Design is evolving from its position of relative insignificance within business (and the larger envelope of nature), to become the biggest project of all… Massive Change is not about the world of design; it’s about the design of the world.

· Bruce Mau and the Institute without Bound­aries, Massive Change

A purely technocentric view of innovation is less sustainable now than ever…What we need is an approach to innovation that is powerf­ul, effective, and broadly accessible…that individuals and teams can use to generate breakthrough ideas that are imple mented and that therefore have an impact. Design thinking, the subject of this book, offers just such an approach.

· Tim Brown, Change by Design

In a world in rapid and profound transformation, we are all designers…The more tradition is weakened, the more subjects must learn to design their own lives and shift from a prevalence of activities carried out in a traditional way to one in which choices are mainly of design.

· Ezio Manzini, Design, When Every­body Designs

Statements on the rapidly changing, and increasingly transformative, character of design abound in the lit­er­a­ture of the past de­cade. The intensification of the globalization of images and commodities fostered by markets and technology has led t­oday’s critical design theorists to advocate for new kinds of engagement between design and the world. This starts with everyday life but moves on to infrastructures, cities, the lived environment, medical technologies, food, institutions, landscapes, the virtual, and, in the long run, experience itself. ¹ The claims about design’s potential new roles range from the significant to the earth shattering. A key question becomes: how does one design for a complex world? Instead of keeping on filling the world with stuff, what design strategies ­will allow us—­humans—to lead more meaningful and environmentally responsible lives (Thackara 2004)? As some design researchers contend, we all live within a design cluster, that is, immersed in designs of all kinds, which means that design becomes “a category beyond categories” (Lunenfeld 2003, 10), opening up new spaces for linking theory, practice, and purpose, connecting vision and real­ity. This brings forth the endless process of discovering new territories for design through research (Laurel 2003).

To be sure, the majority of design treatises still maintain a fundamental orientation that is technocratic and market centered, and do not come close to questioning design’s capitalistic nature. Many navigate in between, alternating between uncritical cele­bration and venturesome ideas and critiques.² Design has its caustic critics as well, although few and far between. A well-k­nown text by Hal Foster, for instance, finds that the pervasive, almost total character taken on by design ­today not only “abets a near-­perfect cir­cuit of production and consumption” but instantiates a “pan-­capitalist pres­ent” (2002a, 192). According to Foster, this type of pres­ent effects a perpetual profiling of the commodity that drives the con­temporary inflation of design. What­ever transgressive character postmodernism might have had, Foster argues, it has become routinized by design, contributing to the exhaustion of any critique ­under the label of the post or the neo. This “wising up” of commercial culture has fashioned the designed subjects of pancapitalism (Foster 2002b). Design has certainly been fully integrated into the neoliberal model of capitalism that has become pervasive since the 1980s (Dunne and Raby 2013). For Sanford Kwinter, the resulting “pop-­libertarian aesthetic,” according to which ­every aspect of our daily lives is susceptible to becoming a design objective (in affluent socie­ties), has been accompanied by the capitulation of criticism in the acad­emy and the public sphere to such trends. Nevertheless, asserting that “much more than our living rooms and silverware are at stake” (2007, 17) and acknowledging that it implies a highly developed form of rationality, Kwinter considers that design is also a vehicle for the deepest ­human aspirations and as such should be a ­matter of widespread concern.

This chapter looks at some of the most salient critical trends in design studies and practice. It discusses recent proposals for transforming design from an expert-­driven pro­cess focused on objects and ser­vices within a taken-for-­granted social and economic order ­toward design practices that are participatory, socially oriented, situated, and open ended and that challenge the business-­as-­usual mode of being, producing, and consuming. It highlights design frameworks that pay serious attention to questions of place, the environment, experience, politics, and the role of digital technologies in transforming design contexts. The chapter ends with a discussion of ­whether a critical design studies field—o­ne that emerges at the intersection of critical social theory and design studies—c­an be said to exist. A main goal of the chapter is to prepare the ground for more detailed discussions of ontological design, transition design, design for social innovation, and autonomous design, particularly for ­those readers with ­little background in design studies. I start with an intuitive, but I believe analytically suggestive, entry into the nature of design.

”When Old Technologies ­Were New”: Design’s Arrival in Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo

It is often the case that highly accomplished literary works reveal essential aspects of human life and history with a sharpness and clarity that philosophy and the social sciences can hardly aspire to match. Such is the case, for instance, with One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1970), a novel that hides unsuspected lessons about the early phases of the deployment of technology and design in so-­called traditional socie­ties. Let us start by recalling the book’s beginning, often considered one of the most perfect opening paragraphs of world lit­er­a­ture:

Many years l­ater, as he faced the firing squad, Col­o­nel Aureliano Buendíawas to remember that distant after­noon when his f­ather took him to dis cover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe ­houses, builton the bank of a river of clear ­water that ran along a bed of polished stones,which ­were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was sorecent that many t­hings lacked names, and in order to indicate them itwas necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a f­amily of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a ­greatuproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the magnet…( 1)

But the magnet and the ice ­were just the beginning of what turned the premodern, seemingly designless real­ity of the poor ­people of Macondo topsy-­turvy. A long paragraph at the start of a l­ater chapter brings us up to date on the dialectic of won­der and disappointment, enthrallment and confusion, felt by the town’s ­people in response to so many modern inventions, such as electricity, the cinema, the phonograph, and the telephone. Let us listen to this amazingly lucid summary paragraph:

Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the ­people of Macondo did not know where their amazement began. They stayed up all night looking at the pale electric bulbs fed by the plant that Aureliano Triste had brought back when the train made its second trip, and it took time and effort for them to grow accustomed to its obsessive toom-­toom. They became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-h­ead ticket wind­ows, for the character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears of affliction had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into anArab in the next one. The audience, who paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many felt that they had been the victims of some new and showy gypsy business and they decid­ed not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many trou­bles of their own to weep over the acted-­out misfortunes of imaginary beings. Something similar happened with the cylinder phonographs that the merry matrons from France brought with them as a substitute for the antiquated hand organs and that for a time had serious effects on the livelihood of the band of musicians. At first curiosity increased the clientele on the forbidden street and t­here was even word of respectable ladies who disguised themselves as workers in order to observe the novelty of the phonograph from first hand, but from so much and such close observation they soon reached the conclusion that it was not an en chanted mill as every­one had thought and as the matrons had said, but a mechanical trick that could not be compared with something so moving, so h­uman, and so full of everyday truth as a band of musicians. It was such a serious disappointment that when phonographs became so popu­lar thatthere was one in e­very ­house they w­ere not considered objects for amusement for adults but as something good for ­children to take apart. (164)

As anthropologist Tim Ingold (2011) says, we moderns who have science can feel a certain degree of astonishment at novel discoveries—­the newest iPad or electric vehicle, a seemingly miraculous drug just hitting the market—yet no real sense of wonder, as the people of Macondo did then. So, when the telephone was fi­nally introduced, “it was as if God had decided to put to the test ­every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of real­ity lay” (164). That was to change significantly with the passage of time, especially as more and more marvels and strangers came to town on the weekly train. And h­ere, at the very end of this page-a­nd-­a-h­alf-l­ong paragraph, one hears that “among those theatrical creatures, wearing riding breeches and leggings, a pith helmet and steel-­rimmed glasses, with topaz eyes and the skin of a thin rooster, ­there arrived in Macondo on one of so many Wednesdays the chubby and smiling Mr. Herbert, who ate at the ­house” (164-165). ­Those who have read the book ­will recall what happened next: Mr. Herbert took his scientific instruments to study the banana he was served at the Buendías’ house, and, as the saying goes, the rest is history, for shortly thereafter he returned to stay, along with the entire banana com­pany, which eventually caused what García Márquez describes as a leaf storm or whirlwind. For the writer, the banana com­pany represents the po­liti­cal economy of modern technology and design, the main driving engine for the whirlwind of modernity.

I grew up in Cali, Colombia, already with many of the technologies that so marveled and at the same time disappointed the people of Macondo, but in a predigital age. My ­family did not own a tv ­until I was fifteen. Before that, kids in our middle-­class neighborhood would crowd together in the early part of the eve­ning in the living room of one of our luckier neighbors to watch tv for an hour or so, an occasion for much merriment and communion among the kids; then we would go out to play on the street. By the time I finished college in 1975—still living at home, as was and still is the custom—my parents had acquired, with significant financial sacrifice, our first, low-­tech stereo player. That was one of the technological highlights of ­those years for me, and ­little by ­little I started to build a small collection of the vinyl rec­ords of my favorite artists. I would stay up late at night in my bedroom studying and ­doing homework, after every­body ­else had gone to sleep, while listening at low volume to my favorite station on an old, worn-­out radio that surely had seen better days. In college I learned to program in Fortran IV; we would write up by hand in pencil the ­simple programs that would enable the endless calculations for our engineering homework, and each of those programs was converted into a large number of punch cards with ­little holes in them that would then be read by our huge, brand-­new, and resplendent ibm 360, which lay impassively in a large, air-­conditioned room of its own. We would look at the reddish machine in awe from ­behind the room’s glass win­dows as the young technicians ran our programs and we waited for the results, which came in the form of long reams of paper put out by the dot matrix printers of the time, with a unique sound that quickly became part of our technological sensual repertoire. By the time I was ­doing my PhD at Berkeley in the 1980s, all of this had changed dramatically, of course. Yet I invariably wrote the first draft of my dissertation chapters by hand, at a café on Clement Street in San Francisco, before typing them up on my first pc at home nearby, a large and heavy Kaypro 4, somewhat popular among academics at the time (it operated with two 64k floppy disks, one containing the word pro­cessing program, the other the data).

The point of this microethnography of my own practices around technology as well as García Márquez’s account is not just anecdotal. Nor is it nostalgia for times and ­things (or lack of ­things) past, and certainly is not intended to convey a reified account of the rapid pace of technological innovation.³ My first goal in telling ­these stories is ­simple: to make us aware, before I go on to discuss con­temporary design in some detail, of the complex entanglement of science, materials, technologies, capitalism, and culture that makes up the matrix of modern design. My second goal, more pertinently for now, is to highlight the social and cultural histories of the body that surround all design, the fact that design is a key ele­ment in who we become ­because of the kinds of practices designed objects and tools call on us to perform. (Does it ­matter ­whether we write with pencils or on an iPad? Whether we engage in activities collectively in the neighborhood or in the solitude of our individual rooms in nuclear homes? ­Whether we dance and make ­music with ­others or listen to it in silence through our earphones? In what ways do t­hese diverse practices construct dif­fer­ent selves and socie­ties? Does it matter?) To be sure, it ­doesn’t have to be either-or, and certainly it is not a question of finding out ­whether ­things were better before than they are now, or the other way around, but of foregrounding the indubitable ethnographic fact of the diverse ways of being-­through-­practices with which our tools have much to do. Toys are us, ­aren’t they?

