Published on 28.11.2025
Nadine Botha is a research designer, editor, writer, curator, and educator. Through her diverse practice, she investigates the intricate ways in which unseen social, political, legal, economic, and cultural systems shape our objects, bodies, homes, cities, technologies, experiences, and knowledge. Since 2023, Nadine has been Head of the Social Design master’s programme at Design Academy Eindhoven, which seeks to redefine the role of designers in social and political relations and complexities. She is also a research associate of the Visual Institute of Art and Design in Johannesburg. In 2018, she was Associate Curator of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennale, A School of Schools.
Delany Boutkan is a writer, curator, and educator based in the Netherlands. She works as a researcher at Nieuwe Instituut. Her work examines how organisational conditions shape what can be remembered, shown, and imagined, treating policies, contracts, and institutional languages as designed materials. She teaches at the Sandberg Instituut Studio for Immediate Spaces and founded Design Drafts (2022), a publishing network for embodied and experimental writing in design. She sits on the editorial board of MacGuffin Magazine and co-edited Remapping Collaborations and the Collecting Otherwise Manuals (2025).
Tiiu Meiner is a curator, writer, and educator based in Rotterdam. Her work investigates how language and storytelling shape the ways artistic practices connect to the world. Her projects range from essays and editorial collaborations to mentoring and programme development, guided by an ongoing interest in how language sustains and transforms creative work. She teaches at the DesignLAB at Gerrit Rietveld Academie and works in communications and artist hospitality for Sonic Acts.
Over the past decade, curating has evolved to take on new forms and meanings. Once defined by exhibitions and the arrangement of objects, it has expanded into infrastructures, pedagogy, publishing, and socially embedded practice. Today, curators are as likely to shape programmes, policies, and institutional frameworks as they are to install artworks – responding to questions of inclusion, participation, and the politics of support.
When I began the Design Curating & Writing master’s at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2017, I didn’t fully know what curating was, or what I was getting myself into. The programme itself was part of a broader shift: during the 2010s, curating was starting to move away from the white-cube model and toward more distributed, process-based forms of practice. Museums were being challenged to rethink their roles, and design was increasingly understood as a social, political, and infrastructural force.
Initially conceived as a joint MA led by Louise Schouwenberg, Jan Boelen, and Joost Grootens, the course was reoriented in 2014 by Justin McGuirk, then chief curator at the Design Museum in London, and Alice Twemlow, who went on to found the Design Lectorate at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. They coined it Design Curating & Writing, marking a new phase that reflected their own curatorial and critical backgrounds and the expanding scope of the field at that time.
By the time I graduated in 2019, both McGuirk and Twemlow had left, and the programme was nearing its end. What had begun as an experiment in curating had loosened into something more open-ended and uncertain – less a training ground for exhibitions than a space for reflection, language, and critical practice. In 2020, it was formally restructured as the Critical Inquiry Lab, moving away from curatorial and exhibition-based formats altogether.
This ambiguity shaped us as much as it unsettled us. With little classical training, many of us carried the programme’s questions into other terrains: writing, teaching, and the behind-the-scenes dynamics that give structure to practice. It left me curious to understand how others navigated that legacy, and what remains of the course in their work today.
Two such peers are Nadine Botha, who graduated in 2017 and now leads the Social Design master’s at Design Academy Eindhoven, and Delany Boutkan, who works as a researcher at Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Both have developed practices that respond to the pressures of our present moment: a fragmented, hypermediated world in need of infrastructures for connection, care, and embodied experience.
In the following conversation, we reflect on what remains of that education – how it shaped our ways of working, and what “design curating and writing” might mean today.
Tiiu Meiner: Why did you choose the Design Curating & Writing master’s, and what from that time still shapes how you work?
Nadine Botha: I came from journalism at a moment when the field was collapsing – blogs and unpaid platforms like Huffington Post were hollowing out paid work. I wanted to study design but didn’t have a design degree. This course at Design Academy Eindhoven offered me an entry point through writing, with the promise of working alongside designers. That collaboration never quite materialised, but the openness of the programme stayed with me. At first I struggled with its chaos, but then I realised that the open space was the curriculum, an invitation to make your own education. That shifted everything. What I carry forward is valuing openness as an educational strength, while also recognising the need today to balance it with scaffolding and tangible skills.
Delany Boutkan: I kind of arrived there sideways. I’d always been split between working with design studios and exhibition production. I started off in another department, Contextual Design, which was very much about making. But I felt overwhelmed by the pressure to materialise every thought into an object. Writing became my material instead. That’s when I moved over to Design Curating & Writing, where questions that didn’t have to end in objects were taken seriously.
The course was also closely tied to the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, where curators encouraged us to interrogate institutional structures like colonial legacies, archives, budgets, policies, and to see how these shape what becomes public. We were taught to look at policies and contracts as design materials in themselves, for example. Even now, I keep coming back to questioning systems precisely when they seem smooth and unquestioned.
TM: How does your current work carry that approach forward, and what medium does curating live in for you now?
DB: For me, curating lives in infrastructures. Infrastructure shapes who gets remembered, who gets supported, and who gets silenced. At Nieuwe Instituut I co-coordinate the International Fellowship and the Design Drafts publishing project amongst others. The curatorial work is in how support is structured. That means the selection, budgets, time, the networks you’re introduced to, and what happens afterwards.
