Interviews with Dorja Benussi

I came to design completely sideways.

Psychology was my first idea, but I wasn't particularly good at memorising piles of information, so that didn't happen. I enrolled in social work instead and was already busy questioning the meaning of education itself when design suddenly appeared as an option.

I had no artistic training. I spent about a year teaching myself to draw just to have a chance at the entrance exam. Somehow I got in.

Only afterwards did I realise design was almost absurdly suited to how my mind works: research, ideas, people, images, systems, objects, all allowed to touch each other. It was basically a lucky guess.

At first? It simply looked interesting and fun enough for me to work very hard to get in. I genuinely had very little idea what design was.

Later I realised it gave me a way to process the world. I am endlessly curious about why people behave the way they do, how environments affect us, why certain things move us, how meaning gets attached to objects and spaces.

Design lets me take those questions out of my head and make something with them.

I chose it, but with almost no understanding of what I was choosing.

It was more instinct than plan. Something about it amused me enough to prepare for a year and try to get in.

Turns out the instinct was pretty good.

My work moves between research, branding, visual communication, editorial, digital, products, spaces and creative direction.

I want more work where those categories collapse into each other. Research becoming an object. Psychology becoming a space. A private obsession becoming an exhibition. An idea becoming a business, ritual, publication or chair.

Basically, fewer neat boxes.

“Design legend” sounds like a terrible career objective.

Become interesting instead.

Read outside design. Develop opinions. Pay attention. Make things nobody commissioned. Follow the weird subjects you cannot stop thinking about.

Style is easy to imitate. A mind takes longer.

Judgement.

Knowing what matters, what can disappear, which question is worth asking, when an idea needs defending and when your own beautiful idea needs to die.

The further I go, the more design seems to be about decisions.

First: justification.

Why is this here? Why this shape, material, interaction, language? What changes because it exists?

Then there is something harder to measure: life. Some things are perfectly resolved and somehow dead.

Really good work has intelligence, clarity and some kind of charge.

Because the things around us are quietly doing things to us.

Objects train behaviour. Spaces affect states. Interfaces form habits. Communication shapes understanding.

Good design can make life clearer, easier, more humane, more beautiful, more interesting. Sometimes all at once.

I would design more with people who know things I don't.

Neuroscientists, psychologists, artists, somatic practitioners, architects, technologists, philosophers.

Give me two people obsessing over the same strange question from completely different directions and I’m interested.

I would love to design an entire environment around the body and its states.

Light, sound, objects, movement, attention, retreat, stimulation, ritual, social contact. Something between an installation, a space and an experiment.

Basically taking questions I have been exploring through individual objects and asking what happens when the whole environment participates.

A slightly unreasonable amount of obsession.

Also naivety has been surprisingly useful. I tend to start things before fully understanding how difficult they are.

By the time I understand, I'm already in.

My imaginary pantheon is very messy.

Artists, writers, scientists, psychologists, philosophers, filmmakers, designers, people working with bodies or consciousness.

I get most excited by somebody who has developed an unusually precise way of seeing the world. The discipline is secondary.

I don't know, honestly. I love my Lost in the Night Hirono at the moment and carrying it around.

Tink Things is still the project I am proudest of.

It took research into sensory integration and child development and turned it into furniture that makes room for different bodies, movement and regulation needs.

What matters most to me is the thinking underneath it. Mia and Ika were the first proof that the methodology could become real.

Notice more.

Read outside design. Travel. Watch people. Learn to write. Talk to people who understand things you don't. Make your own projects. Put them into reality where they can fail.

Reality teaches extremely fast.

Psychology was actually the first plan.

So probably something somewhere between psychology, research, writing, art and entrepreneurship.

Which, annoyingly, sounds very similar to what I ended up doing anyway.

This is such an odd question. Sounds banal, but it's hard. Design to me is everything we do decidedly do.

Ivan, easily.

We have built Benussi&theFish together and then somehow kept building more worlds around it.

He has survived every obsession, production disaster, financial reality and abrupt change of direction beside me. That is quite a form of support.

The word “great” makes me itchy.

What made me better was curiosity, research, self-initiated work and constantly wandering outside my own discipline.

Production helped too. Nothing punctures designer fantasy quite like manufacturing.

Again with the master thing :)

The actual obstacles were much less glamorous: money, time, production, running a studio, self-funding ambitious ideas, learning business by doing it.