The power of tools and design to shape being and identity is eloquently attested by the buzz caused by the world’s fairs, from the mid-­nineteenth ­century till ­today, which became showcases for designs embodying the technological and cultural accomplishments of the age. The famous Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851 (Stocking 1987; Bürdek 2005) paraded for the first time in a specially designed space the technologies, trinkets, and prototypes of the day—­power looms, pumps, steam engines, industrial machines. As visitors made their way through the glass cathedral, it became clear to them that not all ­peoples in the world had achieved the same level of “development,” for t­here was no way the arts from “the stationary East” nor the handicrafts from “the aborigines” could ever match the “pro­gress” of the West. Machines, ­after all, ­were “the mea­sure of men” (Adas 1989). World’s fairs ­were not only shrines for the collective adoration of the “civilization” and pro­gress brought about by the Enlightenment era but also machines for effecting what in current Latin American critical theory is called coloniality, that is, the hierarchical classifications of ­peoples in terms of race and culture.

We no longer point at t­hings, of course, as in Macondo’s times; design gives us their names, and in this naming we are given to them, too. We rarely think ­these days about the ways in which our lives are thoroughly designed. Previous inventions constitute, too, the history of our designing—of both their making and our being made by them. It is a sedimented, and thus invisible, history, yet no less effective ­because of that. From time to time scholars remind us that old technologies were once new, to paraphrase Carolyn Marvin’s (1988) wonderfully imaginative title, and that technological development is about “implementing the ­future” (Marvin 1999).⁴ Objects and products are of course central to this. This is strikingly the case with all the design innovations for the home space, from the mid-­nineteenth-­century Singer sewing machine to the entire range of modernist innovations in the 1920s-1950s (plywood chairs, ­table lamps, Bauhaus-­style furniture, door ­handles, stackable dishes, vacuum cleaners and washing machines, Braun toasters and ­kettles, cars of course, Swedish furniture, Finnish glass, and ­those iconic brand objects of Italian Bel Design, such as Olivetti typewriters and that most beautiful device for modern mobility, the Vespa, introduced in 1946).

These are but a few of the hundreds of objects one is likely to find in lavishly illustrated design history books. They are the stuff of design. And yet design is much more, perhaps even more so today than in the heyday of modernism. Let us now discuss what else ­there is in the world of design and how it contributes to shaping the design of the world and of our lives.

Reengaging with the World: ­Toward Participatory, Human-­Centered, and Socially Oriented Design

Any serious inquiry into con­temporary design must be a journey into the ­trials and tribulations of capitalism and modernity, from the birth of industrialism to cutting-­edge globalization and technological development. This is of course beyond the reach of this short book, yet some general remarks are in order. Design has doubtlessly been a central po­liti­cal technology of modernity. Regardless of where one situates the origin of design—whether with the first use of tools by early humans, the budding technological imagination of the Re­nais­sance, the Industrial Revolution, or nineteenth-­century modernism—the fact remains that as an aspect of everyday life design takes off with modernity. Why? ­Because only with modernity, particularly ­after the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, did socie­ties become thoroughly pervaded by expert knowledges and discourses and transformed by them. Both Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault refer to this aspect of modernity, whether in terms of the “colonization” of the lifeworld by such knowledges or the bureaucratization and governmentalization of life by expert institutions linked to the State. What this means is that previously taken-­for-­granted practices, from child rearing and eating to self-­development and of course the economy, became the object of explicit calculation and theorization, opening the door to their designing. This is an aspect that often escapes the attention of design critics, too mired perhaps in design’s relation to capitalism. In short, with the development of expert knowledge and modern institutions, social norms were sundered from the lifeworld and defined heteronomously through expert-­driven pro­cesses; they ­were no longer generated by communities from within (ontonomy) nor through open po­liti­cal pro­cesses at the local level (autonomy).⁵

With the full development of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-­nineteenth ­century, industrial design came to the fore as a field. A­fter a period of uneasy relations with the arts and crafts movement, which tried to counteract the ascendancy of “the world of machines” during the second half of the nineteenth ­century, by the time modernism emerged in the twentieth ­century design had become inextricably wedded to functionalism. During the first half of the twentieth ­century, first with the Bauhaus and then with the Ulm school of design, as well as design schools in other Eur­o­pean cities, modern design articulated a new view of the intersection of art, materials, and technology at the same time that it instilled in working people new ways of living through the design of lived environments and the functionality of objects. Functionalism, however, carried the day.⁶ Even then, oftentimes the designers’ aim was to improve mass-produced goods and ­people’s quality of life through the use of new materials and techniques. One may see in these practices a nascent preoccupation with the relation between design and politics, to be discussed fully in the last chapter of this book.⁷

This also means that, from the outset, design has been inextricably tied to decisions about the lives we live and the worlds in which we live them, even if this awareness seldom accompanies “design as usual.” Not only design but the acad­emy, with its penchant for neutrality, shies away from these normative questions: “The question we ­humans must face”—­says Humberto Maturana, on whom ­we’ll draw a lot in subsequent chapters—­“is that of what do we want to happen to us, not a question of knowledge or pro­gress” (1997, 1). As Colombian cultural critic Adolfo Albán puts it, speaking about the seemingly intractable social and ecological prob­lems facing most socie­ties, “el problema no es de ciencia, sino de las condiciones de la existencia” (“the prob­lem is not one of lack of knowledge, but of the conditions of existence”; this goes as well for sustainability and climate change: far more than instrumental knowledge and technological adaption is required!).⁸ ­Today some leading critical designers are beginning to tackle this issue in earnest. What world do we want to build? What kinds of futures do ­people ­really want? (Thackara 2004; Laurel 2001; Dunne and Raby 2013). How can we strive for “a new, hopefully wiser, civilization” (Manzini 2015, 15)? ­These normative questions are central to ontologically oriented design.

