The notification pops up like a digital Molotov cocktail. Brazilian designer Rahuany Velleda has just posted another slide to her Instagram carousel, and this time she's not holding back. "O design fracassou," the typography screams. Design has failed. The next slide hits even harder: "É preciso (re)inventar o design. Destruí-lo. Reconstruí-lo." We need to reinvent design. Destroy it. Rebuild it.

This isn't your typical creative's quarter-life crisis post. Velleda's manifesto is a full-scale assault on the very foundations of her own profession – and it's going viral for all the right reasons.

The Sky Is Literally Falling

"O céu está caindo e parece que o design ainda puxa ele pra baixo," reads one particularly apocalyptic slide. The sky is falling and it feels like design is still pulling it down. It's not poetic license – it's scientific fact wrapped in the kind of visual poetry that stops thumbs mid-scroll.

The statistics are genuinely terrifying: human-made objects now outweigh all life on Earth. Every plastic bottle, every branded tote bag, every "sustainably-designed" packaging solution is literally crushing the planet under the weight of our aesthetic choices. And Velleda isn't letting her industry off the hook.

"It's no surprise there's more plastic than people," she writes, connecting the dots between our design-obsessed culture and ecological collapse.

"We are running after the machine—still far too little—to avoid the point of no return."

Gen Z's Design Reckoning

Velleda represents something new in the creative landscape: a generation of designers who inherited climate anxiety along with their Photoshop subscriptions. Based between the cultural powerhouses of São Paulo and Rio, she moves fluidly between graphic design, visual culture critique, and art direction – treating Instagram not as a portfolio platform but as contested territory.

Her aesthetic borrows the visual language of the very system she's dismantling: corporate colour saturation, advertising typography, documentary photography. But she weaponizes these tools against their creators, creating images that feel simultaneously seductive and unsettling – like luxury campaigns for the apocalypse.

What sets her apart is the intellectual depth. By referencing Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa's A Queda do Céu (The Falling Sky), Velleda places her critique within Indigenous cosmologies and anti-colonial environmental thought. This isn't sustainability as lifestyle brand – it's decolonization through destruction.

Beyond Bamboo Toothbrushes

While mainstream design culture obsesses over recycled paper and greenwashed campaigns, Velleda is asking more fundamental questions. What if the problem isn't that design isn't sustainable enough – what if the problem is design itself?

It's a radical proposition that arrives at a particularly uncomfortable moment. As Brazil's government courts creative industries as part of its "orange economy" strategy, industrial agriculture and mining continue destroying the Amazon. Globally, AI threatens to flood markets with even more disposable visual content, produced at unprecedented speed and scale.

Velleda's work joins a growing underground of creatives who see design not as problem-solving but as the problem itself. They're building on decades of dissent – from Victor Papanek's 1971 Design for the Real World, which called most industrial design "dangerous, wasteful and useless," to contemporary degrowth movements.

This generation has something their predecessors didn't: genuine urgency.

They're not debating theory while the world burns – they're literally watching it burn, in real-time, through their phones.

The Revolution Will Be Designed

"Redesigning design is urgent," Velleda's final slide declares. It's both a call to action and an admission of complicity. If designers keep making without questioning the fundamental premise of making itself, they risk perfecting the very systems that are destroying the world they claim to want to improve.

In an attention economy built on endless scroll, Velleda has created something that demands you stop, read, and reckon with uncomfortable truths. She's used the master's tools to dismantle the master's house – and the house is burning down either way.

The question now isn't whether design has failed. It's whether a new generation of creatives has the courage to build something better from the ashes.