Tink Things in particular taught me how much infrastructure hides behind one innocent-looking chair.

Show me what you were thinking.

What was the question? What did you discover? Why did the decisions happen? What changed?

I can survive without twenty pages of decorative Post-its pretending to be research.

Too many things, as usual.

Tink Things is waiting for the right partner so we can properly develop what comes next.

SBLMTD is becoming a broader authorial practice for me, moving through research, writing, image-making, objects and whatever other forms the questions ask for. I am also actively developing my art practice around some of the same obsessions.

I am rewriting an illustrated book I started a few years ago, which I am finally ready to look at again with a completely different brain.

And med+mlekko is slowly becoming a physical space in Barcelona.

So I think the future is less one “next project” and more several things finally starting to meet each other.

Enough freedom to follow a question properly.

And enough resources to actually make whatever answer comes out of it.

Beyond that, I would like to keep surprising myself.

Hopefully a point of view.

Maybe people expect certainty too. I find a sharp question much more interesting.

By shaping better conditions for people to exist inside.

Access, dignity, movement, attention, communication, public space, education, inclusion.

Sometimes “better society” is something very small, like allowing a child to move differently without treating their body as a problem.

med+mlekko because it is becoming physical: studio, objects, art, exhibitions, people, gatherings.

SBLMTD because it is still mutating and I don't completely know what it wants to become yet.

And Tink because there are years of ideas waiting behind the first collection.

Tink Things and A Shortcut to Happiness?, for very different reasons.

Tink turned research into something children immediately understood with their bodies.

ASTH came directly out of my inner life and let research, psychology, art, design and personal obsession become one thing.

Those are the projects where making the work changed me too.

More brains. Less aesthetic sameness.

Making beautiful things is becoming incredibly easy. Knowing what deserves to be made, why, for whom and with what consequence becomes much more interesting.

I would like thinking to regain some status.

Upstream and inward.

Upstream towards research, systems and deciding what should exist before styling it.

Inward towards attention, perception, embodiment and the body.

The more digital life becomes, the more interesting physical human experience becomes.

A few days to several years.

The idea is often the fast part.

Finding out whether reality agrees takes longer.

With the question.

Then reading, looking, talking, mapping, poking holes into assumptions.

Eventually something starts to click. Shape gets its turn later.

We, half dust, half deity.

Both.

I like trends as symptoms. They tell you what culture is currently wanting, fearing or copying.

Much less interesting as instructions.

A tool, collaborator, amplifier, sometimes provocateur.

AI is especially useful to me for research, synthesis, conversation and pushing against an idea.

Technology gets interesting when it changes what I can see or do. It gets boring when the technology itself becomes the idea.

Adobe, 3D tools, AI, cameras, prototypes, paper, books, writing and an offensive number of browser tabs.

Whatever gets me where I need to go.

I have very little loyalty to software.

They are information.

Colour, weight, texture, temperature, acoustics, light, atmosphere. The body is reading all of it constantly.

Often it understands a space before the mind does.

Why?

Why this exists. Why it behaves like this. What sits underneath it. What changes because of it.

That question can keep me talking for a while.

Ah, fuck. That's good.

Then immediately: why?

What did they understand? Which decision made it work? What did everybody else miss?

Good work makes me productively jealous.

Someone obsessed, very good at something I am not, and secure enough to disagree with me.

That is my favourite kind of collaboration.

Co-design with actual knowledge and friction, absolutely. Brainstorm theatre, less so.

Ivan, obviously.

Then children and professionals involved in Tink, researchers, collaborators, artists and friends who pulled me into subjects I wouldn't have reached alone.

Influence for me has been cumulative. More strange conversations than one heroic mentor.

My canon is unstable.

The book that affects me most is usually whatever I am currently scribbling all over.

Psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, embodiment, spirituality, anthropology, literature. Design books are actually a minority.

Mostly by doing things before I knew how to do them.

Client work taught discipline. Self-initiated work taught authorship. Research taught me how little I know. Production taught consequences.

And repeatedly becoming a beginner has probably helped more than becoming a “master”.

I want a dinner table, not one famous person.

A neuroscientist studying consciousness. Someone deep inside a spiritual tradition. An artist obsessed with perception. A philosopher. Maybe a mystic.

And a child who finds all of us slightly ridiculous.

The fame question is wildly optimistic.

