Last year, I was asked to write something for the End of Year Show catalogue, for the School of Design at University of Greenwich, as part of my role as Academic Portfolio Lead for Design.

It was my first show at Greenwich, and I was keenly aware of the writing needing to be a statement of practice, a statement which at some level would encapsulate all the work the staff and the students had done that year to develop our programmes and the field of design itself.

With that thought in mind, I sat down one Sunday afternoon at my typewriter and wrote out my wants and desires for design, riffing off one of my favourite pieces of writing, Zoe Leonard’s 1992 I Want a President.

As I have travelled more and more into design over the course of my career, I find my discipline, my field, my subject, to be, at times, so deeply problematic that I want to dismantle it entirely. But then, there will be times — most often when a student or a colleague shows me something they have made — when design will become deeply liberatory; windows, doors, worlds, futures and possibilities all start to open.

I am conscious of my magpie mind, of a need to keep travelling and moving, and of having a somewhat journalistic drive — perhaps even a journalistic need. And I know I could only have ever ended up in design. And I know this is because design can be specialist, a form of expertise practiced after years of training; and it can also be, as Raymond Williams described culture itself, ordinary.

So below is my homage to design in all of its annoyances and liberatory moments, in all of its extraordinary ordinariness, with absolutely no attempt to reconcile its binaries.