20 Michael Leube Samuel Roux The built environment is never neutral. It can foster belonging and encounter, or reproduce exclusion and conflict. Housing policies, land use, and affordability shape who has access to green spaces, food, or transport. Design choices can also be exclusive on a finer scale: concerts without wheelchair access, cultural practices erased from public space, or signage assuming one language, one age group, or one body type. Neurodiverse ways of navigating space, as well as differences of skin colour, gender, mobility, and identity, are too often ignored. Such oversights are not minor, they are failures of tolerance woven into daily urban life. If design is to serve an open society, human diversity must be taken seriously before anything is conceived, not after! This workshop invites students to treat human difference not as a problem but as a design catalyst. By examining the “skins we wear” - costumes, ornamentation, linguistic cues, and embodied differences of age, gender, neurodiversity, and skin colour - we will explore how identity is performed in cities, and how design can either limit or expand belonging. The central question: How might design embrace diversity rather than suppress it? The facilitators bring complementary expertise: Michael Leube (anthropologist, author of The Future Designer, Routledge) studies design through a social-science lens. Samuel Roux (graphic artist and visual communicator) specializes in poster art and designed the book’s cover. Their workshops Glitter Punk and Hippie Chic (Graz, 2023) and Mindful Design (Schwäbisch Gmünd, 2024) explored impression management and radical self-identity. Together, they merge anthropology and graphic design in a pedagogy that always gives students protagonism. Short theoretical inputs lead into hands-on exploration, mediation, and consultancy. Students also conduct qualitative research, investigating real sites of inclusion and exclusion in Antwerp to develop creative interventions. The only prerequisite is an open mind. Outcomes may include objects, posters, video, photography, installations, or models—tools to reimagine how cities can embody belonging.
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