Awards have been useful. I have applied only to a few, back when we launched Tink Things. I never have time or will for this, even with our client work. They gave the work visibility, opened some doors and occasionally made us feel less insane for doing what we were doing.

Then Monday arrives and there are still invoices.

Colour: changes constantly.

Place: somewhere I can walk for hours and still feel slightly foreign.

Food: cooked properly and shared.

Season: the first genuinely cool week after summer.

Thing: my sleeping mask.

Brand: oh god idk. Margiela?

Each time my grandma tries to understand what I do for living.

A great day is when something clicks.

Two unrelated things suddenly connect. A conversation opens a door. Someone on the team surprises me. One sentence solves three months of circling.

Motivation is unreliable.

Obsession works better.

Absolutely not.

I mostly wanted to climb trees, be outside and run away somewhere.

I wasn't an artistic child. Creative, probably, but more in inventing solutions, games, schemes and ways of existing out on the street.

Design arrived much, much later.

No idea, thankfully.

I am more curious about what survives.

Touch? Ritual? Beauty? Boredom? Desire? Mystery? Other people? Art?

Technology will probably become unimaginable.

I hope humans remain at least slightly gloriously inefficient.

“Fans” is very generous.

Most of the projects you see are really residues of much larger questions I am carrying around.

Right now those questions circle consciousness, agency, embodiment, ritual, attention, beauty, spirituality, technology, emotional states and how much we can consciously participate in shaping who we become.

Some already have projects attached. Some are still just keeping me awake.

And if somebody reading this is obsessing over the same things from a completely different field, please find me.

I think I arrived at design because it gave me a way to process the world.

I have always been interested in why people behave the way they do, what environments do to us, why certain things move us and others leave us completely cold, how meaning gets constructed around objects, images, spaces and rituals. Design became the place where all of those questions could eventually become tangible.

My practice has moved through digital design, visual communication, creative direction, research, strategy, objects, spaces and self-initiated projects. Today I probably identify as much with research as I do with design.

A recurring pattern in my work is finding knowledge or a phenomenon somewhere outside conventional design, recognising that it has design implications, building a methodology around it and then seeing what physical, visual or experiential form might grow from that.

I run Benussi&theFish with my partner Ivan Benussi (I am the fish, yes). We founded it in 2016 and today describe it as a research and design studio. We work across strategy, identities, communication, editorial, digital and increasingly research-led design, with international organisations, cultural institutions and private companies.

The studio is also the place from which many of our self-initiated projects have grown. Tink Things began there, as did my research around emotional regulation and sensory design. SBLMTD is now developing that thinking further into embodiment, state change and the ways we can work more deliberately with the conditions that shape how we feel and act. And then there is m+m, our physical space in development in Barcelona, bringing together design, objects, art, people and ideas in a more tangible, cultural and commercial setting.

So Benussi&theFish increasingly feels less like one neatly defined practice and more like the centre of an ecosystem. Client work, research, products, writing, experiments and new ventures all feed each other. The common thread is probably that we like to enter before the answer is obvious, understand what something really needs to do, and only then decide what form it should take.

One of the sentences we use at the studio is: the things we make shape us back. That is probably the shortest answer.

Everything around us is quietly instructing us. A chair tells the body what kinds of movement are acceptable. A classroom communicates ideas about attention and behaviour. An interface trains particular habits. A brand participates in culture. A room can alter how safe, exposed, calm or activated we feel.

So I think of design as the deliberate shaping of relationships between people, objects, environments, information and behaviour. When I see it that way, design is inevitably much larger than form. Form is simply one of its consequences.

Projects that begin with a question rather than a predetermined object. I like entering territories where the answer is still unclear and where research can genuinely change the outcome.

Sometimes that eventually becomes a chair, sometimes an identity, a methodology, an experience, a publication or an entire system. The exciting part for me is discovering the logic that should govern the thing. Once that logic is strong enough, the design tends to become much clearer.

Tink Things is probably the project closest to me because it contains so much of what I believe design can do.

It began with research into sensory integration, child development and the relationship between our sensory systems and our physical surroundings. That led to a very simple but quite radical question: what happens when sensory intelligence becomes an ordinary design parameter in children’s furniture?

Children’s furniture often confuses equality with sameness. One body, one posture, one supposedly appropriate way to sit, focus or behave. Tink makes room for difference.

