Nu Goteh on Designing With Community

This week on the DesignThinkers podcast, I’m joined by Nu Goteh, founder of  Room for Magic and co-founder of Deem Journal.

Nu’s path into design isn’t a straight line. He started out making graphics on early internet platforms, spent over a decade working in marketing for brands like Puma, Red Bull, and Sonos, and eventually returned to design through a deeper set of questions—about power, participation, and how he wanted to show up in the world.

In this conversation, we talk about what it really means to design with communities—not just for them—and why that work often comes down to time, trust, and budget. We get into the limits of performative “purpose,” the realities of working with clients, and how design can move beyond outputs to shaping systems.

We also talk about Deem Journal: a print publication that explores design as a social practice. We discuss why print as a medium still matters, especially as a way to document, archive, and expand what we consider to be design.

This episode is for anyone thinking more critically about their role as a designer—whether you’re early in your career or rethinking what your practice is really in service of.

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