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  • Publications /

    Essays, reports and other major publications.

    • Essay
      Too Late for the Earth, Too Soon for the Stars On the Para-Real, virtual ecologies, climate grief, and the experiences of the middle children of history, born too late to explore the Earth and too soon to explore the stars.
    • Essay
      The Para-Real: A manifesto Defining the space where digital realms and the physical world converge.
    • Report
      Memory in Uncertainty: Web Preservation in the Polycrisis A deep research report documenting the threats and opportunities for web preservation practice and tooling in a changing world.
    • Essay
      The Imperial Sensorium “Providing a veil for profit-making is not the most interesting dimension of the logic of capitalism. What matters more is the way in which private companies can extend their authority over the social order.”[1] The colonial order casts a looming shadow over our modern times. If capitalist powers were...
    • Essay
      Expectations as Reality In a period of ‘diploma inflation’ the disparity between the aspirations that the educational system produces and the opportunities it really offers is a structural reality which affects all the members of a school generation, but to a varying extent depending on the rarity of their qualifications and on their...
    • Report
      The Limits to Digital Consent A research report from New Design Congress & Superbloom Design documenting the limits of ethical consent in complex systems.
    • Essay
      Aesthetic Flattening [1] One year into the Covid-19 pandemic, an impatient public—lit up by the blue glow of screens—preps itself for a collective amnesia. Many of us started 2020 nervously counting infection curves and rising death rates. Now, after a year of ghoulish statistics dictating what should be considered essential—...
    • Report
      Smartphone as Lifeline: Designing technology for a changing world A stark report on the effects of technology beyond the ideal user, and the hidden essential roles of smartphones in rapidly changing societies.
    • Essay
      This is Fine: Optimism & Emergency in the P2P Network The last fifteen years has seen a surge of interest in decentralised technology. From well-funded blockchain projects like IPFS to the emergence of large scale information networks such as Dat, Scuttlebutt and ActivityPub, this is renewed life in peer-to-peer technologies; a renaissance that enjoys widespread growth, driven by the desire...
    • Essay
      “Technically” Responsible: The essential, precarious workforce that powers A.I. [1]There is a belief that as digital infrastructure and technology intertwines with society, it reconfigures politics and culture in real time. Historian Louis Hyman describes this belief as a misconceived sense of society updating and following technology[2]. Digital infrastructure seizes new upon opportunities, especially exploitable ones, and it...
    • Essay
      The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 In 2020, NASA prepares a mission to colonise Mars. Alone in the expanse, the desire to set sail into the void is understandable for a frightened globe. A planetary health check reveals the terrible reality: countless lost species and one million additionally at risk of extinction, their erasure a direct...
    • Essay
      Our Artificial Wilderness: Virtual Beauty & Ecological Decay The 1990s and early 2000s popularised Massive Multiplayer Online Games[1], or MMOs. Games that featured open, virtual worlds in which a player can freely explore and approach objectives and whose narrative is drawn from the environment and game mechanics. An open world game can be single or multiplayer, but...

  • Research Notes /

    Conscise publications from all of our key research.

    • Research Note
      Material Dematerial The limits to intellect A deeply held contemporary belief is that our digital-first world is of pure intellect, a dematerialised era in the process of abstracting itself away from harsh conditions, physical toil and material requirements. The blind optimism and political naivete of such technocratic tenets were already downright ridiculous...
    • Research Note
      Rare-Earth Ceasarism We must reinvent the fundamentals upon which technology is built, lest they further enable reactionary power structures and their ringleaders.
    • Research Note
      The Fragile Green Future In early October, the New Design Congress team attended the European Forest Institute’s Scientific Seminar in Barcelona.
    • Research Note
      The Coming Game Engine Inflection Point Today's game engines sit at the centre of a key ideological and economic battleground and the two most popular game engine companies face uncertain futures. What is the alternative?
    • Research Note
      Making Demands in an Unaccountable Time The development of frameworks for the common good are an essential tool for peaceful change. But as the material conditions of societies unravel, this tactic appears to be in political retreat, despite being louder and more widely deployed than ever.
    • Research Note
      Signalbots: Secrets Distribution and Social Graph Protection for Private Groups What does it mean to organise, cooperate and moderate online in this panopticon era, where the security practices of everyday people more closely mirror those needed by paranoid dark web users?
    • Research Note
      No Face, No Case How did we go from clapping for carers to furious international protest in less than three months?
    • Research Note
      Understanding Subtlety in Complexity and Chaos Today we are gripped in a period of tremendous uncertainty. Between media saturation, bad actors and a looming global health threat, the idea that one can find any kind of clarity or prediction in this moment seems impossible.

