Oliver Vodeb

Dr Oliver Vodeb is is an internationally respected academic known for his work at the intersection of design, activism, and critical theory, particularly in the areas of design for social change and social justice as well as extradisciplinary design research. He is recognized for advancing design’s role in the public sphere, especially where it confronts issues of its colonisation by capital and private interest as well as issues of power, injustice, and social transformation. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Ljubljana (2007) where he has developed a theory and praxis of Socially Responsive Communication. He argued that most of communication in the public sphere as well as most of communication design is based on onto-episemic positions rooted in i/rationalities of the capitalist market. As they are market/ing based they are largely socially and environmentaly destructive. This in principle includes also professional "doo good communication" as it uses same communication logics. A necessary way to counter this is by developing communication/design approaches, resulting in dialogue or in the creation of the conditions for dialogue.

Vodeb in his work largely integrates design, sociology, and media + communication and primarily works in the field of praxis based research. In the classroom he engages with critical and dialogic pedagogy. Dr Vodeb is regularily invited to lecture and lead design workshops at universities around the world and has directed six global symposia on radical design. He has been appointed as a visiting research professor at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (2024/25).

Dr Vodeb's research is diverse and includes theoretical work, praxis based research and major industry research. He has published extensively and internationaly in academic journals and book publications and has published several well-regarded and diverse books, with top academic and art presses, including Socially Responsive Communication, Indebted to Intervene, Food Democracy, Radical Intimacies, and What is Post-Branding?

He is the author, host and producer of the Radical Design Podcast. Oliver doesn't compete for awards, sorry.

Vodeb's praxis transforms design from a commercial practice into a collaborative, socially engaged, and relational form of critical intervention that merges design, art, activism, research and education beyond institutional and market boundaries. Its main contribution to the design discipline is the redefinition of communication design itself as a socially responsive, dialogical, and ethical practice that prioritizes relationships, participation, and cultural critique over products, markets, and blind client-driven outcomes, working for the public good and for the enrichment of the public sphere. When communication is understood as a living social relation rather than a transmission of messages, the entire logic of design shifts — from producing objects to enabling relations, from representation to participation, and from control to emergence.

His research focus is:

• Design as communication
• Relational design and art
• Critical/speculative/radical /social design
• Education and pedagogy
• Independent publishing
• University governance

Vodeb’s research and practice challenge traditional design frameworks, advocating for ethical, collaborative methodologies that promote equitable and sustainable futures. His work extends beyond academia through public campaigns and interventions, which he implemented in various parts of the world. His integrated approach to research, teaching, and engagement promotes a collaborative response to key design challenges, supporting social equity,  civics, and responsible practice. Dr Vodeb actively engages and collaborates with social movements, including Indigenous and Black communities, as well as with adventorous design and communication professionals and academics, to develop projects that create real-world impact and inclusive sustainable futures through inter/extradisciplinary design practice. Vodeb regualrly serves as a reviewer for Bloomsbury publishers and Design Studies Journal.

Oliver Vodeb is the founder and principal curator of Memefest, a global network, platform and festival for radical design, and has advanced dialogues on socially transformative design theory and practices since 2002. As its main strategies for engaging with the world Memefest uses education, publishing, research, and the organization of events, as well as the facilitation and production of various media and interventions in the public sphere. Memefest since the begining in 2002 engages with onto-epistemic issues of design, problematizing and critiquing how the discipline and profession of design internalize, teach, promote and institutionalize an extractive logic largely tied to capitalism. It argues for another relationship with knowledge using a praxis based research method. Memefest introduced an "anti-award" fostering radical design instead of design based in principles of marketing or fetishizing formal acrobatics and is a unique alternative to the awards industrial complex of the design profession. The festival with its "friendly competition" is known for working on original and urgent toppics. In 2003 Memefest introduced what is seen to be the first award for participatory art and design. In its many processes it has involved people and universities from around the word (40+ countiries), significantly from the global south. Vodeb has together with Memefest collaborators developed a unique extradisciplinary method positioning design as a radical research praxis operating at the nextus between university, progressive profesionals and social movements. Vodeb led extradisciplinary Memefest workshops, and public interventions in Ljubljana, Nijmegen, Brisbane, Belgrade, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Sao Paulo, Havana, Manizales, Dubai, Baltimore and Saigon and has directed six global symposia on radical design. 

