For the first years of my career, “I would prefer not to” was quietly becoming my position. I entered design through the work the industry most readily offered: publishing, advertising, branding, and communication in support of sales. I learned how to make things clearer, more desirable, and easier to consume, but became increasingly uneasy with design as a supporting function for mass production and consumerism. The project ended at delivery, while its social and ecological consequences continued beyond the designer’s responsibility. I began asking whether design could do more than improve what already existed — whether it could question what should be produced, how value was defined, and the rules shaping the work in the first place.

Around 2015, while working independently in London, I encountered the wider Project 00 community and a group of remarkable individuals working at the edges of design, systems, and institutional change. That encounter gave organisational form to questions I had already been carrying. Could design become more than a commercial supporting function — a way of thinking, a framework for collective sense-making, and a means of shaping the conditions in which different futures become possible? Dark Matter Labs became the most important setting in which I could test those questions, first through the London practice and later through the opportunity to establish and shape a locally rooted entity in South Korea. Building the organisation — its missions, relationships, language, and economic reality — became part of the design work itself.

That inquiry is still forming. My practice has moved from visual communication into systems research, civic technology, and governance infrastructure, and is now turning toward repair, stewardship, and long-term transition. I am especially interested in micro-cities, technologies designed for civic value rather than efficiency alone, and small conditions at the edge of dominant systems that might seed deeper change. I no longer think design’s value lies mainly in producing answers. Its deeper role may be to enter early enough that value, participation, and the rules themselves can still be questioned — and to stay long enough to help fragile possibilities endure.