The core of my work is to seek out inspiring people who are designing for life, for real, in diverse contexts. I write about their work in books (12) and online (900+ blog posts). In keynote talks, I explain what you can do, with others, to help them thrive. I help universities develop innovation and design projects. I curate festivals and biennials which bring these project leaders together. Between times, together with my partner Kristi van Riet, I host Retreat-MeetUps at our house in France.

From 2026, I am Senior Advisor to Prof. Lou Yongqi at Shanghai University of Engineering Science, where he is president. We will focus on the Design Harvest 3.0 programme. (This builds on my work as a professor at Tongji University since 2019. There, I curated the Urban-Rural Reconnection expo in Shanghai, in 2019, and co-wrote the DesignS Manifesto). I continue to serve on the editorial board of She Ji; advise PhD students in the SustainX Lab; and work with the Ecology & Cultures Lab of Prof Valsecchi.
thackara.com/urbanrural/research-statement-for-tongji-university/

Care, Value, Place is a two-day annual event that I have co-curated since 2024 with BITSdesign. We invite grassroots project leaders to discuss how design might serve their real-world, place-based projects. (In 2026, I continue to serve on the Advisory Group of BITS Design, the new design school in Mumbai founded by Kumar Mangalam Birla, and led by its Dean, Nandita Abraham)
bitsdesign.edu.in/news/care-value-place-conference-mumbai

How best can design serve bioregions, and urban-rural relationships? At the invitation of Professor Irene McAra-McWilliam, OBE, I’m visiting professor at Rural Lab on the Altyre Estate, in Scotland, site of the Glasgow School of Art’s Highlands & Islands Campus. In 2026, I will be also a guest critic for a fifth year at the GSA’s Winter school convened by Professor Gordon Hush and led by Professor Albert Fuster.
gsainnovationschool.com/winter-school

Bioregioning reminds us that we live among watersheds, foodsheds, and fibersheds – not just in cities, towns, or ‘the countryside’. In 2026, I will continue to help Isabel Carlisle, founder of the Bioregional Learning Alliance, develop design courses for early and mid- career professionals.
https://bioregion.org.uk/meet-the-team/

Many small villages in Europe have been suffering from depopulation – but the tide is turning. In 2020, together with Andrea Paoletti and the Casa Netural Foundation, I helped found the Open School for Village Hosts, a community of practice for mid-career professionals. In 2o26, OSVH is repositioned as a movement that helps local leaders enhance and expand activities that create positive ecological and social impact.
villagehosts.eu/future-villages-lies-hands-rural-activators/

A small number (4-10 people) come to explore what designing for life might mean, for them, In practice. Some are already working on a live project. Other groups are exploring alternative new pathways. Starting in 2026, our offsites are hosted by the not-for-profit Doors of Perception Association.
thackara.com/meetinfrance/offsite/

The words ‘Dancing With Life’ were coined by the scientist Donella Meadows to describe healthy ways to connect with, and live among, living systems.
Her words are the working title of my next book which will be co-published by Thames & Hudson and Lilliput Press.

John Thackara Newsletter August 2025

“Balancing proximity and modernity” is the informal theme for our last MeetUp of the year which starts on 28 August (until 4 September).

I’m borrowing the words from Frédéric Bosqué who’s developing a rural transition neighborhood called Tera in the Aquitaine region of France. https://www.tera.coop/ Bosqué reckons regions like his, and Les Cévennes, where we live, are examples of what he calls Rurality 2.0 – a way of life in which nature, culture, and technology are combined in new ways.

linkedin.com/in/fredericbosque

Is Rurality 2.0 a viable thing? Demand for new ways of living is certainly strong among privileged Europeans. Fifty seven per cent of city dwellers in France, for example, say they would like to live closer to nature. Among them, a significant minority would like to live in some kind of ecological settlement in which housing is shared, and healthy vegetables are produced on cooperative farms, and so on.