The Mia and Ika chairs respond to different needs for movement, retreat, focus and rest, while remaining playful objects that belong in ordinary homes and schools. For me, the larger achievement is the methodology behind them. Furniture was simply its first manifestation.

My professional work inside companies was always in digital design, so product design entered my life through my own practice rather than through client work.

The objects I have designed have all grown from self-initiated research or projects I built myself. I think that freedom has probably shaped the way I approach product design quite profoundly. I am used to starting with the question, developing the methodology and then allowing the object to emerge from it.

I would actually love to design products for somebody else in the future, provided there is enough trust and freedom for me to really play with the problem and make it my own.

Perhaps the body, if I am allowed to cheat. I am increasingly fascinated by the body as an interface. Movement, touch, proprioception, sound, light, temperature, rhythm and spatial relationships are incredibly sophisticated forms of information.

That interest started very explicitly with Tink and sensory integration and has expanded through my newer research into embodiment and state change. In terms of technology, I am most interested in anything that deepens our ability to perceive, understand and work with ourselves.

Usually somewhere between knowing quite a lot and still having no idea what the answer is.

I like the moment when research has accumulated enough density for seemingly unrelated things to start colliding. A sentence from a book suddenly connects with an observation from three months ago, something someone said, a behaviour I noticed in a child, an artwork, a scientific paper.

Walking helps. Travelling helps. Exhibitions help enormously. Conversations help.

Creativity for me feels much more like recognition than invention. Something clicks and suddenly a structure that was already there becomes visible.

Purpose, consequence and context first.

What is this actually for? Who or what does it affect? What behaviour does it invite? What assumptions are embedded in it? What needs to remain? What can disappear? What deserves to take up space?

Then I become interested in the emotional and sensory layer. How does it feel? What does it communicate before somebody intellectually understands it?

Form eventually has to carry all of that.

Curiosity first. Then obsession.

There is usually quite a lot of doubt, irritation, excitement, occasional despair, then that very specific pleasure when previously disconnected pieces suddenly lock together.

I actually value the uncomfortable part of the process. If everything feels immediately obvious, I become suspicious. The projects I care about usually contain a period where I am circling something I can sense but cannot yet articulate.

A strange combination of tenderness and critical distance.

Something that existed privately in your head suddenly has weight, dimensions, consequences and a life outside you. That is always slightly surreal.

With Tink Things it was especially powerful because children immediately began using the chairs in ways that made the research visible. They moved, rocked, hid, curled up, changed position.

Watching an idea become behaviour is much more interesting to me than seeing a pristine object sitting in a photograph.

When it continues working after the novelty wears off.

I like designs that feel almost inevitable once they exist, although reaching that inevitability may have required a huge amount of thought. There should be a relationship between every important decision and the reason the thing exists.

I often think in terms of signal and noise. Successful design carries a strong signal and very little arbitrary noise.

And ideally it changes something, even slightly. A behaviour, an understanding, an emotional state, an expectation, a possibility.

Justification.

Why is this here? Why this material, this shape, this interaction, this language, this scale? I am interested in whether the decisions belong to the idea or have simply accumulated around it.

Then I look at consequence. What happens because this thing exists? What does it ask from the user, the environment and the culture around it?

Beauty matters enormously to me, but I find beauty much more compelling when it has something underneath it.

Designers participate in shaping behaviour, desire, access, consumption, attention and cultural norms. That gives the profession enormous quiet power.

Responsibility begins with recognising that power.

Environmental and social consequences belong inside the design question from the beginning. So do accessibility, inclusion, durability, production and what kinds of behaviours or expectations we are normalising.

I also think we need to become much more demanding about justification. There are already an extraordinary number of things in the world. Anything new should have a reason to be here.

I think design is moving upstream.

Execution is becoming dramatically faster and more accessible, particularly through AI. That makes judgement, framing, research, synthesis and cultural intelligence more valuable.

The interesting designer of the future may move quite freely between researcher, strategist, artist, writer, technologist and traditional designer. The ability to ask the right question will carry enormous weight.

At the same time, I suspect our increasingly digital lives will make embodied and sensory intelligence more important. We will need people who understand attention, nervous systems, physical environments, behaviour and human experience with much greater sophistication.

That territory fascinates me.