If we start with the presupposition, striking perhaps but not totally far-fetched, that the con­temporary world can be considered a massive design failure, certainly the result of par­tic­ul­ar design decisions, is it a m­atter of designing our way out? In an oft-­quoted definition by Herbert Simon, design offers the means to “devise courses of action aimed at changing existing conditions, into preferred ones” (quoted in Thackara 2004, 1).⁹ Ezio Manzini has proposed a variation on Simon’s formula. “Design,” he says, “is a culture and a practice concerning how t­hings ­ought to be in order to attain desired functions and meanings” (2015, 53). Manzini’s emphasis on design’s role in meaning creation (to be discussed at length in chapter 5) leaves no doubt that “more-­of-t­he-same” or “business-as-­usual” approaches are not what is called for. More-­of-the-­same solutions can at best lead to reducing unsustainability. The good news, however, is that a lot of “­going beyond the same” is already happening, in so many social, po­litical, and technological spheres; the bad news is that it might not be happening fast enough, if we heed the criteria of climate change scientists and activists, or with the degree of purposefulness required. More worrisome, most of the policy design that goes on at the level of the State and international organ­izations sits comfortably within the same epistemic and cultural order that created the prob­lems in the first place. How to go beyond the aporias caused by the fact that we are facing modern prob­lems for which ­there are no modern solutions (Santos 2014) is one of the key questions that radical design thinking needs to tackle.

There are areas of agreement about how to go on. Let me mention a few. As design moves out of the studio and the classic design professions (industrial design, engineering, and architecture and art) and into all domains of knowledge and applications, the distinction between expert and user/client breaks down. Not only does every­one come to be seen as a designer of sorts, but the argument for a shift to people-­centered (and, to a lesser extent, earth-­centered) design is more readily acknowledged. Designing people and the environment back into situations also means displacing the focus from stuff to ­humans, their experiences and contexts. From mindless development to design mindfulness (Thackara 2004), from technological fixes to more design, from object-centered design to human-­centered design, and from “dumb design” to “just design”—­all of ­these notions become new guiding ideas (e.g., Laurel 2003; T. Brown 2009; McCullough 2004; Chapman 2005; Simmons 2011). Some of the features of the new design thinking are summarized by Paola Antonelli, the architecture and design curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; con­temporary design approaches, she says, are critical, activist, organic, and po­liti­cal; they are about thinkering (thinking with your hands, ­doing handson conceptual work), about prob­lem finding and prob­lem framing more than prob­lem solving, and about functional social fictions rather than science fiction; they are guided by ethics more than by user-­friendliness. Design has developed a new sensitivity to the environment and to ­human predicaments, and is more attuned to its ability to contribute to creating a better world; it becomes a medium in the ser­vice of society rather than solution-­making expertise in the ser­vice of industry.¹⁰

These princi­ples summon to the discussion unpre­ce­dented methodological and epistemological issues, opening up a welcoming space for disciplines such as anthropology and geography. New methods highlight front-­end research, with the designer as facilitator and mediator more than expert; conceive of design as eminently user centered, participatory, collaborative, and radically contextual; seek to make the pro­cesses and structures that surround us intelligible and knowable so as to induce ecological and systems literacy among users; and so forth. Above all, to go back to the normative question, there is an attempt to construct alternative cultural visions as ­drivers of social transformation through design.

Design as a Situated and Interactive Practice

The increasingly pervasive character of computing in everyday life has fostered concrete questions and design challenges—­from “Are ‘smart devices’ ­really smart, or are they rather making ­people more stupid?” to questions about interactivity, networks, space and place, and embodiment. The mood is to go beyond the early fascination with information and communication technologies of the 1980s and 1990s (and allied concepts such as virtual real­ity and cyberspace; see Escobar 1994; Laurel 2001) and a narrow focus on human-computer interfaces t­oward a more expansive field, variously referred to as “information technologies and creative practices” (Mitchell, Inouye, and Blumenthal 2003) or “interaction design practices” (McCullough 2004; see, e.g., p. 163 for a “manifesto for interactive design”). In Malcolm McCullough’s view, interaction design practices articulate interface design, interaction design, and experience design. Imbued in phenomenological tenets, he sees this articulation in terms of situated technologies that, rather than being decontextualized and value neutral, are embodied, place based, convivial, and conducive to care (see also Manzini 2015; Ehn, Nilsson, and Topgaard 2014). This conception resituates digital technologies within human-­and place-­centered design, thus counteracting modernity’s proclivity to decontextualized speed, efficiency, mobility, and automation. In architecture and other domains, this means designing systems that are easy to operate—­a situated design practice that is grounded in place and community but that through embedded systems nevertheless addresses how people navigate the world through their mobile devices. Design thus becomes a critical localized practice, but one that joins the open-­source dimension of technology to the cultural practice of design. From t­hese debates it is impor­tant to remark on the salience that designers like McCullough, Manzini, and Pelle Ehn, Elizabeth Nilsson, and Richard Topgaard give to questions about place, locality, and community in their revisioning of design practice, both as a corrective to the uncritical embrace of mobile technologies and as a way to redefine their role in daily life—all of this without disavowing the existence and potential of the new technologies.

