23 for ’23: trailblazing talents to watch in the year ahead

Adam Nathaniel Furman is an artist, designer and architectural trailblazer, fearlessly and colourfully campaigning for diversity in public space. Armed with a mixed Japanese-Argentine heritage, a roving intellect and an unstoppable wellspring of creativity, Adam creates spaces, objects and artworks at all scales – from collections of glass and porcelain vessels they designed for Lebanese craft collective Beit, to high-impact public-space interventions such as 2021’s irrepressibly joyful ‘anti-monument’ Proud Little Pyramid, which celebrated the queer history of King’s Cross. In May 2022, with Josh Mardell, Adam published the hugely important book Queer Spaces with RIBA – a landmark anthology of LGBTQIA+ places around the world. With the book earning a spot on the shortlist of just four for the Colvin Prize, Adam is storming into 2023 on a high, and they have a host of major UK projects set to unveil over the course of the year. We can’t keep our eyes off them.

If Andu Masebo’s 2022 is anything to go by, his 2023 is set to be a belter. Right now, the car-exhaust-inspired tubular chair he recently created for Atelier100’s pilot making programme is making waves (we've also invested in one for the Zetteler studio!), and the young designer he worked with for TOG’s Makers & Mentors problem has just just unveiled their finished design. As a fabricator, Andu has developed expertise in carpentry, ceramics and metalwork. As a designer, Andu is fascinated by processes of making, the way objects come into being, and the systems of which they form a part. A case in point: In Material Union is a chair collection developed during his master’s in product design at the RCA. Each chair is built from components cut from a single plank of wood, such that each positive cut creates an equivalent negative, thus minimising wastage. Most designers would stop there and consider the eco box ticked, but Masebo went a step further, drawing up an end-user ‘stewardship’ contract for potential owners, obliging them to pay carbon compensation should the chair not live out its appropriate lifespan. Andu’s work is characterised by simplicity, efficiency and focus; nothing is unnecessary, no materials are surplus, no features are excessive – Andu Masebo designs tell clear accessible stories about what they are and how they were made. We predict a lot more stories to come.

In the last decade, London has lost over 50% of its LGBTQ+ spaces, depriving the community of places to gather, share ideas and relax in safety. Ashley Joiner is on a mission to change things. An artist and filmmaker by background, Ashley released their feature debut Are You Proud? in 2019, chronicling the 50-year history of the UK’s LGBTQ+ movement. The film was distributed worldwide, and has since been developed into educational resources for schools. Ashley founded Queercircle in 2016, aiming to champion LGBTQ+ artists and bring together the LGBTQ+ community. Listening to its growing following in the years since, the organisation has evolved, and in June 2022 made its first permanent home in Design District on Greenwich Peninsula. Here, Ashley and the Queercircle team operate an accessible gallery, library and various project spaces – giving the wider queer community a safe space to call their own, supporting groups who otherwise might have nowhere to go, and giving queer artists a platform to exhibit. (Until 21 December, for example, the main gallery is occupied by Tunnel Visions, a monolithic site-specific installation by bones tan jones.) Some people change the world through their work as individuals; others do it by empowering the collective. Ashley does both.

We were hugely excited to be introduced to Ayomikun Fagbemi earlier this year (thanks Wei!), having been aware of his work for a long while now. A creative director and strategist whose work straddles advertising, design and furniture, he is one of those genuinely multidisciplinary creatives who turns his talents to anything he believes in, always with incredible results – which is probably why the creative studio he co-founded repeatedly wins work from major brands like Nike, Atlantic Records, Merky Books and many more. For us, however, it’s Ayo’s personal, cause-driven projects that are the most inspiring – such as the Beazley-nominated placards he created for the UK Student Network’s Climate Strike Protests (now in the Design Museum) and ‘A Revisionist Future’ – a 2021 placard series created for DesignKind exhibition The Colour of the Climate Crisis to centre people of colour in the climate conversation. Keep your eyes on Ayo in 2023, when he’ll be one of the launch team behind the new design brand, Friends + Family, which aims “to bring the things that matter closer into our everyday lives”. Cannot wait.