Despite this strong interest mass resettlement in ecovillages is not happening. “The reality is brutal” Bosqué observes; “80 per cent of planned eco-places never come to fruition. They flourish in people’s minds, and then whither on the ground”.

The short life-expectancy of ecovillages is not a new phenomenon. California’s Utopian Colonies: 1850-1950 – published in 1953 – chronicles a steady stream of projects which failed due to the same political, economic and cultural conflicts that Bosqué identifies, today.

Are there other ways than ecovillages to balance proximity and modernity in practice? We like to think our MeetUps have those qualities – but we don’t live in a designed community. On the contrary, we arrived in this small market town pretty much by accident. But we’re almost local, by now, in a town that’s been adapting to change for more than 1,000 years. We’ll be happy to share what we’ve learned in the last 24 of those.

Frédéric Bosqué runs immersive weekends for anyone wishing to experience Tera close up. The next two are 6/7 September and 25/26 October.

wiki.tera.coop/doku

New urban-rural economies are the main focus of my work In Shanghai, where I’m a visiting prof at Tongji University. I help senior leadership, and faculty, develop real-world research projects, and I also contribute to events. One of these is the World Design Cities Conference (WDCC), in September, which is shifting the focus of design toward a “web of life” framework. I’ll be doing a follow-up to the AgTech for Agroecology lecture I gave on my on my last visit. I posted a transcript, summary, and takeaways, here:

thackara.com/biodiversity/agtech-for-agroecology

System transformations are happening all over – so how can design help? In October, I’m co-curating a second Care, Value, Place (CVP) event at BITS Design school in Mumbai. I say ‘event’ – rather than conference – because CVP is but one element in a knowledge ecosystem that includes grassroots project leaders, student projects, faculty. The library team play a pivotal role as stewards of this emerging knowledge ecosystem. Keynote videos from the first Care Value Place, last September, have been posted on You Tube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKb-m7MDDLrVkoQ1KJHgBtQ


And here are my reflections on that event.

https://thackara.com/care/introduction-to-care-value-place-mumbai/

My most popular format on Zoom is a 30 minute talk followed by the same time again for discussion. My conversation-starting topics this year are: Designing For Life; Rewilding AI; Oil Age to Soil Age.

https://thackara.com/about/talks/

7-Day-Sabbaticals
When I was explaining about our MeetUps in France, a smart person said we should call them 7-Day-Sabbaticals. We’ve been discussing what to call them since 2019, when we started, and will probably continue to do so – but we have now decided on dates for 2024:

15 June – 22 June
2 July – 9 July
24 August – 31 August
10 September – 17 September

Go here for details on what they are, who comes, and why, and how to apply.

I just got back from a month in Shanghai. Scroll through these signals of change:

For a third year, I’m organising a workshop next February at Milan Politecnico. I challenge design students to design an urban infrastructure, tool, equipment, place, or experience – and give them three domains to choose from:
– Soil care, composting, and fermentation;
– Trees, microparks, and edible forests;
– Microbiome inspired green infrastructure.
thackara.com/urbanrural/nature-as-infrastructure-microbial-urbanism-and-design

Village Hosts are collaboration experts who co-create new services and enterprises in rural areas that have a positive ecological and social impact. They seek out and connect assets that may already exist in a community – people, places, buildings, and skills – but are unknown, or neglected. Their work leads to make it possible for diverse partners and stakeholders to work together – often for the first time. There are dozens of rural networks, platforms, labs and hubs in Europe, but the majority of these are time-limited and feature university reasarchers. OSVH a community of practice for people who are from, and will stay in, their locality. The OSVH Manifesto and Handbook have just been launched.
villagehosts.eu

Bioregioning re-connects us with living systems, and each other, through the unique places where we live. It reminds us that we live among watersheds, fibersheds, and food systems – not just in cities, towns, or ‘the countryside’. Growth, in this bioregioning, means soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient. But how do you do it (bioregioning) ? In 2024, I’m helping the Bioregional Learning Centre develop a Bioregioning 1:01 course for mid-career professionals.Details to follow soon.
bioregion.org.uk/meet-the-team

