“We’re all dealing with the same shit,
just from our own siloes.”

Martin

This is a story about design.

But actually, it’s a story about us.
About how we see, perceive, and reveal ourselves.
About language and silence, attention and invitation.

It’s not linear.

There are bubbles.
  Some rise slowly.
    Some burst.

Some… 
just float.

Design is often understood as a visual discipline, logos, aesthetics, branding… For Martin, design is something else. It’s relational, systemic, and conversational. And it plays a vital role in reshaping how professions contribute to a more life-ennobling future. This is the premise behind Life-Ennobling Design (LED) — a project co-led by Martin Lorenz and Emily Harris at Dm that rethinks design’s role not as a commercial service but as a catalyst for systemic change. Through a series of workshops, publications, and partnerships across Europe, they’re developing new approaches to design that enable collaboration across professions and shift the way we frame problems, align values, and create together.

What is this pressure we feel?

Like a champagne bottle, just opened,
there’s subtle tension before release.
The work of change doesn’t always scream.
Sometimes, it fizzes.

Sometimes, it whispers.
Sometimes, it invites.

And Martin?
He listens 

     …for the fizz.

Introducing Martin

Martin is a designer.

Wait—no.

Martin is a philosopher disguised as a designer.
Or maybe it’s the other way around.

He’s worked in Barcelona, Hamburg, Manila, New York, The Hague, Mexico DF, Paris, London, Copenhagen, Berlin, Madrid, Zürich, Singapore, Hong Kong, Helsinki, Milan, Tokyo, and now at Dark Matter Labs.
He taught students how to choose media as decisions.
How a space becomes a message.
How an interface teaches.
How silence…
communicates.

He came to Dark Matter Labs to work on the visual identity.
But found something else bubbling beneath the surface:

“I’m still arriving at Dm.
You have to create your own Dm
to arrive at Dm.”

So he did.

He didn’t want to create logos shouting “this is mine.”
He wanted to design languages. Flexible. Living.
And like any true language…
something shared.

The Champagne of Change

Have you ever poured champagne? Seen how the bubbles slowly rise to the top? How the gas can’t help but lift?

It’s pressure.
— But it’s gentle.

Just enough
— to release something, 
—— subtle, delicate. 

And if not in the glass
— Released in our mouths

Slow, smooth, tinkling between the palate and the tongue, surprising like the sweetness of a kiss
— sometimes bitter
—— sometimes crisp

This is a bit like that.

Martin’s work at DM, with Emily and others
is about visual design
as a reflective conversation.
A third thing.
Not mine. Not yours.
Ours.

Relational design.

Design that ennobles life.
Design that shifts professions.
Design that breaks silos,
and toasts to that.

LED — Life-Ennobling Design — is an evolving initiative within Dm that seeks to reposition design as a relational and transdisciplinary practice. Rather than working in isolation or as a service to other fields, design becomes a shared language and process across disciplines such as law, finance, education, and urban planning.

The aim: to support the shift toward a life-ennobling economy by working from within each profession’s realities, challenges, and capacities.

“We believe the problems we face today can’t be solved by isolated expertise. Every profession is frustrated. Everyone’s operating in silos. LED creates the conditions for shared reframing, by starting from within each craft and its lived experience,” says Martin.

The approach is both practical and philosophical. On the one hand, Martin and Emily host workshops (with universities, professionals, and civic organizations). On the other, they are developing publications and tools that introduce new ways of thinking about design’s role in systemic transformation.

The Anti-Brief

We often start with a brief. But what if the brief is the trap?

That’s why Martin and Emily invented…

A space to ask:
What are we not saying?
What’s under the surface?
What if we don’t start from what we’ve always done?
What if we begin from tension — from fizz?

They brought it to universities in Salzburg, Ludwigsburg, Barcelona.
To lawyers in London.
To young Welsh activists in the Radical Reading Room.

And slowly, like the bubbles…
Ideas surfaced.

In one workshop, a woman leading a team paused —
really paused —
when asked to write her own anti-brief.

That one question bubbled out,
realigned something subtle.

Because the Anti-Brief is more than a workshop.
It’s a mirror.
A pressure.
A release.

Alongside the anti-brief, LED also explores how design can surface invisible structures: unspoken frustrations, assumptions, and ways of working.

