Desire as
infrastructure.

At ENSCI, I want to explore a question: how can strategic design reveal the potential of dormant heritage assets and support their development into sustainable businesses?

My hypothesis is that some agricultural, craft and place-based assets already possess valuable resources and expertise, but lack the conditions needed for recognition and development.

By “infrastructure of desire”, I mean what connects these assets with their audiences: a meaningful story, products and experiences through which people can engage with them, a viable business model and an organisation capable of delivering on its promises.

I want to investigate how to design and test these connections, and assess their contribution to business viability, continuity and the people who sustain this heritage.

156 is the name I have chosen for my design practice. It refers to the history of our family estate and the time connecting its acquisition with this new stage of development.

In time, I would like to build a studio that works with other businesses, places and skills whose potential remains underdeveloped.

I want to help create the offers, organisations and business models that allow them to reach new markets, better reward the people behind them and invest in their future.

Identify an opportunity like an investor. Build it like a designer-entrepreneur.

Find a resource, capability or business with unrealised potential. Diagnose what holds it back. Design an offer and a business model, then test the assumptions in the field. Bring together the partners and financing needed to launch, develop and measure.

Analysis informs the choice of opportunity. Design makes it tangible. Entrepreneurship turns it into a working business. Sharing in the value created means contributing to the work and operational risk of that transformation.

Second Nature is the working name for a set of methods and tools I want to explore during the programme, eventually supporting the practice of 156.

The aim is to connect learning, opportunity selection and venture building. The following three components are design hypotheses: no tool has been developed yet.

Study leading practices, follow market signals and turn research into learning that can be applied.

An initial prototype could be a sourced research workflow that connects a signal to a hypothesis and a test. The task is to understand what can be adapted, rather than copy success outside its context.

Identify an undervalued asset, understand what limits its development and compare possible scenarios before committing.

An initial prototype could be a diagnostic framework combining demand, capabilities, costs, risks and decision criteria, to design a viable proposition and the conditions needed to deliver it.

Coordinate the resources, talent, partners and financing needed to test, launch and grow the business.

An initial prototype could connect responsibilities, budgets, validation milestones and outcomes. Design products and experiences that build lasting preference, then test the value actually delivered to customers.

I first want to deepen this practice within a venture studio, across multiple projects and sectors, before gradually developing my own studio.

One possible case study after graduation would explore access to the French market for premium Tunisian brands with limited distribution. Brand collaborations or supply partnerships with REBIAA could be among the options.

This is neither a fixed priority nor a launched project. Its relevance would depend on demand, partners, quality and traceability, and the actual economics of distribution.