Economist by training. Designer by instinct. Explorer by nature.
Meli Bodó works at the crossroads of design and sustainability.
Her practice explores how beauty, structure and freedom coexist and how traditional crafts can inspire contemporary ways of living.
Between Two Worlds
She is trained in economics and international relations, with a background in digital storytelling from KASK, Ghent.
Before becoming a self-taught designer, she spent thirteen years working in European governance, studying how political, economic and cultural systems shape human lives.
A background in economics taught her how systems work.
Design became the way she chose to respond.
That systemic way of seeing is woven into her design work,
not as theory, but as sensitivity:
to how structures shape meaning, and how beauty can reshape them.
Practice
Meli’s work moves between heritage and modernity, craft and technology, concept and touch.
She collaborates with artisans and works with processes that value time, precision and responsibility.
Her practice includes an ongoing textile collection (Ode to Freedom), surface pattern design, and objects that bring these patterns into everyday life.
Each piece belongs to a larger body of work — connected, but never repeated.
“Freedom is not the absence of structure — it’s the creation of new ones.”
This idea guides her work.
Through materials, patterns and cross-cultural collaboration, she explores what freedom can mean today:
the freedom to create responsibly,
to question tradition without erasing it,
and to imagine new cultural forms where craft continues to live.
This isn’t just design.
It’s a way of keeping beauty alive —
and setting it free.