School of Radical Imagination

Course Overview

Design Beyond Commerce asks a simple question: what if design could help create more than things to buy?

For a long time, design has helped us create products that sell, services that grow, and experiences that keep us coming back. It has given us access to new things, but it has also contributed to ecological harm, weakened communities, and a culture increasingly organized around consumption.

This course explores how we might shift the purpose of design beyond the market and toward five alternative values. Instead of designing for growth, efficiency, or what sells, we look at what becomes possible when we design for Care, Community, Craft, Culture, and Contentment instead.

Through conversations and practical activities during live sessions, we'll question what design is for, who it serves, and what it could help make possible when commerce is no longer the starting point or the end goal.

What we'll explore together:

Together, we'll examine how commerce has guided what we make, who we make it for, and what realities are seen as valuable. Then we'll explore shifting from commerce to Care, Community, Craft, Culture, and Contentment by asking new questions:

From Commerce to Care: How can design create relationships of care rather than transactions?
From Commerce to Community: How can design strengthen belonging and mutual support instead of individual consumption?
From Commerce to Craft: How can we value quality, slowness, repair, and making over speed and scale?
From Commerce to Culture: How can design preserve, express, and evolve culture instead of homogenizing it for markets?
From Commerce to Contentment: How can design help people have enough rather than always wanting more?

As systems built on endless growth show their ecological, social, and economic limits, this is an invitation to reimagine design beyond a tool for economic value, towards a practice that strengthens relationships, enriches culture, supports communities, and helps both people and the planet thrive.

Who Is This Course For?

This course is for designers, creatives, artists, strategists, educators, and anyone interested in questioning the way own work serves capitalism. It is particularly suited to people working across social, cultural, environmental, or community contexts, or those curious about alternative economies and forms of making.

What connects participants are not their titles, but a shared intuition: The current model is causing harm. New ways of creating are not only possible, they are available to us now.

What You'll Learn

Critically examine how commerce and capitalism shape contemporary design, our growth economy, and purchasing habits.

Apply the five Cs, Care, Community, Craft, Culture, and Contentment, as alternative values for creating, sharing, and sustaining value in their own practice.

Design new solutions through a concrete design proposition, grounded in and guided by alternative values.

About the Instructor

Ida Persson

Design and strategy for social and environmental change

Ida Persson is an independent systems designer, creative strategist, and facilitator based in Munich. She works globally across social innovation, regenerative futures, and social impact, helping organizations and communities navigate systemic transition. A lot of her work comes to life through DesignShifts, a critical design lab and learning platform she founded in 2024. Through it, she and her community explore how to move away from traditional design and capitalistic paradigms that center efficiency, individual consumption, and product output. Instead, they invite designers, researchers, organizations, and communities to explore design as a force for healing, equity, and collective wellbeing. Before going independent, Ida spent fifteen years learning what design could be when it was pushed past its usual edges. She led innovation projects at IDEO, shaped impact campaigns and communications strategy at Media Cause, and carried research, strategy, and creative direction across climate, education, healthcare, and social transformation. The tools she draws on, systems thinking, participatory design, speculative futures, storytelling, are less a toolkit than a way of seeing. Everything she makes is intersectional and interrelational, built on the belief that nothing changes in isolation. Learn more at www.designshifts.org

Frequently Asked Questions

No! You don’t need a design title to participate. As a matter of fact, you don’t need a professional title at all. We recognize that real change happens when different kinds of people collaborate with each other and that expertise comes both from work and life experiences. Beyond the borders of the professional world we can see that “design” is something everyone does on a day-to-day basis and by many different kinds of people. I hope that this piece of work can inspire and activate people beyond design titles. We hope to create new connections between people from different fields and walks-of-life. We hope that it can Shift WHO is doing the design and how the design is being done.

This course is created by Ida Persson, founder of DesignShifts, in collaboration with the School of Radical Imagination. DesignShifts is a critical design lab, community, and learning platform exploring non-extractive design methods for systemic transition. It asks how design might move beyond individual, market-driven outcomes toward systems, relationships, and collective wellbeing. Design Beyond Commerce brings that inquiry into a focused, weekend-length format.

Both. Each live session mixes conversation and critical reflection with hands-on activities, so you're not just discussing alternatives to commerce-driven design, you're actively sketching one for something in your own world.