A Call to Radical Hope
How can we begin to design for the future in a world that feels increasingly uncertain? As Head of the Social Design Master’s programme at Design Academy Eindhoven, Nadine Botha aims to create “an incubator for radical hope”—an approach that resists cynicism and dares to imagine new possibilities.
Building on the department’s decade-long legacy, Botha is committed to challenging colonial and Eurocentric perspectives while equipping students with the skills to actively shape ethical and responsible futures. She also advocates for stability and continuity within the department, ensuring that students have the space to experiment, reflect, and develop individual practices.
With a background spanning journalism, curation, and research design, Botha brings a broad and critical perspective to her role. In this conversation, she discusses how design education can cultivate resilience, proactive ethics, and a capacity to navigate the uncertainties of the future.
You’ve had a long and wide perspective on the design discipline in Europe and the Global South. How would you describe your view on design and design education?
A very broad definition of design is that it’s an ability to look at the consequences of our actions and to adjust our actions and decisions. This definition has led to the current idea of pan-design, where everything is designed, and it has also made the design discipline too big to act meaningfully.
To narrow it down, back to design as a discipline design is an aesthetic material discipline, which negotiates material conditions in the broadest notion of what material conditions are. For example, digital exists on a material computer, and behavioural design is performed by material bodies. That negotiation of the material and aesthetic propositions of our environment has great potential.
Design education is a space to develop the ability to think beyond the pre-established formats of what design, a job, the future, or life as a human is. It is opening up propositions to think about the future of this planet, which is in a dire environmental crisis, but also in relation to new technologies, which create opportunities but also uncharted, potentially problematic territories. In the future, designers will be asked for creativity and to reach beyond the established path. There will be a need for even more radical thinking.
You earned your Master’s in Writing and Curating at DAE in 2017. How did that experience shape your perspective on design and education?
I arrived at the Academy with a similar expectation to many students— a traditional education, where there is an established body of knowledge that needs to be poured into my head, some knowledge I need to master to be a successful designer. The first year was difficult and chaotic, and I hated everything. In the second year, something clicked—that the openness that one is presented with at the Academy is not a void but an invitation to discover oneself and one’s own propensities, abilities, and motivations. This educational proposition is unique and exactly what is needed from genuine education.
I also understood what type of people come out of this kind of education: they are able to determine their own path and conditions, to shape different ways of being in the world for themselves and others, rather than being limited by a job-seeking mindset. It was eye-opening to see how much traditional approaches to education and knowledge construct the agency we think we have in the world. That was a radical a-ha moment. The world—and education—needs this kind of radical approach for us to really take the future into our own hands.
You've been involved in the Social Design department for years. How do you view the legacy of the programme, and how do you navigatechange now as the head?
For a long time, the department was the only Master’s programme in social design, and it was not a conventional notion of social design. The conventional notion of social design is quite colonialistic, with the designer-as-saviour often reaching out to non-western countries, people, and situations, and imposing a value set on a situation. In recent years, social design has also become shaped by design thinking.
In contrast to this conventional notion, the DAE Social Design department was founded in 2012 with the idea that designers, with their knowledge and skills of making and crafts, could bring new perspectives and unexpected approaches to social issues. Using aesthetics, craft and making to understand and negotiate social situations differently was and still is an exciting and radical idea.
However, the design discipline has changed significantly since 2012. It’s been contested by growing decolonial, feminist, and environmental movements, which demand the discipline to be more self-reflective. Since then, we have also seen a turn towards critical design, in which design is more interested in researching and pointing out problems than proposing something or exploring something new.
My vision for the department is to consolidate these two aspects and invite designers and students not only to settle for critique, but also to recognise the power of design as a discipline to materialise propositions. I hope this incubator of radical hope invites being bold enough to research, imagine, materialise and test different ways of being and doing, instead of settling for making it someone else’s problem or deferring responsibility. That’s where radical hope comes in.
"I hope this incubator of radical hope invites being bold enough to research, imagine, materialise and test different ways of being and doing, instead of settling for making it someone else’s problem or deferring responsibility. That’s where radical hope comes in."
‘Radical hope’ is a central concept in the Social Design programme description. What does it mean?
The way the world is presented to us in the media is quite pessimistic and negative. It can feel overwhelmingly like we are in an apocalyptic crisis. It almost feels radical to think that there could be a hopeful outcome.
Hope is not necessarily something that comes out when you’ve got all the ducks in the row. On the contrary, it comes out in moments of adversity, when it doesn’t seem there is a way through. That’s precisely when one needs hope.
Radical hope is increasingly becoming a responsibility for all of us as citizens, not only as designers. There have been recent books by Rebecca Solnit and Byung-Chul Han about this. If we surrender to the pessimism and the cynicism presented to us in the media, we are shutting down our possibilities as citizens and residents of this planet.
How can designers contribute to ‘radical hope’?
Design has the ability to intentionally reflect on the outcomes of something and make informed decisions to try to adjust those outcomes. Being able to adjust outcomes is a discipline and is essential to open up new possibilities, find new ways of doing things and approach situations with curiosity and innocence, without the kind of expert knowledge that gets expected answers.
How can 'radical hope', 'proactive ethics', or articulating 'alternative not-yets' be taught or mentored?
The ability to reflect on oneself as a human being and designer is key to being able to be motivated by such a thing as radical hope, and not only by markets and commercial professional success. People who are self-motivated and have a vision and hunger to create their own path thrive in the Academy, where students shape their practice and measures of success.
Although the Academy’s open pedagogical framework does have a curriculum, it’s more of a curatorial framework than an established syllabus of information that needs to be processed and replicated by students. In a way, all the master’s programmes at the Academy are almost residency-like. One-on-one teaching is tailored to students’ affinities and abilities, and group work, lectures and excursions pick up on the themes that are relevant to the students’ interests and emerging advancements in design. In this open framework, we encourage learning and the desire to learn, which is an essential skill for designers now, but also going forward in a world where we don’t know what will be asked of us. This curiosity and self-motivation is something that traditional and hierarchical education almost squeezes out of us.
The students come together in a cohort, a community of support and integration, which should not be underestimated. That in itself is a model or a testing ground for propositions of living together in a radically hopeful way.
On a very pragmatic note, where do you see Social Design students working after graduation?
A common perception is that if you study design, you need to end up working as a designer. Design education makes you able to do anything. You can bring in the creativity and the flexibility that you learned in design education to anything that you do. It is needed in government organisations and NGOs to open up established career paths and introduce new ideas and new ways of doing things.
At least initially, most of the students end up starting their own business. Some end up working in advisory roles in government organisations and NGOs. Some go on to do a PhD.
From your perspective, which are currently the most pressing social and societal challenges that should be tackled?
Alienation from each other has struck me in recent months. This might be the most pressing challenge beyond the more obvious environmental and political crises. In some ways, alienation from each other is the starting point of all those crises. It’s corroding the basic conditions of being together and looking after each other, even having a conversation with people who have different opinions to us. It’s eroding our resilience and also taking away the meaning of life in a very fundamental way. If we cannot even be with and enjoy each other, find connection and live in relation to each other and the planet as a whole, that is the biggest challenge.Thinking through this ‘social crisis’ through design’s tools of materiality, aesthetics, play, ethnographic research and much more, is the first step in negotiating the global crises we are facing.