At a time when the world often seems to be spiralling from crisis to catastrophe, Daniel Pope is a reason to be hopeful. Having graduated with a distinction from the Bartlett School of Architecture in 2021, the architectural designer is at the forefront of transforming architecture for a zero-carbon future. His project and passion, ‘The Earthen Land Registry’ centres on using London clay unearthed during tunnelling and excavation to develop a new housing typology and as an insulation material that can be retrofitted to the city’s existing housing stock. By combining an abundant local waste stream, usually diverted to landfill, with 3D printing technology, Daniel has conceived a circular resource system whereby extruded clay bricks can be additively applied to existing brick architecture – a beautifully elegant and ethical solution to both a waste problem and an energy crisis. This brilliant breakthrough vision has won Daniel a fistful of industry awards and commendations – including the AJ Sustainability Prize and the Sir Bannister Fletcher Prize – and he’s now at prototyping stage, developing bespoke insulating bricks for irregular housing stock. If the future of architecture’s in the hands of Daniel and those like him, we have every reason to be positive.

Deep Kailey is one of those people you call when you’re in the mood for a fascinating conversation – a ‘Deep and meaningful’ as it were (sorrynotsorry). The former fashion director of Tatler and fashion editor of Vogue India, Deep went from styling iconic global figures to demystifying the understanding of the mind to contemporary audiences around the UK. Alongside her own brand-development and creative-curation consultancy, Deep, she leads the one-of-a-kind arts organisation Without Shape Without Form, which uses the lens of Sikh teachings to bring together art, mental health and spirituality. Alongside its permanent gallery in Slough, WSWF is also running the travelling exhibition, Journey of the Mind, supported by Arts Council England. Transcending social barriers and racial identities, the exhibition combines an exploration of spirituality with digital painting and animation to spark curiosity, encourage conversation and exchange, and enrich self-understanding in the hope of helping people find peace in an uncertain world. In January, the exhibition lands in Nottingham, where it will be opening minds until April, so call in if you can!

No offence, plant fans, but for all its merits, the UK horticultural sector isn’t the most dynamic or progressive of industries – so it’s inspiring to see Gynelle Leon blaze such a trail across it. Having turned her back on a career in fraud prevention and compliance, Gynelle followed her passion for plants and carved a unique niche in what was a very traditionalist field. She is the founder of the one-of-a-kind cult cacti and succulent shop PRICK LDN, which brought spiky green joy to the streets of East London for six years before moving online, and Shallow Roots, a studio space for plant lovers to attend events, talks and creative workshops. Pushed on by a tremendous entrepreneurial spirit, a well-rooted creative streak and an extraordinary depth of botanical knowledge, Gynelle has become a leading authority on plants, with two books under her belt (PRICK and PLANT), a Guardian houseplant column, and a growing roster of consultancy clients looking for plant advice and creative direction.

Given mortgages and rents are currently skyrocketing, UK housing is in crisis, the world is on fire, and the neoliberalism experiment has all but blown up in all our faces, Jack Self is well worth your attention. An architect, futurist and critic who defies easy categorisation, Jack has made it his life’s work to chronicle and interrogate ‘what it means to live today’ – which is the remit and tagline of his (ad-free, crowd-funded) contemporary culture magazine Real Review, now on its 13th issue in six years. The magazine launched in 2016, the same year that Jack curated the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale and founded REAL – a cultural institute and architectural practice set up to promote inclusivity, democracy and equality. For Jack and REAL, the future of architecture is adaptable and sustainable rather than static and functionalist. He’s been saying this for years through his teaching, ever-expanding roster of books, articles and international exhibitions, but the need for a radical new model of housing and ownership has never been more acute – so perhaps 2023 is the year we need to start really listening.

Joe Franc is one of those designers who never fails to put a smile on your face – because a) his work is unfailingly fun and imaginative; b) he’s doing good things for the world; and c) he is, if not the friendliest person you’ll ever meet, then certainly in the top five. Joe graduated from the 3D design course in Northumbria University in 2018 alongside fellow furniture designer Mac Collins, and the two of them are now leading figures on the Newcastle design scene (hurrah for non-London-centric creative communities). Having added a master’s in design to his credentials cabinet in 2021, Joe now devotes his practice to transforming found materials and redirected waste into functional furniture, giving new life to abandoned objects, re-imbuing them with value, and challenging throwaway consumer culture. In Joe’s ever-resourceful world, tables, drawers and wardrobes become chairs, steel tubes become desktop organisers, and bits of wood off the street become stools. Joe’s designs proudly bear the traces of their former lives, playfully reinterpreted in bold new forms. We’re expecting big things for him in 2023.