Vodeb is a founding member of Academics for Public Universities- an interdisciplinary think tank researching the crisis of the Australian Public universities. APU has made the conclustion that the primary issue of AU unis is not the lack of funding but the lack of appropriate governance and has called for urgent governance reform already in 2021. This position was taken up later by the national union NTEU and in 2025 a federal senat review of university governance was started followed by several state reviews on uni governance. 

His culinary relational art project Lipstick+Bread invites people to explore food as pleasure, cultural exchange, and conversation through informal, themed cooking classes and immersive events—where food becomes a catalyst for dialogue, identity, and connection. Lipstick+Bread engages relational, culturally grounded approaches to eating and cooking—offering specially curated hands‑on cooking classes inspired by themes like poetry, literature, music, and film, alongside immersive events such as multi‑day feasts, pizza-and‑poetry gatherings,  street-food celebrations or performances such as Toasties and Tips—blurring the lines between cuisine, storytelling, and social practice. Lipstick+Bread performed at festivals and other events in Melbourne, Baltimore (USA) and Matera (Italy).

For eight years Vodeb co-directed Poper (Pepper) Studio in Ljubljana as a conceptual and creative director, which is also co-founded. A cutting edge studio "for communication in the public sphere", Poper was operating in the cultural, not for profit and ethical commercial sector and has as well regularily done self initiated  public campaigns and interventions on burning social issues utilising communication theories based on critical and reflexive social theory. The studio name comes from the king of spices and from the only hit by the seminal USA avant garde punk rock band The Butthole Surfers. The studio was a complete unicuum in as it has been radically challenging what a design practice, which also earns a salary, can be. Among the many projects Poper completed was the first peer2peer production based open source fashion brand, a groundbreaking self initiated campaign in support of the bureocraticaly "Erased" people in Slovenia and a presidential campaign, after the then minister for finance approached Poper because he wanted a campaign that would not "sell him a as a commercial brand".

His work has gained high international recognition from academics, critics, leading professionals and community leaders: 

Arturo Escobar, Colombian design anthropologist and author of Designs for the Pluriverse states: "I do not hesitate to describe Dr. Vodeb as one of a handful of pioneering and avant-garde researchers giving birth to a systemic reconceptualization of both dominant theoretical frameworks and concrete socially engaged design practices of transformation in the face of the planetary crisis and the crisis of liberal humanism." 

Design critic Rick Poynor states about his book What is Postbranding? (Grant, Vodeb 2023): "An uncompromising handbook of theory and action … This visually inventive pocketbook is a vital manual of resistance to the manipulative fundamentalism of the contemporary marketplace. Every graphic designer with a conscience should read it, weigh up its findings, heed its call to rethink, and find ways to apply its life-affirming insights."

Eric Jackson, Black community leader and servant director of Black Yield Institute, Baltimore: "Oliver Vodeb is a leader who understands what is needed for the investment in the next generation of scholars, activists, and justice workers."

Mike Townsley, Communications Director, Greenpeace International states: "As we grapple with the concepts and tools of 21st century communications, What is Post-Branding? arrives as a key to the crisis of imagination in which it seems easier to imagine the end of nature than the fundamental system and technological changes needed to shift onto a path of real sustainability. It invites a bright future of infinite potential built on collaborative communcations as an antidote to corporate competition’s bleak zero sum branding game."

The book [What is Post-branding?] is reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage, cautioning against a kind of mind (and soul) control… and brings some of those pre-branding, pre-digital ideas to the 21st century.’

– Steven Heller Printmag.com

Leading international scholar in media studies Mark Andrejevic states about the book Food Democracy: "The essays in this collection provide a crucial source for developing the tools and practices to support sustainable democracy in a time of global instability. Now more than ever we need the Memefest organization’s prescient blend of theory and practice, aesthetics and politics."