The Radical Design Podcast is a new special monthly show re-thinking the radical potentials of design. We aim to understand the world better through deep conversations with people who are doing significant things. Dive into design beyond the conventional. Hosted by Oliver Vodeb, the podcast explores how design intersects with social change, politics, and radical thought. Each episode features conversations with thinkers, activists, and creators who challenge norms, reimagine systems, and push the boundaries of what design can do.
We are interested in design emerging in the undercurrents, kicking capitalism while its down. Our first series, Radical Intimacies, features dialogues with contributors to the book Radical Intimacies: Designing Non-Extractive Relationalities, exploring themes of dialogue, power, land, interventions, and radical praxis. These conversations highlight design operating beyond dominant, extractive paradigms—aimed at imagining and building new worlds and social relations. Find the book here.
From the aesthetics of resistance to strategies of radical imagination, the podcast investigates the ideas shaping design as a tool for transformation.
About Memefest:
Memefest is an international network interested in transforming social relations through radical design. Independent and collaborative, it works with universities, practitioners, and social movements to create spaces for deep exchange in the undercurrents.
Credits:
Hosted by Oliver Vodeb / Memefest
Co-production with Intellect Publishers
Music by Bait: https://bait2.bandcamp.com/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Radical Design Podcast is a new special monthly show re-thinking the radical potentials of design. We aim to understand the world better through deep conversations with people who are doing significant things. Dive into design beyond the conventional. Hosted by Oliver Vodeb, the podcast explores how design intersects with social change, politics, and radical thought. Each episode features conversations with thinkers, activists, and creators who challenge norms, reimagine systems, and push the boundaries of what design can do.
We are interested in design emerging in the undercurrents, kicking capitalism while its down. Our first series, Radical Intimacies, features dialogues with contributors to the book Radical Intimacies: Designing Non-Extractive Relationalities, exploring themes of dialogue, power, land, interventions, and radical praxis. These conversations highlight design operating beyond dominant, extractive paradigms—aimed at imagining and building new worlds and social relations. Find the book here.
From the aesthetics of resistance to strategies of radical imagination, the podcast investigates the ideas shaping design as a tool for transformation.
About Memefest:
Memefest is an international network interested in transforming social relations through radical design. Independent and collaborative, it works with universities, practitioners, and social movements to create spaces for deep exchange in the undercurrents.
Credits:
Hosted by Oliver Vodeb / Memefest
Co-production with Intellect Publishers
Music by Bait: https://bait2.bandcamp.com/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this conversation, artist and activist Kyle Magee joins Oliver Vodeb to explore what it means to act publicly—through subvertising, image intervention, and sustained political engagement within a media landscape dominated by corporate power. Together, they ask: what does genuine participation in the public sphere look like today? Noone does anti- advertising activism like Kyle Magee. And we at Memefest should know.
Visit our website: https://memefest.org/knowledge/memefest-radical-design/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
American scholar Daniel Marcus and Memefest curator Oliver Vodeb explore the deep ties between capitalism and addiction from the early 20th century to today. They show how capitalism has not only shaped addiction but has actively relied on it as a strategy for growth.
Drawing on their chapter “Capitalism’s Addictions” in the book Radical Intimacies, they explain how addiction became capitalism’s answer to a fundamental contradiction: how to keep selling when people don’t need more stuff. From planned obsolescence during the Great Depression to today’s endless cycle of food, technology, and drugs designed to hook us, they trace how pleasure and dependency became central to capitalist expansion.
Design plays a crucial role in this story: born within capitalism, it has often been deployed to exploit our vulnerabilities and create new forms of craving. This conversation unpacks how addiction has been used to colonise intimacy itself — and why the rise of AI might push these logics into even more intimate parts of our lives. The episode closes by asking: can Radical Intimacies offer a way out?
There is much more in the original written chapter, and If you want to read the whole chapter in Radical Intimacies, Designing Non-Extractive Relationalities, find more about the book: here.
PODCAST CREDITS:
Hosted by: Oliver Vodeb/ Memefest. The podcast is a collaboration between Memefest and Intellect publishers.
