Who

I am a design ethnographer with a focus on postcolonial urban development and social participation processes. In my dissertation Dakar Mobilities, I investigated urban practices of exclusion and participation along the tracks of the Train Express Régional in the Senegalese capital Dakar. Combining creative and ethnographic methods, I worked with the theatre forum group Kaddu Yaraax and the collective impactés du TER to explore the selective connection logics of neocolonial mobility infrastructures and their displacement of local forms and functions of mobility. Therefore, I developed participation-oriented formats for the visualization of implicit and embodied knowledge. My research stays in Senegal were made possible by a scholarship from the DAAD.

Previously, I studied for a Master in European Studies in Design at the KISD – Köln International School of Design, the Politecnico di Milano and ENSCI – Les Ateliers in Paris. In my thesis, Making Home, I explored practices of homing and spatial appropriation by migrant actors between Paris and Cologne. I then worked for two years as a researcher and designer of participatory formats for the United Nations International Organization for Migration in Senegal and The Gambia.

I taught at KISD in the master’s course Methods Lab: Design as a Practice of Correspondence and in the master’s module Creative Design Processes at the Media University of Applied Sciences in Cologne.

To support early career design researchers, I am co-organizing the bi-annual colloquium design:promoviert.

I am also a member of advisory commitee of rrrreflect – a digital open-access journal of integrated design research, published by KISD – Köln International School of Design.

For recent updates follow me on @simonsdigest

CV upon request.