‘It’s a paradigm of the design school for the 21st century’: Joseph Grima takes the helm at the Aral School

Joseph Grima believes design education is in need of change. As schools proliferate around the world, many remain built around the same structures and increasingly generic ideas. What is missing, he argues, are smaller, more agile institutions rooted in their landscapes, cultures and challenges of a place.

The Aral School in Uzbekistan could offer one such model. Established by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) in Nukus, Karakalpakstan, the experimental postgraduate programme brings together designers, architects, scientists, researchers and other practitioners to investigate the ecological, social and cultural conditions of the Aral Sea region.

Grima has been appointed Programme Director for the school’s second cohort, following its inaugural programme under designer Jan Boelen. As applications open for the 2027 intake, the school is inviting postgraduate practitioners from across disciplines to join a fully funded, six-month residency beginning in January. Under the theme Climate and Landscape, participants will consider the territory as an interconnected system – encompassing soil, hydrology and wind as well as agriculture, infrastructure and cultural history – and exploring how research might have a tangible impact within the region.

The appointment brings together Grima’s longstanding interest in the relationship between design and environmental systems with his experience of experimental education, developed over eight years as creative director of Design Academy Eindhoven.

Ahead of the announcement, Wallpaper* spoke to Grima during last week's Aral School Assembly in Nukus about creating a place-specific model for design education, translating research into tangible change and why every city might one day need an Aral School of its own.

Wallpaper*: Congratulations on the new role. What interested you in becoming involved with the Aral School?

Joseph Grima: This is actually my first day here, and I'm really just getting the measure of everything. I've been following the Aral School since it started because I think it's a project that has really drawn a lot of attention, well beyond Uzbekistan and all across the world, because of its quite radical nature. It's a pedagogical experiment that I think everybody is very excited about because of the way that it's structured and set up. So to now be here and to be directly involved is incredibly exciting.

I've been working with Gayane Umerova (the Foundation’s chair) and with ACDF for several years now. I actually came the first time in 2019. I've worked with them on several exhibition projects, both in Tashkent and also in Venice. But the exciting thing about this one is that it's really a structural project. It's not just about a point of arrival. It's about building something, and that's a long-term commitment.

W*: What particularly attracts you to its location and its work in the Aral Sea region?

JG: What I'm really excited about is that, in the case of the Aral School, the whole project is set up around a very specific landscape, and a set of very specific climate-related questions. It's not a generic question; it's a very specific question.

The landscape that we're asked to observe in particular and to work with is unique in the sense that it's such a concentration of so many issues and questions that are manifesting themselves all over the world, but here they're taken to an extreme, so they become more evident.

I think specificity is really important, and the fact that a country like Uzbekistan and an organisation like ACDF and Gayane Umerova have had the intuition that maybe we can do something even more advanced and even more radical and even more propositional in a place like this, which is seen as a disaster and a catastrophe area, I think that's absolutely brilliant and really worthy of attention elsewhere as well.

W*: The open call welcomes architects and designers alongside scientists, researchers, anthropologists, writers and filmmakers. What does this mix of disciplines make possible?

JG: I think it reflects the way in which architecture and design are fundamentally changing as professions. I think we're being forced to move away from a vertical concentration of knowledge towards a horizontalisation, in which not everybody becomes an expert in everything, but there's an increased collective awareness that the scale and the complexity of the questions we're dealing with require incredibly broad knowledge and integration between different systems.

I think the school brilliantly reflects that in the way that it involves anthropologists, writers, people involved in culture in all sorts of different forms, as well as people who have a very hands-on, deep knowledge about architecture and design.

We're talking about a very small experimental institution – 22 people in the last cohort – but the impact can be really disproportionate to the numbers because it's really like a task force that has incredible agility compared to the big institutions and big organisations. It has the ability to engage with the landscape and begin to immediately develop relationships with people on the ground and to translate those into knowledge. That's something that very few other schools or institutions of higher learning can do because of the way they're set up.

I really feel like it's a paradigm of the design school for the 21st century, precisely because of involving people like ethnographers, anthropologists, filmmakers and writers, as well as designers.

W*: ACDF covers participants’ tuition, accommodation, stipends, travel and publication costs. How does removing those financial barriers affect who can participate?

JG: Covering these costs offers an even playing field for anyone with the necessary qualifications to apply for a six-month residency in Nukus in the first place. A programme asking people to relocate for half a year, away from paid work or studies, would bring forward whoever can already afford to take that time out – which tends to produce a fairly narrow, self-selecting group, and quietly excludes exactly the regional practitioners the School most needs.

That matters here specifically because the model depends on the make-up of the cohort, not just the individuals in it. The first cohort drew over 130 applications for 22 places, evenly split between international and regional participants. Removing the financial barrier is what lets us build a cohort on merit and fit for the work.