  • Streams /

    Films, talks, interviews, podcasts and other broadcasts.

    • Stream
      IPFS and digital preservation in the multi-crisis present A presentation on the 2022 ground-breaking research into how decentralised digital archiving, its technologies and institutions are out of step with the realities of rising instability and complexity of the 21st century.
    • Stream
      The Para-Real, Tactical Media & the Failure of European Tech Criticism At the Institute of Network Cultures, Cade lays bare the multi-decade failure of tech criticism and open source, and the hubris of European funders masquerading as operatives for change.
    • Stream
      NM56 The Para-Real w/ Cade Diehm of New Design Congress A deep dive into the Para-Real with New Models' LILINTERNET and Carly Busta.
    • Stream
      The Para-Real World Fair: The Logistics of the Largest Immersive Digital Arts Market At the height of the worst economic crisis in nearly 50 years, an underground creative class was putting the finishing touches on one of the largest showcases of digital assets assembled to date.
    • Stream
      Decentralised Networks of Care: The Para-Real as Mutual Aid In an era of fractured exploitation and inequality, how can we take health and care back into our hands? The Hologram is social medicine for a cooperative species and is a bold vision for revolutionary care: a viral, peer-to-peer feminist health network.
    • Stream
      We Are Here Because of Those Who Are Not: Claiming the Para Real Through reflection on their trailblazing work, Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley details the shortfalls of today's digital identity systems and the missing voices from early digital culture.
    • Stream
      “It’s Weird, Okay!? I Get It’s Weird!”: Embodying the Self in the Para-Real The Para-Real is an ephemeral space that exists in the moment where digital systems and the real world collide. But what does that look like, and how does it affect us?
    • Stream
      Digital Resilience & War in Ukraine New Models interviews Cade Diehm about digital infrastructure resilience in a time of network upheaval as the world responds to Russia’s escalation of the war in Ukraine.
    • Stream
      IXDA Budapest 2020: Design Ethics? No Thanks! A talk about Design Ethics.

  • Weaponised Design /

    Documenting the systemic failures that lead to designed systems that harm users while operating entirely as intended.

    • Stream
      Digital Resilience & War in Ukraine New Models interviews Cade Diehm about digital infrastructure resilience in a time of network upheaval as the world responds to Russia’s escalation of the war in Ukraine.
    • Report
      The Limits to Digital Consent A research report from New Design Congress & Superbloom Design documenting the limits of ethical consent in complex systems.
    • Stream
      IXDA Budapest 2020: Design Ethics? No Thanks! A talk about Design Ethics.
    • Report
      Smartphone as Lifeline: Designing technology for a changing world A stark report on the effects of technology beyond the ideal user, and the hidden essential roles of smartphones in rapidly changing societies.
    • Essay
      On Weaponised Design The lives of digital platform users are at odds with how these systems are conceived and built, thanks to weaponised design, where a product harm of users while behaving exactly as designed.

  • The Para-Real /

    Cutting edge research into a third 'space' that emerges when digital platforms and real life circumstances align.