out of the studio 35­There is no doubt, from this hasty and purposeful review, that a relatively new brand of design theorist is emerging; the new theories are to some extent a result of taking design practices beyond their established domains, including in social ser­vice and environmental arenas, for-profit consulting firms staffed by interdisciplinary research teams, community-­based nongovernmental organ­izations and design outfits, and even social movements.¹¹ Design thinking has become a key trope in this context. As the editorial in a recent issue of Design Studies devoted to the concept put it, the ­great popularity gained by design thinking outside the design professions stems precisely from the perception of design’s real or potential contribution to addressing “wicked” (intractable, unbounded) prob­lems, and of design as an agent of change (Stewart 2011). This brings about a shift from design’s functional and semiotic emphasis to questions of experience and meaning.¹² While some designers manifest unease with this trend, many assess it in a positive light. As a key figure in the spread of design thinking from the well-known Bay Area design company ideo puts it,

design thinking begins with skills designers have learned over many de­cades in their quest to match ­human needs with available technical re sources within the practical constraints of business. By integrating what isdesirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasibleand econom­ically ­viable, designers have been able to create the productswe enjoy ­today. Design thinking takes the next step, which is to put ­thesetools into the hands of people who may have never thought of themselvesas designers and apply it to a vastly greater set of prob­lems…[­There is a]difference between being a designer and thinking like a designer. (T. Brown 2009, 4)¹³

­There ­isn’t much of a self-­critical look ­here in terms of the po­litical economy and cultural politics of design, yet the descriptive character of the analysis—often with a degree of ethnographic detail—is in­ter­est­ing in itself.

Architecture and Urbanism: Experimentation, Unsettlement, and the Reinvention of the Vernacular

­There are three topics to be touched on very briefly in what remains of this chapter before a concluding reflection on whether a field of critical design studies can be said to be emerging. T­hese are architecture and urbanism, ecological design, and the relation between design and politics. To start with architecture: ­there is no doubt that architecture has always been central to design, as witnessed by its role in design education and as richly exemplified by traditions in many world regions (e.g., Italy, Finland, Catalonia in Spain, some Latin American countries, East Asia, or cities like Chicago and San Francisco) where architects have customarily included as part of their practice the design of furniture, fashion, music, materials, and even utopias. There is also a sense that architecture has ceased to be a poor relative of social theory, becoming an impor­tant space for discussions about globalization, urbanization, the environment, modernity, and media and digital culture; architects are often attuned to the pressing social issues of the day, including globalization and the anthropocene (e.g., Turpin 2013), and to the theoretical and philosophical prob­lems with which the social sciences and humanities deal (e.g., Sykes 2010).¹⁴ Also readily recognized by critics, however, is the fact that a certain style of architecture has contributed to the inflation of design—­a sort of “Bilbao effect,” ­after Frank Gehry’s famous Guggenheim Museum in this city. Foster contrasts this “master builder” (Gehry) with Dutch-­born and New York-­based architect Rem Koolhaas, whose design writings and architectural practice aim rather to rethink globalization from alternative architectural and urban princi­ples. Koolhaas’s practice is contradictory, to be sure, as reflected in his work of cultural-­architectural criticism Contents (2004), a tour de force that combines in intricate ways deconstructive analyses, exposés, post-9/11 geopolitics, diatribes (e.g., on architecture and war), and, of course, a dazzling and ever-­proliferating and bifurcating graphic display of images, fonts, photographs, drawings, and so forth.¹⁵ For Tony Fry (2015, 87-89), however, Koolhaas’s version of posturbanism continues to abide by the “signature architecture” tendency that spells out the abandonment of the urban as a proj­ect and hence the unquestioned character of the city as the locus of the unsustainable.

At the other end of the spectrum, one would be remiss to overlook pleas for the renewal of vernacular architectural practices, for mobilizing the ele­ments of the earth along with t­hose of place and culture to deal with the seemingly intractable prob­lems of urban poverty and environmental degradation, as in the case of the amazing architecture of dwelling in parts of West Africa, beautifully illustrated, described, and theorized by Jean-­Paul Bourdier and Trinh T. Minh-ha (2011). Vernacular, in ­these contexts, no longer indexes a rigid traditionalism but a space of possibility that could be articulated to creative proj­ects integrating vernacular forms, concrete places and landscapes, ecological restoration, and environmental and digital technologies in order to deal with serious prob­lems of livelihood while reinvigorating communities.

The tiny ­house movement, in its multiple instantiations, could be said to be inaugurating a new vernacular thoroughly infused with ecological and cultural design knowledge. Various hybrids of vernacular, self-­made, and functional housing are emerging, for instance, in the well-­known “half-­houses” of Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena.¹⁶ Vernacular forms of design may be particularly relevant when used in design proj­ects intended to strengthen communal autonomy and resilience.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of discussions at the intersection of architecture, art, and design. An exhibit at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 ­under the rubric “Traces of the Past and ­Future Steps” showcased a range of tendencies at this intersection; many of the works on display demonstrated ecological sensibility as well as an acute awareness of philosophical and cultural issues such as space and place, temporalities, objects, materiality, locality, scale, agency, and so forth. Innovative designs and experimentation with materials, forms, and patterns embodied reflections on topics such as the relation between the natur­al and the artificial (moving back from the excessive concern with the virtual t­oward an ecological sensibility), self-­organization, popu­lar knowledge of the built environment, the cultural dimension of architecture (e.g., issues of identity), aesthetic diversity (e.g., the multiplicity of pattern making, including vernacular forms), and of course sustainability. In some cases, however, the lack of a deliberate discussion of capitalism and globalization does not mean a lack of awareness of their importance as much as indicate that architectural discourse gets at them in other ways (through artistic expression, concern with individual be­hav­ior, or hints of the spiritual value of space situations, the fate of traditional forms, the destruction and reconstruction of seemingly obsolete spaces or dilapidated neighborhoods, and so forth). Some works explored new imaginaries for living by rethinking long-­standing practices (e.g., courtyards in China) through innovative building designs (maintaining the courtyard princip­les but g­oing beyond its bounded form to propose new structures). Some of the works could be said to be deeply attuned to relational ways of being-i­n-t­he-­world, starting with the materials themselves (the ­great won­der in the transfiguration of materials at the microscale, whether wood, glass, or metal, as the narrative of one of the exhibits put it) and the role of objects and surfaces as dwelling topographies that open up ­toward a deep understanding of place and attention to communal logics and interrelations with the environment.¹⁷

