Dr Ramon Amaro appointed as the new Creative Director of Design Academy Eindhoven

With great pleasure, Design Academy Eindhoven announces the appointment of Dr Ramon Amaro as its new Creative Director and Executive Board Member.

As of 1 September, he will succeed Joseph Grima, who held the position from 2017 to 2025, having completed his second and final four-year term. Dr Amaro steps into the position at a pivotal moment, as Design Academy Eindhoven prepares to relocate to the heart of Eindhoven’s new district De Kanaalzone. As a member of the Executive Board (College van Bestuur), Amaro will work closely alongside Raf De Keninck, who will become DAE’s General Director and Chair as of 1 September. Together, they will shape the institution’s artistic vision, educational philosophy, research agenda and strategic direction.

The Supervisory Board of Design Academy Eindhoven welcomes this key leadership appointment. Chair of the Board Meta Knol states: “We are thrilled to welcome Ramon Amaro to the thriving, pluralistic community of DAE. With his collaborative leadership style, sparkling energy, and extensive experience in design, technology, art, and science, we trust he will foster an ecology of care, relevance, and imagination. We express our gratitude to Joseph Grima, who consistently led DAE through the dynamics of the past eight years and has now successfully completed his task. With Ramon Amaro, alongside Raf De Keninck, DAE will make the leap towards a new future.”

As a celebrated curator, theorist and educator, Amaro brings a rare transdisciplinary perspective shaped by experience in engineering, policy development, sociology, philosophy of technology, visual studies and digital culture. His professional path spans quality design engineering at General Motors, policy development at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and academic appointments in the UK, including at Goldsmiths, University of London. Until recently, he served as Senior Researcher for Digital Culture at Nieuwe Instituut, where he founded -1, a space for experimentation across design, architecture and technology. Amaro’s critically acclaimed book, The Black Technical Object (Sternberg, 2023), explores the societal impact of emerging technologies and opens space for alternative modes of algorithmic engagement.

As Creative Director, Amaro views design as a social, philosophical, and political act — not solely a material discipline, but one deeply rooted in community and collective making. His vision aligns closely with DAE’s institutional values: its long-standing resistance to reductive definitions of design, its embrace of materiality even during the rise of the digital, and its commitment to both local and global communities.

“Design Academy Eindhoven has long understood design as a way of exploring conditions for change,” says Amaro. “Its community is already practising care — not only in the object or the process, but in the full ecology around it. I feel honoured to step into a role that stewards these inherent values, now imagining the type of planetary care we need, amplifying our presence regionally, nationally, and internationally, and co-developing methodologies for realising just futures. My leadership will be centred on bottom-up co-participation and empowerment.”

Amaro’s vision includes foregrounding radical collaboration and critical inquiry across disciplines, developing speculative and systemic perspectives on futures, and shaping curricula and programming driven by lived experience and situated practice. Drawing on DAE’s unique embeddedness in Eindhoven, and its forthcoming move to the De Kanaalzone cultural area, Amaro sees a timely opportunity for the Academy to help reconfigure the relationship between technology, design, and justice.

“For me, this isn’t just about where we work — it’s about how we relate,” he says. “The move enables us to create a new kind of sociality, a new way of being together — not just within the Academy, but also with our neighbourhood, the Netherlands, and a broader global network.”

Photo: Tengbeh Kamara