Mio Kojima (she/none) is a German-Japanese designer, researcher, educator, and editor focusing on knowledge politics in design. Drawing on collaborative, intersectional feminist, and decolonial approaches, Mio’s practice critically examines the spaces and conditions of design education and aims to broaden the values and experiences centered within learning about and through design. From teaching to publishing and curating, she 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 sociopolitical issues within educational spaces and design’s potential as a practice of dreaming and empowerment.

In recent years, she 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.

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).