Rewilding the Self: Kit Braybrooke on Feral Design, Transversality and Change

Held in New Delhi in February 2025, ‘What Design Can Do’ was a festival that brought together designers to address the climate crisis. While some participants provided their responses onstage, Kit Braybrooke conducted a workshop on ‘Feral Hacking.’

Pro Helvetia: You describe your approach to design as feral: a term that brings up notions of animal, untamed even rebellious. Can you tell us more about that?

A new phase is emerging in creative practice and world-making, called ‘ferality.’ It describes how an ecosystem, organism, or group can evolve beyond its original human-designed intentions.

Sometimes human-designed projects become feral, such as a highway that could become home to many birds, even when builders of the highway would never have imagined an invasive species of birds would like to live and burrow into the concrete of the highway.

At other times, relations between feral agents morph and transform the human-designed products beyond what one could imagine. The pine beetle, for instance, came over from China through the chips in timber and is now eradicating tree species in Canada.

We can build a feral next-generation into the things that we’re making. We can actually work with feral actors as collaborators.

Pro Helvetia New Delhi: What does it mean to bring a transfeminist lens to design?

Transfeminism is both hard to explain and beautiful. You cannot explain one transversality without explaining all the other transversalities. They’re all interrelated and co-producing.

Transfeminist theory is inherently intersectional, it’s inherently critical of hegemonic social norms. It is also intentional about inviting those social actors who’ve been denied from feminist theory in previous waves of feminism, like trans women, for example, or other female-defined figures across other species.

People have lived experiences of both privilege and a lack of power across gender, ethnicity, race, and class. So, we need to apply an intersectional approach to power dynamics, and that also needs to happen in design.

Not all of us who practice design define ourselves as designers. My argument is we’re all designers because we’re all building worlds. When we separate ourselves into silos and see ourselves as separate, we’re hurting ourselves as a species. What we must do is work across paradigms, fields, intersectionalities, classes, genders – across all the things possible in the most transversal, transdisciplinary, wild ways that we can to face the immense challenges of public crisis. We’re coming to terms with this in our own ways as we face climate emergency and the climate crisis in our own lives.

Pro Helvetia New Delhi: You’ve worked with large-scale climate conferences and other settings, such as grassroots and subcultural practices. What strategies have you found most effective in challenging institutional power structures from within?

People often think of systems change as something that has to happen only amongst large and powerful state agents or corporations. In fact, systems change is happening in every moment. We are alive because every act, every conversation, and every encounter we have in urban space on Earth is a means of systems change. We impact the social agents and the others around us through the words we use, the titles we use, the ways we move near each other, the things that we are thinking, and how we articulate them. We’re socialised to call, for example, a bird ‘it’ instead of he, she, or they. Why is a bird not given the honour of being seen as an agent? It’s these micro encounters that we can shift but they are very hard to shift, they’re the hardest of all to shift. So many of these encounters go unseen but are part of the co-production of change. We forget that a revolution involves a thousand and one conversations beforehand, and a thousand and one meetings that no one writes down that get lost in the sands of time.

While studying public arts institutions in London during my PhD, I was working with the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, British Museum, and Wellcome Collection. Each of them had a space for technological innovation or a maker space or creative space.

In over 60 interviews, co-curated exhibits and other interventions with museum staff and collaborators, I got to see first-hand what happens when a big powerful public institution like the British Museum – which one might argue is a bastion of colonialism – willingly enables other social actors to enter it and hack it from within. I found that museum workers, after being exposed to the hacker and maker cultures who had entered the museum, had started to say things like ‘I now want to apply more of a hacker mindset into my own work, with more trickery and more play,’ and ‘There are things I now know I too can change within the institution through my job.’

This work within the institution was hacking the institution. A meta-hack was happening through the people that the institution had itself hired, but in such a way that the institution didn’t see it coming because it was happening gently. We use the term ‘gentle dismantling’ in systems thinking. Often the strongest systems change actually happens the most gently because then the institution doesn’t know how to combat it because it’s not really a fight. It’s just like sandstone wearing down through continuous wearing. How do you fight that?

It’s important for us as designers to realise our own agency in this, that we too are actors in this actor network map, that we too are making change through our conversations.

Pro Helvetia New Delhi: Do you think more-than-human collaborations are truly possible?

I would say ancestral knowledges have long known how to collaborate with more-than-human agents, but mainstream colonialist societies have lost that knowledge in many cases. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Native American scholar of the Potawatomi Nation, writes beautifully in ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ about lost knowledge even in Native American cultures and in many Indigenous cultures. That knowledge was in many ways actively erased from the collective consciousness. This happened in Canada as well with residential schools draining Indigenous young people of their shared cultural knowledge. Indigenous populations are having a renaissance of bringing those knowledges back and finding ways to honour them again and to honour the knowledges that already exist in their communities. We have lost that way of seeing, speaking, engaging with the more-than-human world. We’re each on our own journey of regaining that, reclaiming it, and rewilding ourselves.

I run a little Substack newsletter called Wild Thickets, where once a season I ask 30-40 of my favourite makers and thinkers around the world, ‘How have you been rewilding lately – and not only outside, but also inside?’ It’s a seemingly simple question that holds volumes in our times of climate emergency, where we have come to believe as a species that humans and nature are separate.

It sounds radical to say, ‘We are all animals,’ but it’s the truth. We all come from some rawness that has been civilised. A key point of going feral is uncivilising not only the world around us but starting first with ourselves; it’s actually quite an intimate journey.