Design Against Design: Kevin Lo on Radical Practice Across Industry, Community and University

Kevin Lo has spent decades designing for and with protest and social justice movements. From running the exceptional Montreal studio LokiDesign to his current role as assistant professor at Concordia University, he's walked the walk.

25 years after they first met, Kevin and Oliver Vodeb sit down to talk about design's radical potential — and the uncomfortable truth that design is still largely a tool for capitalist extraction. They explore what it means to practice oppositional design across industry, community and the university, what AI means for the future of graphic and communication design, and why — now more than ever — we need radical design in theory, practice and education.

Kevin is a member of the Memefest network, a long-term jury member of Memefest's Friendly competition, and author of the recently published Design Against Design (Set Margins', with an afterword by Oliver Vodeb).

A conversation about experience, maturity, curiosity and the urgent need for design that actually challenges the status quo.

🎧 Listen now.

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Shahib Uddin is a social documentarist, using photography as his chosen medium to reveal human nuances of the world

Visit our website: https://memefest.org/knowledge/memefest-radical-design/

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THIS IS THE SECOND PART OF THE CONVERSATION: Earthship Futures: Radical Design for Community and Life is a live conversation between Daryl Taylor and Oliver Vodeb, at 2026 Melbourne Design Week, recorded as part of the Radical Design Podcast. The discussion focuses on Taylor’s Earthship project in Kinglake, Victoria – an experimental natural building initiative developed through international participatory workshops following the Black Saturday mega-firestorm, Australia’s worst natural disaster.

The session explores how community-led design and architecture can support socio-ecological restoration and regenerativity, post-disaster community recovery and discovery, and social and emotional resilience. Drawing on lived experience, the speakers will examine undisciplined and fringe design knowledge, co-liberatory climate-responsive design processes and practices, and the role of design in rebuilding both physical and social infrastructure in disaster-vulnerable and -impacted regions. The event took the form of a moderated dialogue followed by audience Q&A and discussion. *We were also joined by Serenity Hill, a food sovereignty community activist.

Daryl Taylor

Daryl Taylor is a pioneering Melbourne-based builder, educator, and community leader, known for constructing Victoria’s first council-approved Earthship in Kinglake—a radically sustainable, fire-resistant home built from recycled materials after losing his own in the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. As a lived-experience mental health and neurodivergency advocate, he has shaped policy and education in community development, disaster resilience, and participatory design across government, NGO, and academic sectors, teaching at five Melbourne universities and co-authoring influential works on post-disaster recovery. Daryl’s work—spanning eco-design, permaculture, and community-led resilience—has earned national awards and features in ABC News and Grand Designs Australia, while his initiatives like Facing Fire, Biocultural Futures, and Retro-Futures continue to inspire sustainable, adaptive living in the age of climate change.

Visit our website: https://memefest.org/knowledge/memefest-radical-design/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Earthship Futures: Radical Design for Community and Life is a live conversation between Daryl Taylor and Oliver Vodeb, at 2026 Melbourne Design Week, recorded as part of the Radical Design Podcast. The discussion focuses on Taylor’s Earthship project in Kinglake, Victoria – an experimental natural building initiative developed through international participatory workshops following the Black Saturday mega-firestorm, Australia’s worst natural disaster.

The session explores how community-led design and architecture can support socio-ecological restoration and regenerativity, post-disaster community recovery and discovery, and social and emotional resilience. Drawing on lived experience, the speakers will examine undisciplined and fringe design knowledge, co-liberatory climate-responsive design processes and practices, and the role of design in rebuilding both physical and social infrastructure in disaster-vulnerable and -impacted regions. The event took the form of a moderated dialogue followed by audience Q&A and discussion. *We were also joined by Serenity Hill, a food sovereignty community activist.

Daryl Taylor

Daryl Taylor is a pioneering Melbourne-based builder, educator, and community leader, known for constructing Victoria’s first council-approved Earthship in Kinglake—a radically sustainable, fire-resistant home built from recycled materials after losing his own in the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. As a lived-experience mental health and neurodivergency advocate, he has shaped policy and education in community development, disaster resilience, and participatory design across government, NGO, and academic sectors, teaching at five Melbourne universities and co-authoring influential works on post-disaster recovery. Daryl’s work—spanning eco-design, permaculture, and community-led resilience—has earned national awards and features in ABC News and Grand Designs Australia, while his initiatives like Facing Fire, Biocultural Futures, and Retro-Futures continue to inspire sustainable, adaptive living in the age of climate change.

Visit our website: https://memefest.org/knowledge/memefest-radical-design/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The amazing Jane Naylor speaks with Oliver Vodeb about how to go on an Artstrike. Jane reassessed her art practice, went on an Artstrike and developed the concept of *Rt. Find out what this means, and how could you do it yourself. Besides this, we talk about deeper and more nuanced ways on how to distinguish Art from Art in ways that help us see through the BullS*** Art World and what it calls Art. Oh, and one thing we really LOVE: Jane speaks about her work in relation to solidarity and the ephemeral! Enjoy!

Visit our website: https://memefest.org/knowledge/memefest-radical-design/

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Oliver Vodeb talks to George Petelin, author of the chapter on Dialogue in Memfest’s book on Radical Intimacy. They discuss the importance of intimacy for true dialogue to take place and how conditions in contemporary society erode that intimacy or substitute it with forms of pseudo-intimacy. Radical Art and Design face the difficult task of restoring intimate dialogue mediated through technology on a mass scale.

Visit our website: https://memefest.org/knowledge/memefest-radical-design/

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What carries more wisdom than the seed? Rachel Bordeleau, Jeanette Hart-Mann and Chrissie Orr collaborate on SeedBroadcast, a transdisciplinary art project, raising the culture of agri-culture and putting the seed in the centre of our relations with the world. In this podcast episode they speak with Oliver Vodeb about the different and intimate dimensions of their work learning from the seed and using the knowledge to empower our understanding and our relations.

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/

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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/

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