Music: Thanks to Bait for their song Property Law. Two best friends meeting seasonally in bucolic surrounds to generate improvised music. Property Law recognises the Indigenous peoples of the world's relationship to land. As in, "we don't own the land. The land owns us." Each of us is only passing through. Empires, Epochs come & go, but the spirit of the land persists.
Visit our website: https://memefest.org/knowledge/memefest-radical-design/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Why is design not enough? Berlin based designer extra-ordinaire Sandy Kaltenborn and Oliver Vodeb discuss design practices which seeks social and political impact and transformation, in relation to the to the constrictions of professional frameworks. The pressing social and political challenges we face these days cannot be understood—let alone addressed—from within the closed logic of traditional design professions or academic routines. If design is to have real political or social impact, it must engage directly from within actual social struggles. That’s where the questions arise, where contradictions become visible, and where intervention is needed. Design that seeks to be transformative must in this sense understand itself as a practice shaped by conflict—not as a response to self-contained problems, but as a contribution to real-world struggles.
Two friends engaged in radical design for decades reflect on the past and investigate what matters in design today.
Visit our website: https://memefest.org/knowledge/memefest-radical-design/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Aboriginal artist and activist Kristy-Lee Horswood and writer, teacher, and activist Sam Burch join Oliver Vodeb to discuss Aboriginal practices of “Seeing Country” and Radical Design. “Country” for Aboriginal people is a deep spiritual and cultural relationship with the land, waters, skies, and all living things—a source of identity, belonging, law, and responsibility.
The conversation centres around the chapter Seeing Country: Decolonization, Timeless Intimacies and an Escape from the Tyranny of the Dead Man’s Vision, which Sam Burch contributed to the Radical Intimacies book. It outlines some of the key ideas behind the practice of Seeing Country. As a practice grounded in lived experience, its radical potential for design lies in its specific relationality with the world—rooted in a deep appreciation of, and respect for, all living things.
The discussion touches on cultural positions formed in response to the ongoing colonisation of so-called Australia, offering relational frameworks that are deeply relevant to radical design. We hear about the meaning of “fire,” the spiritual nature of initiation rituals, the still ongoing forced removal of children, and ideas of what it means to be in “proper relationship.”
At one point, Oliver asks: “Is everything coming from the West bad?” Of course, it isn’t—but as Sam Burch notes, we need to better understand how different knowledge systems can “talk to each other.” Reflecting on capitalism through an Aboriginal lens, Kristy-Lee remarks that even Marx could have benefited from decolonial thinking.
This podcast is a beautiful journey into knowledge and radical relationality through dialogue.
Sam Burch and Kristy-Lee Horswood are both engaged in activist and educational work and have collaborated closely and meaningfully with Memefest since 2013.
Visit our website: https://memefest.org/knowledge/memefest-radical-design/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this conversation Keely Macarow and Oliver Vodeb touch on intimacy during time of the pandemic. The exceptional events of global pandemics teach us a lot about the limits and the potentials of Intimacy. How can we think about intimacy and even radical intimacy through the lessons learned during Covid lock downs or through looking at the HIV pandemic?
Visit our website: https://memefest.org/knowledge/memefest-radical-design/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Black community leader from Baltimore Eric Jackson and Oliver Vodeb speak about radical intimacies and Food Apartheid. The racial structuring of food production, distribution, consumption and promotion of food is deeply rooted in capitalist domination and extraction. The conversation gives deep context on Food Apartheid , explains the situation in Baltimore and the work of Black Yield Institute a Pan African power institution.
Visit our website: https://memefest.org/knowledge/memefest-radical-design/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Australian scholars Alexandra Crosby and Ilaria Vanni are in conversation with Oliver Vodeb about their ideas on Seed Balls as a relational design method. As designers who apply permaculture principles to broader social and cultural issues they have explored and developed potentials of a DIY method to relate with the planty world and with each other in radical ways.
Check the Radical Intimacies, Designing Non- Extractive Relationalities book and read the complete chapter "Seed Balls as Method" here: https://www.memefest.org/publishing/radical-Intimacies/
The Memefest Radical Intimacies podcast | www.memefest.org
Memefest is an international network engaged in the transformation of social relations through radical design. Our main focus is the decolonisation of knowledge and the public sphere + social and environmental change. We integrate education, publishing, research, and the organization of events, as well as the facilitation and production of various media and interventions in the public sphere. Memefest is independent and operates in collaboration with universities, practitioners and social movements. Our approach counters the management of pedagogy, channels knowledge from different disciplines and connects the university with critical, marginal and counter-cultural positions. We create impossible spaces for deep exchange in the undercurrents.
