Jonathan J. Felix has a clear position on AI. “AI use is regressive,” he says. “It gives a destination without a journey.” He has also spent the past few years co-designing an AI-based learning platform primarily for university students studying creative disciplines. He does not see the tension.
Working alongside an expert team of academics, NEW Futures, his co-developed research project at RMIT University Vietnam, helps Vietnamese students navigate pathways into the creative industries. It uses AI to map the territory, to surface opportunities, to make legible a job market that can be opaque to graduates without industry connections. It is a tool for orientation, not creation. Felix is precise about the difference. AI as compass is not AI as author.
He has spent over eighteen years thinking about what education is actually for. Jonathan is a faculty member in the School of Communication and Design at RMIT University Vietnam, being a transdisciplinary academic whose work cuts across Sociology, Cultural Studies, Media, and Higher Education. His research is informed by poststructuralist thought; he is interested in how knowledge is produced, how institutions shape what counts as learning, and who benefits. The focus is human capital formation in Global South contexts: what education actually delivers to the people who pursue it.
His path to Vietnam was not direct. He worked first as an in-house designer, freelancer, and consultant. Practical work, client work, the kind that teaches you what design can and cannot do under pressure. He co-designed a Media and Design diploma programme in Trinidad and Tobago, jointly approved by Pearson UK and the Accreditation Council of Trinidad and Tobago, aligned with the Caribbean Qualification Framework. In 2018 he received an Enterprise of the Arts Fellowship from the Ministry of Community Development, Culture and the Arts in Trinidad and Tobago. Building a design education programme from scratch in a context where the industry infrastructure was limited shaped how he thinks about the relationship between design education and the economies it is meant to serve.
In Vietnam, as in the Caribbean, what design schools teach and what the creative industries need do not always match. Graduates finish with skills and without a clear sense of where to take them. NEW Futures is an attempt to close that distance. Not by doing the creative work for students, but by helping them read the complex and unpredictable landscape they are entering.
He teaches interdisciplinary courses in digital communication and Asian cultural studies. In 2021 his students nominated him for RMIT Vietnam’s Student-led Teacher’s Award. He is a Visiting Fellow of the International and Comparative Education Research Group at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, an Associate Fellow with Advance HE, and an associate editor of the Southeast Asian Media Studies Journal. His published work spans Vietnamese higher education, alternative media, and explorations into the visual language of Vietnamese graphic novels, led by undergraduate researcher Đặng Trương Minh Hương. A recent paper with collaborator Renick Bell examined live coding as critical media, looking at how Algorave, a practice of writing and performing code in real time as music, operates as a form of artistic resistance in Asian contexts. The through-line across all of it is consistent: how culture is made, contested, and transmitted, and who gets to participate.
On design, Jonathan does not talk in aspirational terms. Much of what gets made, he says, is generic, forgettable, and disposable. He does not say this with contempt. “Good design isn’t about the wow factor.” The book he returns to most is William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler’s Universal Principles of Design. Not a fashionable reference, but a deliberate one. It is a book about foundations: the principles that hold across disciplines, contexts, and decades. For someone whose career has moved between the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the academy, that kind of durability matters.
What he looks for when judging work: “A balance between idea and execution, theory and practice, thought and action.” It is the same framework he brings to the classroom. Not a checklist, but a way of asking whether a piece of work has fully committed to what it set out to do.
His advice to designers submitting to awards for the first time: “Keep your expectations low, your resilience high, and produce honest work.” No strategy, no positioning. Just the work.
On craft and process, his position is the same as his AI position, approached from the other side. The process of making, of not knowing yet, of working through, of arriving somewhere unexpected, is not a preliminary to the real work. It is the real work. AI does not shorten this process. It removes it.
Jonathan joined the Design Magazine Awards panel because the structure made sense to him. Blind judging and free entry are not just procedural choices. For an academic who has spent his career thinking about the value of education, how best it can work and who it works for, what human capital formation looks like outside London or New York or Sydney, reflects a set of values about what an awards programme is for.
“It gives me an opportunity to encourage good practice in a different capacity,” he says. He has done that as a designer, a consultant, a lecturer, and a researcher. Judging is one more form of the same work: looking carefully at what someone has made, and deciding whether it earned its conclusions.
The Design Magazine Awards 2026 are free to enter, blind-judged, and open to designers, studios, and students worldwide. Early entry closes 31 July 2026.
Jonathan J.Felix · RMIT University, Vietnam ·