People come to explore what designing for life might mean for them. Some are working on a live project, thesis, course, or book. Others want to transform their professional situation, and only do good work. They use a time-out in France to figure out how to do that.
Aside from organised Sabbaticals/MeetUps you can come in the off-season for a Retreat or bring your team to an OffSite
thackara.com/meetinfrance

I was invited by Aric Chen (left, above) director of Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, to join a Dutch Design Day discussion on “Revisiting Design Institutions”. Our panel of former institute directors included Dingeman Kuilman (right). Here is my five minute introduction.

In 1993, soon after I arrived in Amsterdam to start work as the Vormgevingsinstuut’s first director, I met the eminent Dutch engineer, Leo Jansen. For 20 years, Jansen been a leading member of the global scientific community that produced Limits to Growth in 1970. That book had famously warned of an “imminent global disaster” if industrial capitalism continued on its perpetual-growth, extractivist, path.

“If we are going to be serious about sustainability” Jansen told me, “we rich countries have to reduce our energy and material throughputs by a factor of 20 times. To be sustainable, today, means meeting our basic needs using 5% of the resources we are using now”.

Woah! Factor 20! Five percent! That conversation had a profound impact on the Design Institute’s first director. I knew sustainability involved change – but not how much. I checked Jansen’s proposition, of course, but the conclusions remained the same. Business as usual – design as usual – was clearly not an option if the planet was to have a chance.

That well-intended idea proved easy to think – but harder, in practice, to do. In retrospect, I should have listened better to Leo Jansen, at the end of our talk, when he said: “by the way, nobody wants to hear about any of this”.

A good example of my naivity, on this point, concerned energy blindness. I went around telling designers: “You and I use more energy and resources in single month than our great-grandparents used during their entire lifetimes. And we’re doing that on a finite planet. Isn’t that crazy?” Most of time I was greeted not by cries of “we must do something!” – but by blank stares. The reason slowly dawned on me: I failed to explain what designers were supposed to do with his shocking information.

Later, 17 years after that talk with Leo Jansen, I read these wise words of Raymond Pannikar, the Spanish theologian, about how change happens. “The destruction will stop when we see nature differently, relate differently, understand our purpose here differently” Pannikar wrote. The lesson finally sank in. People don’t change when you accuse them of killing the planet. They don’t change if you bombard them with scientific charts. People change, societies change – when they have a new sense of purpose.

For me, designing for life is that purpose. By designing for life, I don’t mean a warm and fuzzy feeling, a state-of-mind. I certainly don’t mean a clever financial trick, or greenwashing, or a box to be ticked. On the contrary: Designing for life is a practice. It’s something we can all do.

The role of design institutions, in today’s context, is a practical one. It’s to enable reconnection with nature, and designing for life. That’s it. Teach designers how to think – and practice – ecologically. Help them explore the qualities and assets of their bioregion. Add their design skills to ecological restoration projects. Innovate ways to meet daily life needs using five percent of the resources we’re used to. Focus design on care, more than consumption.

That’s a long to-do list. Designing for shared aliveness involves an ecosystem of services, relationships, spaces, and equipment. All of these need to be designed. But there is a catch. The purpose of these institutions is to serve their place – not themselves, and not the design profession.

If you run an institution, and this shift in priorities sounds hard, there are examples out there to learn from. Local libraries, museums, and community colleges, already act as anchor institutions that serve their place. The world’s small farmers know about biocultural diversity. Indigenous peoples are experts in cognitive justice – or for that matter, AI. Go and partner with them.

Aric has posed us a final question: “What does it mean to be a designer today, or a design institute?” A five percent economy, a Factor 20 economy, involves a lot of care, a lot of craft, and a lot of creativity – in short, a lot of design. Designing for life is no longer about pushing people where they don’t want to go. It’s about opening a door.