Runner, writer, researcher and personal trainer Kole Fulmine is a long-standing friend of Zetteler, first landing on our radar as one half of set-design, prop-maker duo Lightning & Kinglyface. In the years since, Kole has pivoted professionally and personally, and now dedicates their practice to exploring the diversity of the body – the trans body in particular – in the fitness space, which is the topic of Tracking Neutrality, their doctoral project at Queen Mary University, where Kole also teaches creative writing to undergraduates. When they’re not exploring fitness and queer identity through writing, Kole is living it, working as a fitness coach teaching calisthenics, strength and conditioning, and running at an East London gym. They are a big believer in building community through sport, and have set up a number of queer and trans classes, notably Pecs Education, and Queer Running Club, which tears through the streets of Hackney every Tuesday night (check them out in The Face last month). That might be enough for most people, but Kole clearly believes in pushing themselves, having recently co-founded queer literary platform The BitterSweet Review, which launched at the ICA in September. You can also read Kole’s own story in the brilliant trans-experience anthology Transitions, published in 2021.

In autumn 2022, Rotterdam and Eindhoven played host to the world’s first Solar Biennale – a celebration of solar-based design that shifted the focus from the tech and economic considerations that dominate the solar discussion, to the human angle, exploring the potential of a solar-powered world beyond uniform arrays of old-school PV panels. Without the work of co-founder Marjan van Aubel, it wouldn’t have happened. For much of the last 10 years, the Dutch designer has been developing new, exciting and often beautiful ways to weave solar energy into everyday life. Her Current Table (2015), a desk inlaid with solar cells that powered integrated USB chargers, evolved into the Current Window (2016), made from stained-glass incorporating dye-sensitised solar cells, and Power Plant (2018), Marjan’s rooftop greenhouse fitted with solar glass to control its interior climate – a way to harvest both food and energy in a single system. At the world Expo in Dubai in 2020, she and V8 Architects fitted the Netherlands Pavilion with a gloriously colourful solar skylight. Her gorgeous Sunne Lamp was named Dezeen Lighting Design of the Year in 2021 and Life-Enhancer of the Year by Wallpaper* in 2022. No one else has done more to shake the tired perception that solar power can’t be beautiful – like her inspiration, the sun, she is an absolute star.

Nabil Al-Kinani was studying biomedical sciences at Queen Mary University of London when he came upon a book by André Anderson. Entitled ‘Authors of the Estate’, it contained essays by Anderson and five other residents of St Raphael’s Estate in Neasden, and allowed the estate's residents to author their own stories in the face of negativity and sensationalism by traditional media. The book helped Nabil shake off the notion that writers didn’t come from communities such as his and understand that to be an author is to possess the authority of owning one's narrative. Having pivoted from biology to the built-environment industry, Nabil published another Authors of the Estate book with André in 2019, featuring 22 first-time writers from Nabil’s own Chalkhill Estate in Wembley Park. Today, Nabil is one of the most interesting and influential voices on inner-city spaces, as a built-environment professional by day and a cultural producer by night. His recent projects include ‘Privatise the Mandem’ a guide to collectively buying freeholds as an antidote to gentrification, and ‘Castles’, an ongoing photo essay celebrating the overlooked majesty of social housing complexes. He frequently speaks on the subjects of spatial politics, storytelling through place, and changemaking (he was great at the ‘We Are Here’ event at the Rio during LDF). If you get a chance to hear or read him, don’t pass it up.

Slipping nimbly from spoken word to set design, painting to film, poetry to portraiture, Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye is an artist who is equally at home in any and every medium. Since 2007, Ntiense has been a member of the Peckham-based Intoart collective (who Zetteler has worked with on and off for years), and has exhibited and performed her work all over the world – often creating her own stage sets and garments for her performances. Ntiense’s wide-ranging practice explores the relationships between words and images, asking questions about the location of the artist’s identity within the work. Her 2021 exhibition and film ‘Art Deco Zebra Crossing' at the artist John Latham’s former home and studio Flat Time House, transferred to New York’s White Columns in 2022, expanded with her new series of large-scale silk wall hangings ‘African Bird Dynasty’, which combine Shibori tie-dyeing and hand screen printing techniques. This show, on top of the stellar career that led up to it, is one of factors that won Ntiense the £60,000 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists last month, giving her the support and opportunity to push her creative practice even further. We can’t wait to see what she does in 2023.

Over two decades as a creative, Ollie Olanipekun has blazed a trail across the advertising world, winning accolades à gogo, building his agency Superimpose from a Hoxton basement in 2014, and working with some truly massive global brands. Ollie evolved the business into Futurimpose in 2020, with a focus on behaviour-driven thinking and a more flexible, streamlined and progressive business model. But what earns Ollie his place on this list is his bird-watching habit. At the height of Covid lockdown and BLM protests around the world, Ollie had turned to his lifelong hobby as a means of relieving stress and connecting to nature. By chance, he connected online with fellow Black bird-watching enthusiast Nadeem Perera and Nadeem jumped on Ollie's idea to launch the nature-focused support group Flock Together – starting as a birdwatching club conceived to help POC and other minorities connect with nature and access the rural spaces from which they can often feel excluded. The club has blossomed, supported by Ollie’s work as an ambassador for both the RSPB and the World Wildlife Trust, and his position on the development board of the Outdoor Industries Association (OIA). Flock Together is now preparing to launch its next campaign, New Nature, designed to reframe how we all engage with the natural world for the long term.