Through visual language, publication formats, and workshop design, Martin and Emily emphasize negative space, friction, and structure as tools to provoke reflection.

For example, one LED publication used a three-column format:

a main narrative

a reference thread

a “friction” column,
containing critical questions,
contradictions,
or pauses

Surprisingly, the white space between columns became one of the most commented-on aspects. It wasn’t just empty; it was a signal, an invitation to reflect, to pause, or to notice discomfort.

The emptiness isn’t neutral. It creates the conditions for others to enter.

Blank space. Is. Conversational.

For example.

Here.

Reader,
what’s come up as you look at this white space?

Frustration?
—Boredom?
——Relief?

What do you make of that signal?

Working Across Professions

LED’s ambition is to contribute to a broader transformation of professional practices.

In workshops with lawyers, Martin observed a common pattern: a desire for change, but a default to creating closed communities or reinforcing existing silos. LED’s role was to gently disrupt that pattern to introduce the idea that many professions share the same challenges, and that by working together (rather than apart), new alignments could emerge.

“This work sounds so confusing when put into words. Maybe because words belong to preestablished systems and infrastructures, and what we are trying to do is to redesign the old and build the new.

Let me throw in some images that come to mind, which might help clarify some of the confusing things I said. Imagine many transparent petri dishes on top of each other. Every petri dish is filled with oil and water. The oil self-organizes and forms groups (which would not exist without the water). When viewed from above, you see that the oil-water petri dishes overlap but don’t mix. It’s like if they have moments of connection, but never really mix.

This is how LED feels to me. We use languages that are complementary, but fundamentally different. We want to bring professions together with design, knowing they will never fully mix. Yet, us all being life on this shared planet, we all react like oil and water. We bond because we share fundamental ways of being and seeing. What if design could be the view from above? Helping to see the overlaps.

After all, everything is about relationships and how we make them ennobling. Design, in its current use, often does the opposite. It creates silos. We need to overcome the systems or petri dishes we are embedded in. I am stretching the metaphor a little too much here… “

says Martin

What’s Noble Anyway?

Life-Ennobling Design (LED) asks:
What would a noble life look like?
What if we designed our professions from that place?
What if law, finance, health, design — all rewrote their briefs?

The LED work 
Is language-building,
— visual prototyping,
—— conversational diagrams,
——— negative space.

Workshops.
Publications.
— Calls.
—— The shifts are not recipes.
(Recipe-seekers often leave disappointed.)

The shifts are invitations.

Like a bottle of champagne…
— set on the table…
—— waiting to be opened.

Martin says:

“A non-noble life? It’s walking through a city covered in ads that think I’m stupid, while the art, the real art, is locked away.”

Design is no longer a tool for promotion.
It’s a language. A sandbox. A ceremony.
30% of design should be inexplicable, he says.

Because life only supports what it co-creates.
Everything else feels
like death.

So what does LED do?
It builds languages between those siloes. Design as coherence. The dream? That each profession will reimagine its own role starting from a Life-Ennobling place. Although Martin and Emily have called this work Life-Enobling Design it feels as big as how we relate.  This work is a reminder of the concept of Nested-I, as described in Bollier and Helfrich book, Free Fair and Alive, the Insurgent Power of the Commons. 

Nested-I refers to: 
“(…) the existential interdependency of human beings on other humans and the larger world, which co-creates and supports our personal development. To use the term Nested-I rather than “individual” is to recognize that one’s identity, talents, and aspirations are ultimately booted in relationships. With this self-awareness, the person who recognizes himself or herself as a Nested-I realized that self-interest and larger collective interests are not opposed to each other, but can be aligned”

What work could be more important than helping us see, and live, that truth?
The individualistic nature of Western culture, combined with our instinct to organize into divided social groups—by profession, culture, or belief—creates a false sense of safety. But it also makes it incredibly difficult to shift our collective ontology: the way we see the world and make meaning together. This work, like bubbles breaking the surface, releases us—softly—into something freer, more spacious.
A return to ourselves. And to each other.

To What Bubbles Up

Champagne, once poured, never goes back in the bottle. Martin’s work at Dm is helping shape a new kind of fizz.

A pressure
that invites.

A language
that stretches.

A shift
that awakens.

And like the best champagne,
it reminds us
how it feels
to be
alive.