Set Margins, ISBN 978-9083350134, English, 300 pages, 2023, The Netherlands

Lorusso has established a clear narrative on his social media channels that is ironic, if not sarcastic. It is about the exploitation of designers, their failure, their precariousness and, in general, their fragility under today’s conditions. The design he talks about in this book seems to be deeply rooted in the digitally encoded world and its endless cultural, bureaucratic and economic parameters that undermine the stability at its core. He battles culturally against both a reassuring tradition of the design project that is disrupted by modern dynamics, and a constantly regenerating complexity that is in fact triggered by those same dynamics. Indeed, here he describes chaos as a major player, while order can be a privileged status of an elite. Lorusso, who is also known for his earlier book Entreprecariat [1], puts together what sounds like a generational outcry, and the choice to use only design memes to illustrate it seems to amplify that outcry. But disillusionment, even a universal one, as emerges from the memes, is not necessarily a passive state. And as each generation must slay the gods to start anew, navigating and ‘inhabiting’ the complex and chaotic conditions often brought about by an oppressive digital system could set in motion new contemporary trajectories and, more importantly, organisations to initiate change.