My last solo exhibition was A Shortcut to Happiness? at Gallery Bernardo Bernardi in Zagreb in 2021. It came out of years of research into emotional intelligence, self-regulation and the relationship between our internal states and the environments around us.

Looking back at it now, I can see it as a kind of bridge between several things I had been thinking about separately and much of the work I am doing today. The central question was already there: if our surroundings continuously affect us, how deliberately can we design that relationship?

I would hold another exhibition as soon as somebody gives me a reason to. I absolutely love what an external deadline, a space and the expectation of having to show something do to my brain. They force me to take all the half-formed things I have been privately researching, writing, sketching and obsessing over and actually birth them into the world.

Apparently I need a little pressure to stop thinking and make the thing.

Mostly from outside design.

Psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology, child development, somatics, literature, contemporary art, conversations, ordinary human behaviour, strange little observations.

I read constantly and quite promiscuously. I love exhibitions. I save sentences. I take screenshots of diagrams. I watch people. I become fixated on questions.

I think I collect questions more than I collect visual references.

Eventually some of those things begin speaking to each other and a project appears between them.

My consistency probably lives more in attitude than style.

There is usually clarity, conceptual rigour and some tension between seriousness and play. I like things that are visually strong but still warm, strange enough to stay alive, simple enough for the underlying idea to remain legible.

“Warmth with teeth” is a phrase we use at the studio and I think it describes quite a lot of what I am drawn to.

My approach starts with understanding and framing. Research first, principles second, form later. Shape is the last question I ask myself.

I live in Barcelona now. My life and work have moved through Zagreb, Belgrade, Valencia and Barcelona, so I increasingly experience culture through movement between places.

That has probably affected me more than any single national design identity. Living somewhere as both insider and outsider makes you notice assumptions. Things that appear completely natural in one culture suddenly reveal themselves as conventions when you move somewhere else.

I find that slight foreignness productive. It keeps perception awake.

And of course I carry where I come from with me: a certain resourcefulness, humour, scepticism, intensity and comfort with contradiction. Those things inevitably enter the work too.

I like working close to the beginning of a problem.

The best relationships happen when there is access to the real question, the people involved, the constraints and the uncomfortable bits.

At Benussi&theFish we usually start by understanding the context, researching, mapping what is actually happening and building a strategic or conceptual logic. Design then grows from that logic.

I see the relationship as collaborative. The client knows things we cannot know. We see things precisely because we are coming from outside. Good work happens in that exchange.

Look at how somebody thinks.

A portfolio tells you what someone has made. Their process tells you what they might be capable of making with you.

Ask what questions they ask, how deeply they understand unfamiliar subjects, whether they can explain their decisions and whether they are capable of challenging the brief intelligently.

Style matters, of course. Thinking matters first.

And chemistry matters. Design requires a surprising amount of trust.

It changes with every project, but there is usually a sequence underneath it.

First I try to understand the phenomenon or problem properly. That can involve reading, interviews, observation, workshops, existing research, conversations with specialists and sometimes direct research with users.

Then I map what I have found and look for patterns. At some point a framing emerges. From that framing we can build principles or a methodology.

Only then do I want to know what the thing should become.

After that it becomes much more recognisably “design”: concepts, prototypes, testing, refinement, production.

In reality there are loops everywhere. Research changes the design, a prototype exposes a bad assumption, a material suggests another possibility. It stays alive until quite late.

I’d probably cheat on the number.

My Togo armchair. A lava lamp, because I desperately wanted one as a child and apparently some desires deserve to survive into adulthood. And then the posters and artworks made by my artist and designer friends.

Those are probably the things I am most attached to. I like living with objects that carry stories, people or some slightly irrational affection.

The perfectly selected “design object” interests me much less than something I have formed a relationship with.

It depends wildly on the day.

Usually there is some mixture of running the studio, calls, reviewing work, writing, research, developing my newer research projects, family and social life, whatever spiritual practice I happen to be experimenting with at the moment, reading and walking around Barcelona thinking about something completely unrelated to whatever I am supposed to be doing.

I tend to have several worlds running simultaneously. Client work is very concrete and deadline-driven; my independent research can sit in the back of my head for months or years.

There are also far too many tabs open. Both literally and metaphorically.

Read outside design. Learn how people work. Learn to observe. Learn to write and explain an idea clearly. Understand systems, psychology, culture, business and whatever else genuinely interests you.

Make your own projects. A self-initiated project can take you into territory a client would never think to commission.