NB: For me, curating has migrated into education and research. At Design Academy, programming a department is essentially a curatorial act, putting together guest speakers, workshops, and shaping the overall experience students move through. In my independent practice, I see the curatorial happening before the project: in the research, the framing of questions, and the critical contextualisation. I don’t always create exhibitions; I curate how research is represented through workshops, publications, online platforms, or participatory formats.
TM: What feels like the most powerful way to support or share design today?
DB: For me, it’s not about numbers but about placing practices in contexts where they can actually grow and be meaningful. The mythic ‘large audience’ often flattens differences and usually defaults to a white wealthy audience. Effective support means being specific.
At Nieuwe Instituut, small-scale initiatives like Research Nights are designed not to fill a 250-seat hall but to build communities around questions. It’s about resonance, even if that means 20 deeply engaged people rather than 200 casual ones.
NB: I circle back to education. I’m convinced what we do is less about producing more designers and more about cultivating engaged citizens and thinkers who can apply creative capacities anywhere. With AI and other shifts challenging conventional schooling, design education’s emphasis on self-directed, critical, and collaborative learning feels more relevant than ever.
TM: Why do you think so many of us didn’t end up in classical curating roles?
DB: There are a few reasons. Structurally, there just aren’t many classical curating roles open to new graduates, and the ones that do exist are often held by an older generation who’ve been in place for a long time. So scarcity forced us to become inventive. But it also has to do with how we were trained. In Design Curating & Writing we learned to see the infrastructures around design, like the budgets, policies, fellowships, and conditions of support, as forms of design in themselves. With that mindset, it felt natural to take curatorial thinking into other contexts, rather than pursuing the narrow idea of a “classical curator.”
NB: I agree, and I’d add an institutional mismatch. Design Academy pushed us to unlearn the object, while traditional institutions still revolve around objects. That made it hard to slot into conventional curating roles. In my year, two out of five people did become classical curators, but most of us didn’t.
When I worked on the Istanbul Design Biennial, A School of Schools (2018), I learned both sides. Exhibitions carry an immense operational load – commissioning, logistics, endless coordination – which I found overwhelming. But in that Biennial, staged during Turkey’s state of emergency, I also saw the exhibitions’ political potential. We used the theme ‘Design Education’ as a kind of Trojan horse, framing shows as schools so we could speak about how political conditions design knowledge, attitudes and ways of thinking.
That experience showed me that curating isn’t something you can fully learn in a classroom. You only grasp it by doing because it holds together concepts, politics, production, and people, all at once.
TM: How do you feel about exhibitions as a format now?
DB: I became quite dismissive of exhibitions for a while, but I’ve come to see them differently. What interests me now is not the exhibition as an output but as a method of research, a way of asking questions in space. Text and conversation can do some things, but space allows for other, more embodied forms of knowing. Seeing Natalie Kane’s exhibition Design and Disability at the V&A reminded me, for example, that disability justice communities are incredibly inventive in how they read and redesign space, and I think design curation has a lot to learn there. For me, the challenge is to treat exhibitions not as the final word but as part of an ongoing inquiry into how people, from a variety of social groups, encounter design.
NB: I hardly ever go to exhibitions anymore. Too often the format feels slow, predictable, or like something I’ve already seen online. What I value now are formats that expand experience rather than just knowledge – exhibitions that are sensorial, immersive, or embodied, that offer something digital media can’t. Some shows manage to do this in smart ways, like Vera Sacchetti and Frederico Duarte’s exhibitions in Portugal that translated Fazer’s magazine spreads into a spatial form. But generally, I find myself more drawn to public programmes, workshops, and collective encounters because that’s where the energy is, where you’re engaging with thinkers, makers, and other visitors directly. For me, exhibitions only remain relevant if they can become sites of encounter and experience, not just display.
TM: What keeps you curious about design curation, and what feels like a “good outcome” for you these days?
DB: Design keeps me curious because it refuses to sit still. It has been so defined through a Western upper-class lens. Other ways of making the world were relegated to ‘craft’ or ‘vernacular’. I don’t believe in a static definition and constantly questioning it keeps me engaged.
And a good outcome, for me, is what continues after a project, like a shift in perception, a new collaboration, or an infrastructure that stays. Institutions are elastic; they often snap back after a person that initiated a positive change leaves the institution. So I aim to leave projects structurally better than I found them in the hope they won’t snap back.
NB: For me, curiosity comes from curation resurfacing in new contexts. As AI increasingly curates what we see online, the human touch in all its messy, subjective, narrative ways becomes valuable again. People will seek more than algorithmic slickness.
I also think curators are shape-shifters – they can move across formats, from fast public programmes to slower print or exhibition [formats]. Maybe curating isn’t about content anymore, but about encounters, bringing people together in embodied, collective experiences.
Listening to Botha and Boutkan, what emerges is a wider sense of what curating can be. It is less about arranging objects in a space and more about editing infrastructures, programming educational encounters, shaping research questions, and building contexts for dialogue.
The age-old etymology of curating, from curare to care, remains people’s favourite touchstone, but their stories suggest that the place where care is directed is shifting. Care is no longer only about artworks, collections, or audiences in galleries. It extends to infrastructures, research processes, students, collaborators, and communities that may never set foot in a museum. That expansion feels not like a departure, but a natural progression of what curating has always been: an ongoing practice of attention and responsibility.
This is also why the Design Curating & Writing course, however short-lived, mattered. It trained a generation to see curating not as a job title but as a practice of care in its broadest sense. In a time when institutions chase numbers and algorithms that either polarise or flatten, that expanded idea of curating, as care for the conditions of culture itself, feels more urgent than ever.