if I may ask, is your mother?” Richard turned back to Vann.

“And what’s her shoe size?” Sayed said, a grin forming.

At that moment, Vann recalled the figure drawing lessons they had all attended in their early years of instruction. Hard as he tried to depict the form of the male nude, the tutors were unimpressed.

“It’s because their proportions are all off!” Ngo had yelled when Vann finally came to his friends in desperation.

“Of course they are! I bet you there’s not a Cambodian alive with feet that big!” Sayed had chimed in, gesturing at the model’s toes with a flick of his pencil.

Vann emerged from the cafe to a deserted rue Malaquais. He was walking home, bending the tattered corners of his father’s letter in his pocket when the wispy fragments of last night’s vision came into piercing clarity.

In his dream, Vann was standing in front of a magnificent slab of sandstone. The ground seemed to tremble from the force of wooden mallets hitting metal as an army of វិសវករ visvakar 5 chipped away at the temple’s facade.

“កូរសមស��ឹកដ�ះ Ko Samut Tuk Dos”6 Vann whispered under his breath as he continued down the Pont des Arts, the dream playing out in his mind’s eye.

Beyond him, Vann could see wild boar, elephants, monkeys and rabbits, clusters of thatched roofs surrounded by palm trees, water buffalo swatting at flies in the verdant rice fields, and the delicate pink of lotus flowers illuminating the dark-green shadows cast by lily pads.

Emerging from the dusty cloud of sandstone, an អចរ achar7 came walking past, carrying a silver bowl in his weathered palms. Into it, he dipped a bundle of twigs and splashed water onto Vann’s forehead, which was now bowed, with palms pressed and thumbs resting at his nose.

A thunderous chant erupted from the old man’s toothless mouth, which was barely moving as he recited:

“Just as rivers with water Entirely fill up the sea, So will what’s here been given, Bring blessings to departed spirits. May all your hopes and all your longings Come true in no long time.”

The End

Vann Molyvann served as head of public works and state architect of Cambodia from 1956-1970. In addition to his extensive work as an architect, Molyvann was an urban planner and oversaw the expansion of Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and Sihanoukville. Along with his position in the faculty of Phnom Penh’s Royal University of Fine Arts, Molyvann’s contributions helped shape a modernist design pedagogy that continues to serve as the backdrop of Cambodian design culture today. Molyvann died in his home in Siem Reap in 2017, at the age of 90 and is survived by his wife, three daughters, and two sons.

5 វិសវករ Visvakar (vi-sva-kaw): Engineer. Originating from the sanskrit “vis”, a derivative of Vishnu, and “kaw” builder – in other words, “divine builder”. Centuries of commercial and cultural interaction between the Indian kingdoms and the Khmer Empire led to a rich cultural exchange, culminating in the architectural masterpiece Angkor Wat, a Hindu temple constructed in the 12th century dedicated to the god Vishnu. In Hinduism,

Visvakarma is the presiding deity of all craftsmen and architects. 6 កូរសមស��ឹកដ�ះ Ko Samut Tuk Dos (Ko Sam-ut Tuk Daw): The Churning of the Sea of Milk, a Hindu story of the creation of the universe carved on a 49m-long bas relief in Angkor Wat. In this epic, gods and demons face each other in a tug of war for the elixir of immortality. For thousands of years they yanked back-and-forth on the giant serpent Vasuki, releasing supernatural creatures and giving form to the world in the process. 7 អចរ Achar (a-cha): A holy man called upon to conduct spiritual ceremonies and rites of passage in daily Cambodian life, from moving into a new home, to opening a new business. Derived from the sanskrit “acharya - an expert, a guru, a master”.