Hilde Bouchez, PhD teaches and researches within the field of applied arts, design & architecture, with a focus on responsibility and awareness, and a direct link with ways of storytelling as generators of meaning.

In the past she was head of the Design Departement of KASK & Conservatorium (Ghent), design manager for Proud Europe, a co-design platform, and initiator of the FabLab and Innovation Hub Buda (Kortrijk), involved in a research group On continuity and identity (KULeuven), looking into the power of ancestral knowledge in rural area’s in Nepal, Greenland, Egypt and Congo. She founded and was editor in chief of the magazines BEople and A Magazine.  She has been curating several international exhibitions (MARTa Herford, Design Miami, Design museum Gent, Broelmuseum Kortrijk). 

In 2017 she published A Wild Thing. Essays on things, nearness and love, APE. With this widely acclaimed collection of philosophical essays she is one of the voices of the ‘ontological turn’: looking into a new understanding of the relationship between the human and the non-human. Proposing ways in giving agency to the man-made and thus questioning the role and perception of everyday objects in transitional times. 

Throughout her career she has been on a quest for meaning, in different corners, layers and attitudes. For twenty years she has been a tantric practitioner of ancient paths. As a wayfinder she has been gathering a collection of often oppositional experiences, thoughts and things, which she recently assembles in her artistic practice, in an aim to bridge the visible and the invisible.