Graphic designer Samar Maakaroun has been telling visual stories for two decades, working with globally revered agencies and brands such as M&C Saatchi, Pentagram and Apple. Raised in Beirut, based in London for the last 15 years, Samar straddles two design worlds in her practice, building bridges between East and West in terms of aesthetics, culture, and typography. She is the founder and creative director of Right to Left in Hackney Downs, a design agency drawing on the talents of four designers, spanning three generations and seven languages between them. The studio’s work covers every aspect of brand design, from naming and strategy to digital-content development and cultural consultancy, with their diverse perspectives, and unparalleled international expertise forming the secret sauce that makes their work unique. Samar has distilled her language-hopping culture-crossing experience into her typographic project 29 Words for 29 Letters, which connects each of the letters in the Arabic alphabet to untranslatable words relating to her daily working life. Despite being – predictably – very busy, Samar finds time to work with Design Can as a mentor for aspiring designers, going above and beyond to help others follow the boundary-breaking path she has carved.

A compelling critical voice on contemporary architecture and its intersections with marginalised histories and minority identity, Shukri Sultan is a co-founder of Afterparti – a collective of urban space explorers who produce an event and zine series exploring issues of spatial equality in the built environment. Afterparti was born from New Architecture Writers – the free programme designed to nurture, network and mentor emerging POC design critics. Shukri was one of NAW’s inaugural cohort in 2017, most of whom stayed together to form Afterparti after the programme finished. Shukri and her colleagues published their first issue 00 ‘The Time for Failure is Now’ in 2019, and in October 2022 followed up with 01 ‘For the Love of Power’, a (crowdfunded, ad-free) collection of essays from diverse, provocative global voices on built-environment topics ranging from spatial injustice to climate catastrophe and decolonisation. Outside Afterparti, Shukri writes for the likes of Wallpaper*, AJ, RIBAJ and Architectural Review, and teaches at Camberwell College of Arts. Right now, she’s undertaking research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where she wrote this fascinating piece about appropriating personal space for the sacred as a Muslim in the city.

In an era when everyone and their dog can claim to be a curator of something or other, it’s always refreshing to encounter someone who actually understands the delicate science of the practice. Sumitra Upham is one of the rare breed of arts practitioners who have a bone-deep understanding of the complex art of curation. Armed with an MA in Curating Contemporary Design, Sumitra has worked her way through many of London’s most influential arts institutions over the last 10 years, including White Cube and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). When we first came across her, Sumitra was senior curator of public programmes at the Design Museum, heading up a cross-displinary programme of events, residencies and temporary projects untangling design's relationship to pressing social, ecological and political issues, while simultaneously co-curating the fifth Istanbul Design Biennial 'Empathy-revisited: design for more than one' led by Mariana Pestana. In 2021, she became head of programmes at the Crafts Council, with a remit to bring new voices and perspectives to the table and to expand and diversify the organisation’s audiences among local and under-represented communities. You could feel Sumitra’s impact from the off, as the Crafts Council’s exhibitions and events took on a new dynamism and energy. Its current show Cotton: labour, land and body, runs until 4 March next year. 2023 is set to be an especially big year for Sumitra: alongside Meneesha Kellay, Joseph Henry and Jayden Ali, she’s co-curating the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

We met Zara Shasore on a sunny Saturday afternoon last March at a Design Can mentoring event at the V&A, had a coffee and, less than a week later, she’d taken charge of the campaign’s graphic design, putting her creative spin first on ‘What’s Changed?’ – the publication summarising the key findings of Design Can’s 2021 industry survey. Having graduated in graphic design from the University of Leeds in 2018, Zara has forged a multifaceted career working with progressive organisations that prioritise diversity, sustainability and innovation – particularly those in the arts and culture space. Always an inspiring and enthusiastic collaborator, Zara avoids pigeonholing herself, maintaining a varied client base and project portfolio. Alongside Design Can, she has recently been working with company-culture transformation specialist Creamer and Co and the luxury art practice Adam Ellis Studio as well as designing the weekly publication by the Economist Educational Foundation, used in schools teaching pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds all over the world. Zara also pursues her personal creative practice, producing art and design characterised by bold colours and abstract forms, often through screen printing.