In Anti-Environments, designer-artist Luis Adrian Borchardt explores how misusing digital tools and alternative design processes can unearth new creative potential and lead to greater autonomy and experimental practice with digital media. This highly unconventional companion on design tools challenges established traditions and methods through friction. Borchardt deliberately examines fields of tension and software limitations to break with conventional ways of use and to open new, unexplored avenues for creativity. He advocates for digital media being understood as dynamic formative systems to be made use of and to be repurposed, rather than as linear processes.

Borchardt’s visionary book is itself such an “anti-environment,” produced entirely in Google Sheets and avoiding conventional design programs. In this way, he demonstrates an alternative hybrid publishing approach, allowing readers to print a work from the internet and bind the volume themselves.

Borchardt is a trailblazer for a more open, democratic concept of disseminating knowledge and making it accessible.

Winner of one of German Stiftung Buchkunst’s 2025 Sponsorship Prizes for Young Book Design and a 2025 International Creative Award. Prize Nominee Work & Excellent Work at the Tokyo TDC Annual Awards 2026. Longlisted at the German forms of publication 2026 competition.