Roel Wouters's Home Page

Roel Wouters is a graphic designer / director, lives and works in Amsterdam. He runs his own studio named Xelor since 2002. Studio Xelor likes to work across all media and operates mostly in the cultural field. Prior to becoming a staff tutor for visual design in the Media Design Master of the Piet Zwart Institute, he has been teaching interactive and graphic design courses at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, the Sandberg Institute and recently at Yale University School of Art.

Roel likes to collaborate. Together with Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey and Edo Paulus he has been working on a manifesto named the Conditional Design Manifesto. A manifesto that promotes the idea of designing conditions rather than end results. Together with his brother Job (letman) he works on a series of flyers that facilitate a public design battlefield, with the client as a referee.

About Roel's work

Tools / Machines / Conditions

Roel has been aware of the big influence of tools in a design practice for a while. By designing his own tools or machines, he felt he gained control over the end result.

He is currently investigating the outsourcing of control. He is very much into introducing unpredictable elements into his projects, leaving space for emergent, surprising results that reveal processes connected to the world around us. The focus shifted from designing end results towards designing their conditions In other words, the process is the product.