The tension between ­those architects for whom place is a crossroads of flows and events and an inevitable space of transformation on an always-­shifting ground (e.g., Koolhaas) and ­those who continue to adhere to an existential conception of place continues to be productive. Nobody has perhaps broached this tension with more passion than Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa (e.g., 2016). Influenced by his famous countryman, the architect Alvar Aalto, and building on what is perhaps still the most profound phenomenological reflection on space and place—t­he inspiring The Poetics of Space, by French phi­los­o­pher Gaston Bachelard (1969)—P­allasmaa provides us with a thoroughly con­temporary meditation on the act of dwelling as the fundamental medium of our being-­in-­the-world. Architecture, for him, has forgotten this basic fact of existence, causing him to pen disparaging reflections on the profession. As he argues, architects are now taught to design ­houses, not homes, thus contributing to the uprooting that feeds into our growing inability to genuinely connect with the world. There is a “poetics of home”—­linked to memory, emotions, dreams, identity, and intimacy—­that functional architecture and “modern living” have foreclosed (e.g., “in the con­temporary ­house, the fireplace has been replaced by the tv” [35]; or, as Bachelard might say, the modern apartment has given up on its oneiric function and is no longer capable of fostering our dreams).

Pallasmaa draws substantial implications from this situation, including the loss of our ability to truly imagine alternative worlds. Against architecture’s growing instrumentalization and aestheticization, without deep roots in our existential experience, he arrives at a conclusion that has significant design implications. “A building is not an end in itself. A building conditions and transforms the h­uman experience of real­ity,” he states; “it frames, structures, articulates, links, separates and unites, enables and prohibits” (96). This is because buildings possess “a tectonic language” (97); we interact with them actively with our entire body and senses. Partaking more of the nature of a verb (to inhabit, to dwell) than that of a noun, “­every meaningful building is at the same time about the world, about life, and about the very discipline of architecture” (98).¹⁸ Something of the sort can be found in writings about Japa­nese architecture, at least in its traditional instantiations. In his book on aesthetics and architecture, El elogio de la sombra (In Praise of Shadows, 1994), writer Junichir Tanizaki discusses central aspects of the materialist phenomenology of the traditional house, from the woods, ceramic, and paper (e.g., t­hose wooden lattices of translucent paper that serve as doors or room dividers, the texture of which transmits “a ­little warmth that recomforts the heart” [25]) to the bathroom (“which our ancestors, who rendered every­thing poetic, paradoxically transmuted into a space of the most exquisite taste”) and, above all, the alternation between life and shadow, which serves as a princip­le for all aspects of interior design, ­every experience, even that of eating (e.g., the gleam of cooked rice, or of traditional porcelain dishes, which is lost with Western-style lighting).¹⁹ ­These princip­les reached an incredible level of development in the traditional ­temples, such as the fourteenth-­century Buddhist ­temple outside of Kyoto so splendidly described by anthropologist Norris Johnson (2012), with its meticulously designed buildings, gardens, and ponds, where even stones respond to an animist perspective in which every­thing is alive and partakes of our emotions, calling for an ethic of compassion and love. ­Here land, landscape, and the spirit of place achieve a most harmonious interrelation, perhaps ­because it is based on the princip­le of their sacredness.

Today, however, the real challenge lies in urbanism. As Fry harshly puts it, “gestural egocentric architectural statements and master planning fictions mea­sured against the scale of imperative [climate change and generalized unsettlement] are not merely misplaced, they are crimes against the ­future” (2015, 48).²⁰ Much more than reactive adaption and retrofitting of buildings that serves the interests of the affluent ­will be needed to face the universally but differentially experienced condition of unsettlement that has come about as a result of the combined action of climate change, population growth, global unsustainability, and geopo­litical instability. As he vehemently states, “destruction has gained the upper hand” (25) in a world that is made structurally unsustainable by colonialist forms of Western cap­i­tal­ist modernity. The development of new modes of earthly habitation has become an imperative, which means changing the practices that account for our dwelling in ways that enable us to act futurally instead of insisting on the strategies of adaptation to defuturing (future-­destroying) worldly conditions that are on offer at pres­ent. What is required is a new kind of metrofitting made up of design strategies capable of bringing about new infrastructures of life. Adaptation and resilience will have to be revisited through the creation of grounded, situated, and pervasive design capacity by communities themselves who are bound together through culture and a common will to survive when confronted with threatening conditions, not by global experts, bureaucrats, and geoengineers who can only recommend the business-a­s-­usual approaches that emerge from impoverished liberal mind-­sets. All of this ­will call into question the notion of the city as an enduring sociomaterial form—­perhaps the end of the modernist city, once the symbol of dynamism and pro­gress. In short, the “recreation of urban life should occupy a central position in the structural changes that must occur if ‘we’ h­umans are to have a v­iable f­uture” (82). The destructive metabolic nature of cities implies going beyond the model of the modernist city. Fry’s urban design imagination provides impor­tant leads with regard to “the question of finding futural modes of dwelling” (87). Reimagining the city along ­these lines ­will have to be part of any transition vision and design framework.

