Mio Kojima (she/none) is a German-Japanese design educator, editor, and researcher focusing on knowledge politics and social justice in design. Drawing on collaborative, intersectional feminist, and decolonial approaches, Mio’s practice critically examines the spaces and conditions of educational and community-based environments and aims to broaden the values and experiences centered within them. From teaching and facilitating to publishing and curating, Mio understands her work as a space-making practice that centers on criticality, community, and exchange.

Along with Maya Ober, Mio is co-director of the intersectional feminist platform for design politics Futuress. As a hybrid between a learning community and a publishing platform, Futuress aims to problematize the role of design in systems of oppression and discrimination and explores design’s potential for social change. With a mission to radically democratize design education and amplify marginalized voices, Maya and Mio curate public learning programs, facilitate fellowships, and accompany the Futuress authors in developing their texts.

Additionally, in 2024, Mio joined forces with Lisa Baumgarten to give lectures and workshops for design teachers and students on discrimination-sensitive teaching and learning in design. As an impulse from teachers for teachers, the format focuses on approaches that can be integrated into teaching in parallel with structural changes (e.g., through diversity guidelines) and aims to plant first seeds of sustainable approaches for designing more just teaching/learning spaces in design.

Beyond these long-term endeavors, Mio has been teaching in schools and universities in different formats, addressing socio-political issues within educational spaces and design’s potential as a practice of dreaming and empowerment. Until 2024, Mio was a mentor within the Digital Spark’s program of the Education Innovation LAB, and the Make Your School Hackdays by Wissenschaft im Dialog, where she empowered students to make their voices heard through hacking-and-making projects, podcasts, and comics. Topics varied from critically examining the school environment to AI and discrimination, and mental health.

Mio's research and teaching practice often works with propositions, scripts, prompts, scores, and other formats that aim to critically discuss practices and expand hegemonic ways of doing. Her writing has been published in Glossary of Undisciplined Design (ed. Anja Kaiser and Rebecca Stephany, Spector Books, 2021) and First, Then... Repeat. Workshop Scripts in Practice (ed. Anja Groten, Hackers & Designers, 2022).

In recent years, Mio has also given lectures and panel discussions on design politics, publishing, and feminist educational practices at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Kunsthochschule Weissensee, Hochschule Düsseldorf, Museum Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt, and the Weltformat Festival Luzern, among others.

After leaving her studies of media studies and art history at the University of Tübingen (DE) in 2014, Mio studied communication design and exhibition design/scenography (the latter with a focus on dramaturgy and curatorial practices) at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (DE) and strategic design at Kyushu University in Fukuoka (JP).