Visit our website: https://memefest.org/knowledge/memefest-radical-design/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode Chilean and Canadian designer and academic Patricio Dávila and Oliver Vodeb discuss what is "critical visualisation" its potentials and also a special project looking at NATO accountability in the death of refugees in the Mediterranean Sea.
Check the Radical Intimacies, Designing Non- Extractive Relationalities book and read the complete chapter "Designing Facts: Assembling Survivors, Satellite Data, and Interfaces in the Case Against NATO in the Mediterranean Sea" here: https://www.memefest.org/publishing/radical-Intimacies/
The Memefest Radical Intimacies podcast | www.memefest.org
Memefest is an international network engaged in the transformation of social relations through radical design. Our main focus is the decolonisation of knowledge and the public sphere + social and environmental change. We integrate education, publishing, research, and the organization of events, as well as the facilitation and production of various media and interventions in the public sphere. Memefest is independent and operates in collaboration with universities, practitioners and social movements. Our approach counters the management of pedagogy, channels knowledge from different disciplines and connects the university with critical, marginal and counter-cultural positions. We create impossible spaces for deep exchange in the undercurrents.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Argentinian medical epidemiologist, family physician, and Memefest collaborator Mariano Mussi puts forward the idea of the emancipatory potentials
of suffering. In this episode Marianno Mussi and Oliver Vodeb explore how radical intimacy is the answer to impossibilities, which cause suffering. In a capitalist society the aim is not to cure suffering but to create value. Radical Intimacy manifests in acts of rearranging relationalities of the social organization of care as work.
Check the Radical Intimacies, Designing Non- Extractive Relationalities book here: https://www.memefest.org/publishing/radical-Intimacies/
The Memefest Radical Intimacies podcast | www.memefest.org
Memefest is an international network engaged in the transformation of social relations through radical design. Our main focus is the decolonisation of knowledge and the public sphere + social and environmental change. We integrate education, publishing, research, and the organization of events, as well as the facilitation and production of various media and interventions in the public sphere. Memefest is independent and operates in collaboration with universities, practitioners and social movements. Our approach counters the management of pedagogy, channels knowledge from different disciplines and connects the university with critical, marginal and counter-cultural positions. We create impossible spaces for deep exchange in the undercurrents.
CREDITS:
Hosted by: Oliver Vodeb/ Memefest
Music: Bait: two best friends meeting seasonally in bucolic surrounds to generate improvised music. Property Law recognises the Indigenous peoples of the world's relationship to land.
As in, "we don't own the land. The land owns us." Each of us is only passing through. Empires, Epochs come & go, but the spirit of the land persists.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Slovenian/Australian sociologist and extradisciplinary designer Oliver Vodeb and Colombian maverick anthropologist Arturo Escobar discuss the onto-epistemic politics
of participatory design. They discuss the roots of participatory design and show urgent and hopeful frameworks for true participation based on radical interdependence. How can we reclaim participation again?
Check the Radical Intimacies, Designing Non- Extractive Relationalities book here: https://www.memefest.org/publishing/radical-Intimacies/
The Memefest Radical Intimacies podcast | www.memefest.org
Memefest is an international network engaged in the transformation of social relations through radical design. Our main focus is the decolonisation of knowledge and the public sphere + social and environmental change. We integrate education, publishing, research, and the organization of events, as well as the facilitation and production of various media and interventions in the public sphere. Memefest is independent and operates in collaboration with universities, practitioners and social movements. Our approach counters the management of pedagogy, channels knowledge from different disciplines and connects the university with critical, marginal and counter-cultural positions. We create impossible spaces for deep exchange in the undercurrents.
CREDITS:
Hosted by: Oliver Vodeb/ Memefest
Music: Bait: two best friends meeting seasonally in bucolic surrounds to generate improvised music. Property Law recognises the Indigenous peoples of the world's relationship to land.
As in, "we don't own the land. The land owns us." Each of us is only passing through. Empires, Epochs come & go, but the spirit of the land persists.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.