Design and the Rise of the Digital

The digitalization of so many dimensions of social life is one of the most impor­tant social facts of the last few de­cades. Digital technologies and information and communication technologies have to do with all aspects of everyday life, and design’s role in the ever-­expanding and always-­changing digital territories is one of the most poignant questions for critical design studies. Succinctly stated, “­doing digital design also means designing society, and designers ­ought to take a stand as a driver of social change” (Kommonen n.d., 2). For Kari-­Hans Kommonen, a theorist at the Aalto University Media Lab in Helsinki, the princi­ple of digital design should be the critical awareness that “digital products also live in the social world and change it. Digital design cannot operate outside its social context, because files, systems and media only gain meaning as part of a community’s practice. Effective, meaningful design is a social activity, in which the designer is one actor among many. In addition to computers, software, digital information and media, the materials of digital design also include communities, processes, practices and culture, and designers need to be equipped with the right skill to deal with these ele­ments” (1). More than technological expertise, open-­source approaches and certainly the cele­bration of new media is at stake.²¹

The demo­cratizing potential of information and communication technologies has been exaggerated. Let us recall that the 1990s was the high de­cade of ­things cyber. Digital technology designer Brenda Laurel’s (2001) list of “four revolutions” usefully marks the changes in the digital field: the pc, computer games, virtual real­ity and cyberspace, and of course the Internet and the web (see also McCullough 2004). Over the past ten to fifteen years, at least in the Anglo-­American science and technology studies field, the focus on the digital was displaced by attention to ­things “bio,” particularly as a result of the ontological turn in social theory (see the next chapter). Social science studies of the digital continue to be done, although perhaps with less excitement than during the first wave; the seeming consolidation of digital technologies in so many aspects of life (ubiquitous computing) has robbed this field of its previous glamour as a source of epistemic, social, and cultural analyses. Now the cyber is just one more field of practice among many. That said, ­there is a lot of in­ter­est­ing work being done at the interface of the digital and the cultural that contributes to illuminating, and continuously reappraising, the meaning of being digital; ­these include both theoretical and ethnographic studies. ­There are in­ter­est­ing works on postcolonial theory and computing (Irani et al. 2010), the digital divide, digital technologies and the body, social media, virtual environments and communities, and so forth. Some of this work involves ethnographic investigations of the manifold intersections of digital technologies and cultural practices, originating a new field of digital anthropology (Boellstorff 2008; Balsamo 2011; Horst and Miller 2012; Pink, Ardèvol, and Lanzeni 2016).

Questions about the digital have not been salient in ontologically oriented research, with the pos­si­ble exception of t­hose who follow in the tradition of Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores (1986) on ontological design, such as Harry Halpin and Alexandre Monnin’s (2014) work on the philosophy of the web. Halpin (2011) draws on Heideggerian phenomenology and on Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s (1980, 1987) biology of cognition to reformulate the so-­called four es in the artificial intelligence field—­cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended.²² Challenging conventional views of repre­sen­ta­tion and individual cognition in the artificial intelligence field, he advocates for a notion of collective intelligence in terms of a collective understanding of cognition that extends into an equally collectively ­shaped environment. The notion of cognition as embodied (to be explained at length in chapter 3) is central to this “neo-­Heideggerian program” in artificial intelligence. The web itself comes to be seen as collective intelligence, while embodiment is redefined away from the individual ­toward the constitution of assemblages.

A persuasive framework for the digital that has ontological implications is being developed by Benjamin Bratton in San Diego. Bratton’s (2014) concern with the geopolitics of planetary-­scale computation leads him to posit the existence of an “accidental megastructure,” the Stack. On first inspection, the Stack looks like an updated version of cyberspace, only much more comprehensive and totalizing, for it includes myriad dimensions of life, from mineral sourcing to the cloud, from interfaces to robots, from platforms to users, and from governmentality to surveillance. The Stack is the new nomos, or po­liti­cal geography of the Earth. It is the dimension one needs to add to the analytical triad of the State, civil society, and the market—so now we also have the Platform, or the Stack. Within the Stack, the cloud and the user enable a sub-structure that Bratton refers to as the Black Stack, a hardware and software “computational totality” that produces an accelerated geopolitics that shapes economies as much as subjectivities, transforming the meaning of the h­uman by proliferating the world’s nonhuman inhabitants and users (see also Invisible Committee 2015). This geopolitics/biopolitics of the digital has profound implications for design.

Sustainability by Design?

At the other end of the spectrum from the digital, we have the concern with the natur­al. Both demand equal attention from design perspectives. Since the inception of the sustainability movement in 1987 with the publication of the Brundtland Report, Our Common F­uture, where the term sustainable development was first defined as development that meets the needs of the pres­ent without compromising the ability of ­future generations to meet their own needs (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987), critics have pointed out that such a definition is oxymoronic in that the interests of development and the needs of nature cannot be harmonized within any conventional model of the economy (e.g., Redclift 1987; Norgaard 1995). Despite the moment of hope and the a­ctual achievements at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the contradictions and criticisms have only multiplied through the years, peaking around the disappointing twentieth-anniversary conference of the Earth Summit (known as Rio +20), held in Rio in June 2012, where the notion of the green economy was presented by governments from the North and by international organi­zations as the panacea for reaching the ever-­elusive goal of sustainable development. The notion of a green economy corroborated critics’ view that what is to be sustained with sustainable development, more than the environment or nature, is a par­tic­ul­ar capitalistic model of the economy and an entire dualist ontology.

