Yesterday I sat down on a bench in a metro station in Bonn when a woman sitting next to me spilled coffee on her coat. She was shirty – presumably the nipple of her coffee to go was leaking. After asking another woman for a tissue and cleaning up the mess, she took out a book and started reading: the title of the book was “Mieses Karma” (engl.: Bad Karma).

Can something like this happen by chance? It seemed like the book’s content jumped over to the cup. So: Can objects have a bad karma? If then, designers as object specialists should have knowledge of the metaphysical side-effects of their products and “karmic design theory” has to be on the curricula soon.