When someone like Nicolas Nova dies, we are tempted to ask in despair: Why? Or rather: Why him? In the ir/rationality of life and death, we wish that brilliant and generous minds (a very rare combination) would simply live forever. But with Nicolas, it’s even more devastating, because despite his many high-profile cultural productions, he only lived to be 47. Nova had that kind of conceptual magic that gave substance and depth to his hetherogenic projects, which he usually co- developed with someone else (an even rarer combination), virtuously amplifying the collaboration while still maintaining incredible consistency and originality over time. From his unique blog Pasta & Vinegar run for 20 years, to the various seminal works with the Near Future Laboratory / Julian Bleecker (including The Manual of Design Fiction and The IKEA Catalogue ) to the consistently excellent research books: Dr. Smartphones: an ethnography of mobile phone repair shops, with Anaïs Boch , 8-Bit reggae: Collision and creolization, Dadabot with Joël Vacheron , and the excellent The Bestiary of the Anthropocene with Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska. All of these works, which we have received over the years, have been a highlight. Nova, who was known as a gentle person, was a coherent polymath who could seamlessly apply ethnographic methodologies, guided by critical thinking, rendered with compelling design, while retaining a nerdy technical knowledge and creating delightfully new meanings. We will certainly miss him greatly in an increasingly inconsistent and cheaply polarised media landscape.