    • Essay
      Too Late for the Earth, Too Soon for the Stars On the Para-Real, virtual ecologies, climate grief, and the experiences of the middle children of history, born too late to explore the Earth and too soon to explore the stars.
    • Stream
      The Para-Real, Tactical Media & the Failure of European Tech Criticism At the Institute of Network Cultures, Cade lays bare the multi-decade failure of tech criticism and open source, and the hubris of European funders masquerading as operatives for change.
    • Stream
      NM56 The Para-Real w/ Cade Diehm of New Design Congress A deep dive into the Para-Real with New Models' LILINTERNET and Carly Busta.
    • Essay
      The Para-Real: A manifesto Defining the space where digital realms and the physical world converge.
    • Stream
      We Are Here Because of Those Who Are Not: Claiming the Para Real Through reflection on their trailblazing work, Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley details the shortfalls of today's digital identity systems and the missing voices from early digital culture.
    • Stream
      “It’s Weird, Okay!? I Get It’s Weird!”: Embodying the Self in the Para-Real The Para-Real is an ephemeral space that exists in the moment where digital systems and the real world collide. But what does that look like, and how does it affect us?
    • Essay
      Our Artificial Wilderness: Virtual Beauty & Ecological Decay The 1990s and early 2000s popularised Massive Multiplayer Online Games[1], or MMOs. Games that featured open, virtual worlds in which a player can freely explore and approach objectives and whose narrative is drawn from the environment and game mechanics. An open world game can be single or multiplayer, but...

  • Digitised Society & Digital Identity /

    The brittle nature of digitsed society and identity systems is a core focus of our work.

    • Stream
      IPFS and digital preservation in the multi-crisis present A presentation on the 2022 ground-breaking research into how decentralised digital archiving, its technologies and institutions are out of step with the realities of rising instability and complexity of the 21st century.
    • Research Note
      Rare-Earth Ceasarism We must reinvent the fundamentals upon which technology is built, lest they further enable reactionary power structures and their ringleaders.
    • Research Note
      The Fragile Green Future In early October, the New Design Congress team attended the European Forest Institute’s Scientific Seminar in Barcelona.
    • Report
      Memory in Uncertainty: Web Preservation in the Polycrisis A deep research report documenting the threats and opportunities for web preservation practice and tooling in a changing world.
    • Essay
      The Imperial Sensorium “Providing a veil for profit-making is not the most interesting dimension of the logic of capitalism. What matters more is the way in which private companies can extend their authority over the social order.”[1] The colonial order casts a looming shadow over our modern times. If capitalist powers were...
    • Stream
      Digital Resilience & War in Ukraine New Models interviews Cade Diehm about digital infrastructure resilience in a time of network upheaval as the world responds to Russia’s escalation of the war in Ukraine.
    • Report
      The Limits to Digital Consent A research report from New Design Congress & Superbloom Design documenting the limits of ethical consent in complex systems.
    • Essay
      Aesthetic Flattening [1] One year into the Covid-19 pandemic, an impatient public—lit up by the blue glow of screens—preps itself for a collective amnesia. Many of us started 2020 nervously counting infection curves and rising death rates. Now, after a year of ghoulish statistics dictating what should be considered essential—...
    • Research Note
      No Face, No Case How did we go from clapping for carers to furious international protest in less than three months?

  • Ecology /

    Challenging conventional thinking about non-human life on Earth and Western-led response to the climate crisis.

    • Stream
      IPFS and digital preservation in the multi-crisis present A presentation on the 2022 ground-breaking research into how decentralised digital archiving, its technologies and institutions are out of step with the realities of rising instability and complexity of the 21st century.
    • Policy
      Toward Re-entanglement: a Charter for the City and the Earth Co-authoring a charter for the healthy and regenerative re-connection of human activity with the Earth’s natural systems.
    • Essay
      The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 In 2020, NASA prepares a mission to colonise Mars. Alone in the expanse, the desire to set sail into the void is understandable for a frightened globe. A planetary health check reveals the terrible reality: countless lost species and one million additionally at risk of extinction, their erasure a direct...


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