Prem Kirshnamurthy writes us a letter. A letter that exemplifies the tangle, weaving moments from his collaborative practice into a meandering text on slowing down, embracing bumpiness and decentring direct design processes. In doing so, Prem illustrates the importance of social and human attention to the design process.

In their essay, Noam Youngrak Son listens to the silence of the design industry in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Palestine. Critiquing design’s historical involvement with humanitarian crises in this current global context, Noam dismantles the financialised risks of activism assumed by design institutions, seeking and signposting a higher calling for practices of design that reach beyond simply the accumulation of capital.

Arja Karhumaa interrogates the relationship between design academics and design practitioners within the realm of publishing; two step-sisterly professionalisms that can struggle to see eye-to-eye in the quest to disseminate ideas. Writing from her perspective as a weaver of many threads of practice, Arja cross-examines the production of knowledge within the design field, embracing and untangling the complexities within her own publishing communities.

After we said adeus to designer Manuel Raeder at the Tangle in Helsinki, we reconnected to learn more about his unique approach to project briefs– and their favourite furniture!

We caught up with Chiara after the Tangle to talk about the intersections between research and creative practice.

Kicking off the Helsinki Tangle was researcher and writer Chiara Di Leone, whose talk “Power Play” launched us straight into our theme by examining the techno-economic power structures at play in climate forecasting.

Control was a theme that threaded through Ryan’s talk at the Tangle, where he described that exercising control is often the foundation of power, and how having a certain degree of control over your creative practice can help with forging your own direction.

As a graphic designer and typographer fascinated with the urban landscape, Laura Pappa’s work operates at the intersection of place and image. In her talk in Helsinki, Pappa explored her mechanisms of staying engaged in creative practice over time.

Studio Manuel Raeder is an interdisciplinary design studio exploring the boundaries between exhibitions, ephemera, books, type design, editing, publishing, textile and furniture design. Manuel is joining us from Berlin to expand on the studios’ deep involvement in editorial and spatial narratives, as well as its interest in the meaning of books within space, the archive and the future of libraries.

Just after the tangle, we posed graphic designer Laura Pappa some questions on what places, and people and practices help keep her work at the cutting edge.

Noura Tafeche is an Italian-Palestinian visual artist and independent researcher. Through a lecture performance at the Tangle, she introduced her research project “Kawayoku Inception” on the visual representation of violence in internet subcultures. We learned about the meaning of images and together questioned the way we learn from online visual culture.

Being uniquely positioned as those who have a hand in producing our environment; responsibility can be placed upon designers and the power they hold in changing the world for the future. However; power is an elusive and plastic substance that clings to some and slips away from others.