Tools will keep changing. Judgement accumulates much more slowly.

And protect your curiosity. It is probably the most valuable thing you have.

The great privilege is that curiosity can become a profession. You can spend your life entering worlds you know very little about, learning how they work and then making something tangible from that understanding.

The difficult part is how porous the work becomes. Ideas keep running after working hours. Independent practice also means that creativity lives beside budgets, contracts, production failures, clients, logistics, salaries and business decisions.

I actually think that friction has made me a better designer.

Reality is an excellent editor.

Before shape: purpose, context, effect, behaviour, meaning, constraints, consequence.

Curiosity, observation and judgement.

Then the ability to synthesise enormous amounts of information and find the thing that actually matters. Communication is crucial too. Writing, speaking, listening, explaining an idea, defending it and knowing when to change your mind.

I would add tolerance for ambiguity. Good designers spend a considerable amount of time in the uncomfortable space before the answer appears.

Craft and technical skill remain important, but tools evolve. The deeper skill is knowing what deserves to be made with them.

Books, papers, conversations, writing, sketching, diagrams, prototypes, photographs, voice notes and an absurd number of open browser tabs.

Then the usual digital ecosystem depending on the project: Adobe & 3D tools and whatever else the work requires.

AI has also become part of my thinking process. I find it most interesting as a conversational and analytical instrument, something that can help interrogate an idea, expose connections, organise research or push against a line of thought.

The most important tool is probably still writing. If I cannot articulate what I am doing, I usually have more thinking to do.

With varying degrees of success.

The most useful thing is establishing the conceptual spine of a project early, but sometimes even that only helps so much. I am actually quite good at managing client work, but honestly absolutely terrible at setting and respecting my own deadlines.

Lots of my days end with some degree of a guilt trip about everything I planned to do and didn't. I try to protect periods of concentrated thinking from the administrative rhythm of running a studio, but some ideas simply need time.

I have learnt to respect incubation rather than treating every unanswered question as a productivity problem.

Anywhere from a few days to several years.

An idea can arrive extremely quickly. Understanding whether it is actually good can take considerably longer.

Tink Things took years because the object was only one layer. There was research, methodology, prototyping, engineering, testing, manufacturing, communication and eventually putting a real product into the market.

Physical objects are humbling that way. Reality gets a vote.

Probably some version of: “So what kind of designer are you?”

Which I understand, because my work keeps crossing categories. At this point “multidisciplinary designer and researcher” is probably the simplest answer.

I love and hate this question and usually answer it with: “I’m all over the place.”

Building my own projects has probably taught me the most, and Tink Things in particular. We were incredibly naive when we started. We thought that if the idea was strong, the product was good and we worked hard enough, we could somehow build the whole thing ourselves. Production cured us of that very quickly.

Developing a physical product properly, manufacturing it, storing it, shipping it, marketing it, improving it, financing production and keeping the entire business moving requires a ridiculous amount of work and money. Doing all of that independently taught me more about design than any isolated design process ever could. You suddenly understand every decision through cost, logistics, manufacturing, risk, cash flow and real people using the thing.

It is also why we deliberately slowed Tink Things down. I still believe completely in what it can become, but pushing new products into the world without the right investment and business partner would simply repeat the same structural problem. For now, we are protecting the idea rather than exhausting it.

At the same time, working with the UN internationally for years has been humbling in a completely different way. You move through subjects, countries and realities much larger than the design profession itself. It teaches you to listen, understand context, respect expertise outside your own field and remember that design is only one part of a much bigger system.

Those two experiences probably shaped me the most: building something entirely our own from the ground up, and working inside enormous global systems where your own role is necessarily much smaller.

The mix is quite broad. We have worked with international organisations such as UNICEF, UN Women, UNDP, UNFPA and ILO; public institutions including the Republic of Croatia and the City of Zagreb; private companies such as EESE and Above Academy; publishers including Booka; museums such as the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade; cultural organisations including Rijeka 2020, European Capital of Culture; and individual artists, such as photographer Sara Pukanić.

I actually like that range. One week we might be working with a UN organisation, another with a city, a cultural institution, a founder or an artist. The subject changes, but the interesting part for me is always entering somebody else’s world deeply enough to understand what the work really needs.

The work I care about most is the work that becomes entangled with my inner life.