It also changes what people are free to research once they're here. Without the pressure of a personal financial stake in tuition or a rushed timeline, participants can take on genuinely open-ended, place-specific questions. And because ACDF invests in showcase costs too – exhibitions, presentations, publications and the eventual production and implementation of prototypes – the findings are built to travel beyond the School once the programme ends, thanks to these resources.

W*: Does describing the school as a ‘task force’ reflect something that you believe is wrong with existing design education?

JG: I'm coming out of eight years at Design Academy Eindhoven as creative director, so I can speak to the existing structures of higher education and design. I think it's not that there's necessarily anything wrong with them. I think it's crucial that there are places like Design Academy Eindhoven, which itself is a very small school compared with many others, and a very experimental one too.

But at the same time, the world is changing so quickly, and the methodologies of designers and creative people more broadly, and even people in the more scientific fields, are changing so rapidly that there is an urgent need to question the structures and the platforms through which processes are transmitted and taught.

I think that there is an overabundance, perhaps, of traditional design schools. We're coming from a situation where, at the end of the 20th century, there were the better-known ones that were around, but now we're really getting to a situation of oversaturation of design schools. Perhaps a surplus in production, you could say. But they're all built around the same model, and they're coming out of the same mould. They're built around the same ideas.

The thing that is a little bit lacking is a counterbalance to that, which is about specificity of place. I don't think we can be indefinitely generic about design and expect that the same ideas work everywhere. I think we need to engage with the reality on the ground in places.

W*: Could the Aral School provide a model that could be replicated elsewhere while remaining specific to its location?

JG: I see the Aral School as an incredibly promising paradigm of a small, agile institution that is setting up an opportunity for people to interface with very specific problems and very specific culture in a very specific place.

I really am excited by the idea that there could be in the future 30 or 50 or 80 Aral Schools, or 80,000 Aral Schools. Maybe every city needs an Aral School of its own that's looking at the territory, looking at the community, looking at the place, and understanding what can be learned from that place and how its issues can be addressed without defaulting to generic solutions and generic answers.

There should also be structures in place where what is learned here can be transmitted and shared to other realities around the world. In this particular case, what I think the Aral School can scale is specificity. It can set up a paradigm for other places to look at themselves.

W*: The inaugural programme focused on food and water systems. How will the next cohort build upon that work?

JG: Food and water are both very much connected to questions of climate and landscape. Even if one wanted to, it wouldn't really be possible to disconnect them.

Something that we've been talking about a lot today [at the Assembly] is how to facilitate the transmission of knowledge and how to create a network. It can't be just a flash in the pan: something that happens one year and everybody goes home and that's the end of that, and it starts over again. There has to be an aspect of continuity, an aspect of building a knowledge base, and also creating lasting relationships with the local institutions, with the landscape, with the people here.

It could be a continuous collaboration between people who are inside the cohort and others who are still around but outside, or it could be a handover of knowledge. It doesn't necessarily need to be that a project has just one author. The project can be layered, a little bit like open-source development in software, where a lot of people gather work and pass it on.

W*: Could the school’s work ultimately influence policy as well as producing objects or architectural proposals?

JG: The word scale is really crucial and central because it also applies to the kind of outputs that the school needs to consider in order to be successful in its goals.

The scale can range from the singular object, which is the tip of a larger productive iceberg of material chains and supply chains and production chains. That's really the smallest scale. But it can also be all the way up to policy, which is something that impacts an entire society or community or economy, and in between. So the scale of architecture, the scale of landscape, and then the scale of policymaking and administration – all of these need to be thought about.

It's not something that 22 people can do in one year, but if we are successful in building the continuity of knowledge and skill, and the ability to pass on this knowledge between generations of participants, then that can become an incredibly powerful tool over time.

W*: What would success look like in five or ten years?

JG: Adoption is the key word there, because whatever we build and design and conceptualise here can't just stay on a shelf in a display of a museum or a gallery. It has to find its way down into the bloodstream of everyday life and find its way back into reality, which I think is potentially a shortcoming of many design schools. They tend to remain a little bit on the abstract level and then leave it to the post-education period.

I think here it would be exciting to see the school developing projects that could directly be impactful. That's why I think the word task force is interesting, because school almost implies the expectation that it's all just a simulation. It's a hypothetical, whereas a task force or a design studio is intended to work for the real world and develop things that are going to find an application.

W*: Finally, what will you take from your time at Design Academy Eindhoven into this new role?

JG: Design Academy is a very, very special place. I think the thing that's really precious that the school managed to develop was an environment in which people are expected to work with their heads and their hands, to not end up on one track or the other track.

Historically, there's always been this separation between the craftsman and the thinker, and I think Design Academy can really claim credit for having brought those two back together, which is now something that has found its way into the mainstream bloodstream of design.

That's what I would really try to take from Design Academy and bring here: the expectation that everything we do must be absolutely exquisite, but also meaningful.

Applications for the Aral School's next intake are open until October 25 2026. Here's how to apply.