The No Design Manifesto: Design Beyond Shame

Mieke Gerritzen

Welcome to a world where everything seems "wrong": eating meat, smoking, sitting, flying, data, campfires, flowers on the table-even your houseplant might be a climate offender. We're flooded with dos and don'ts, as if daily life must constantly be corrected by a moral authority. But what if we didn't shrink back in shame? What if we moved forward-with imagination?
The NO DESIGN MANIFESTO is a call for creative freedom. At Next Nature, we don't believe in going back to nature-we believe in moving forward. A nature where humans and technology co-evolve, not under rigid rules, but through new forms of play. Design shouldn't be a moral compass-it should be a living, breathing system, alive with potential.
Instead of turning design into a lecture on good behavior, we see it as a space for radical curiosity. Not statements that align neatly with policy, but experiences that invite us to feel, think, and act differently. The future doesn't need perfection-it needs connection: between nature and algorithm, bacteria and emotion, human and more-than-human.
Forget the checklist. Embrace the ecosystem. Don't fear the wild edges. The new manual? We're writing it-together.