I am most alive when a project begins with something I am genuinely living through, obsessing over, questioning or trying to understand for myself, and then slowly gathers enough substance to become something outside me.

ASTH came from that place. It grew from very intimate ruminations around emotional states, consciousness, self-regulation, embodiment, transcendence and our capacity to influence our own experience. SBLMTD continues from there, taking those questions further into practices, objects, rituals and ways of working deliberately with state.

Tink Things began differently, through sensory development and children, but underneath it sits a related fascination with the relationship between our internal worlds and the environments and objects around us.

Even med+mlekko belongs somewhere in this territory for me. It is a chance to make a physical world around the things I am drawn to, art, objects, people, conversations, ideas, atmosphere, culture. To build a place that feels like a material extension of how we think and live.

That is probably where design becomes closest to art for me. Research and methodology are there, but so are instinct, symbolism, memory, poetry, spirituality, obsession, taste, whatever is troubling me, whatever is opening something in me at that particular moment.

And increasingly, I want more of this work to happen with other people. I want to collaborate with people who are also obsessing over the questions that keep me awake at night, whether they come from art, science, philosophy, psychology, technology or somewhere I have not even thought to look yet.

There is something incredibly fertile about two or three private obsessions suddenly recognising each other and becoming a shared project.

The work I love most changes me while I am making it. It becomes a way of thinking through life, and occasionally, if everything aligns, that very private inquiry turns into something another person can enter too.

Right now, the main plans are to find the right partner or investor for Tink Things and continue developing the next products; keep building SBLMTD into a more concrete body of research, tools and objects; and move med+mlekko towards becoming a physical space in Barcelona.

Alongside that, I want to expand my writing, research and teaching practice, while continuing to lead Benussi&theFish.

Both, at different stages.

The initial research, framing and creative direction of Tink Things are very much my practice. But bringing something like this into reality is inherently collaborative.

Children, parents and professionals participated in the research. Then there are designers, engineers, manufacturers, photographers, writers and all the other people whose knowledge changes the project.

I like having a strong conceptual centre and then allowing other forms of expertise to make the work more intelligent.

Quite a few, but they sit at very different levels of maturity.

With Tink Things, there are already new products and categories waiting to be developed, but I am deliberately holding that work until the right partner and business structure are in place.

SBLMTD is much more active experimentally. I am developing objects, cards, printed matter, rituals and digital tools around state change, embodiment and self-regulation, while figuring out how the different pieces could eventually connect into a larger system.

m+m is probably the most concrete work-in-progress right now. We are developing it as a physical space in Barcelona, part studio, part curated retail, part gallery and part cultural platform, so there are a million things to work out there, from the space itself to what we show, sell, commission and programme.

And I am writing more. Some texts grow out of ASTH and SBLMTD, some out of Tink and sensory design, and some are simply questions I have been carrying around for long enough that they are starting to demand their own form.

Through Benussi&theFish, LinkedIn or my other project channels... Or Instagram. I am quite easy to find online.

There are probably more things currently obsessing me than I have projects for.

I keep circling around consciousness, agency and the strange question of how much of what we experience as “ourselves” is actually authored by us. How much comes from the body, chemistry, memory, environment, culture, language, other people, algorithms, inherited patterns? And once you become aware of those forces, how much freedom do you really gain?

I think a lot about ritual too. Why humans have always created ways of marking transitions, altering states, making meaning, entering grief, joy, devotion, concentration, ecstasy. Spirituality interests me increasingly from that angle. The human need to move beyond the purely rational self, to feel connected to something larger, even when we no longer share the same religious structures that once held those experiences. I am fascinated by what fills that space now.

Then there is attention. What happens to us when more and more of our perception, memory, choice and eventually imagination are mediated by technology? What becomes more precious when information becomes infinite? I suspect slowness, embodiment, discernment, physical presence, intimacy and direct experience become much more valuable.

Beauty keeps bothering me too. Whether beauty is simply cultural preference or whether some part of it operates much deeper in us. Why certain spaces make the nervous system soften. Why some objects acquire almost talismanic importance. Why art can rearrange something internally without ever explaining itself.

And perhaps the question underneath all of these is one I keep coming back to in different disguises:

How much can we consciously participate in becoming who we are?

And then immediately: where does that participation end? What should remain mysterious? What happens when we become too good at engineering ourselves? And what do we lose if every difficult state becomes something to optimise away?