We ­will touch on sustainability again when discussing ontological design, but even a cursory map of design trends must include a mention of ecological design. It took almost three de­cades ­after the publication of landscape architect Ian McHarg’s anticipatory Design with Nature (1969) for a field of ecological design properly speaking to take off.²³ Approaches range from the conceptual to the technocratic, with the latter predominating, particularly economic and technological perspectives; the range among the latter category is wide, from proposals that could be said to push the envelope in envisioning a significant transformation of capitalism (as in the well-­regarded proposal for “natu­ral capitalism” by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins [1999]) to the plethora of greenwashing proposals coming out of the World Bank, the United Nations, and mainstream environmental think tanks in the Global North around climate change, sustainable development, and the green economy.²⁴ A counterintuitive example comes from the field of fashion and sustainability; in this field, one finds designers taking seriously the social and ecological challenges of the industry in an attempt to transform it (from reductions in the environmental impact of materials and pro­cessing to reuse and refashion strategies, place-­based production, and biomimicry), as well as proposing creative notions like codesign through active crafting, hacking, and the tackling of difficult issues related to alternative knowledges, politics, and transitions to other cultural and ecological models for society (see the excellent book by Kate Fletcher and Lynda Grose [2011]; see also Shepard 2015).

There have been significant conceptual strides in ecological design, largely through collaborations among architects, planners, and ecologists with on-t­he-ground design experience. A readily accepted principle is that ecological design involves the successful integration of ­human and natu­ral systems and processes; ­whether this integration is seen as based on learning from several billion years of evolution and from nature’s designs, or as needing to rely on, and hence reinvent, technology to deal with con­temporary situations, the starting point is the realization that the environmental crisis is a design crisis and that ­humans need to change their practices radically to avert it.²⁵ ­There are a number of shared notions, notably the belief that ecological sustainability goes well beyond economic sustainability, ultimately requiring a significantly new culture. Living-­systems theory is seen by many as the basis for design competence for conservation, regeneration, and stewardship; ­these goals involve seeding all socionatural systems with diversity and creating resilience through intelligent webs, building on the self-­organizing potential of natu­ral and social systems. ­Going against the expert-­driven dominance of design, some ecological theorists argue for “a deeply participatory pro­cess in which technical disciplinary languages and barriers are exchanged for a shared understanding of the design prob­lem. Ecological design changes the old rules about what counts for knowledge and who counts as a knower. It suggests that sustainability is a cultural pro­cess rather than an expert one, and that we should all acquire a basic competence in the shaping of our world…F or too long we have expected the design professions to bend an inert world into shape. The alternative is to try to ­gently catalyze the self-­designing potentialities of nature” (van der Ryn and Cowan 1996, 147, 130). In this framework, “solutions grow from place,” and cultivating design intelligence becomes a key aspect of democracy based on locality. This marriage of ecology and direct democracy manifests itself best in bioregionalism but also in the redesign of cities to foster forms of ­human habitation through which people can relocalize a range of activities in place and community, integrated with the environment.²⁶ Some envision a “design pro­cess where mutualism is extended from locality to locality across continents” (Hester 2006, 61). While all this might sound a bit utopian and lacking in self-­critique, a valuable feature is that ­these frameworks are accompanied by concrete examples of re/design embodying ecological design principles. At their best, they acknowledge that unsustainability springs from the cultural structure of modernity itself (Ehrenfeld 2009, 7, 210); modern solutions in the form of so-­called sustainable development and the green economy will not do. John Ehrenfeld’s ontological design approach leads him to conclude that sustainability ­will be brought about only if “a cultural upheaval” takes place (211). For many ethnoterritorial social movements, sustainability involves the defense of an entire way of life, a mode of beingknowingd­oing. ­These are among the most impor­tant contributions to the network of recurrent conversations arising in response to the ecological crisis and attempts to redress it.

Critical Design Studies and Speculative Design

Critical design studies must embrace, at its best, the vital normative questions of the day, and they should do so from out-­of-­the-­box perspectives. This type of inquiry can be found in instances of engaged research at the interface between design and activism, or where modern designs seem to break down or become inoperative. Feminist disability scholars (e.g., Hartblay 2017) are reframing the concept of universal design (a sort of barrier-­free design for individual accessibility) in both collective and relational terms. T­hese scholars argue for participatory, bottom-up, situated design methods that build on a close examination of the interrelations between differently abled bodies and design outcomes. Thus reinterpreted, the idea of diverse bodies becomes a stimulating epistemic and material-­discursive basis for design practice. By constructing ableism as an ontological issue, they suggest, designers might arrive at a materialist ontology that is mindful of the relationality that necessarily brings together bodies, spaces, environments, tools, and so forth. For this to happen, however, a nonableist ethnography of in/accessibility is required (e.g., of ramps, buildings, and living spaces), one that reveals the meanings and practices of disability and its accompanying designs.²⁷ In another revealing study, an ecological concern with the wastefulness of modern toilets leads the author to unconceal a veritable domestic culture of shit, steeped in modernist understandings of the body, waste, cleanliness, and so forth, calling for significant ecological-­ontological redesign (Dimpfl 2011). ­These examples can be said to be situated within the critical cultural studies of design; they engage the speculative design imagination in ways that may lead to a significant reconstruction of cultural and material practices.

After this purposeful review, can a field of critical design studies be said to be emerging? By critical I mean, following academic usage, the application of a panoply of critical theories to design (from Marxist and post-­Marxist politi­cal economy to feminist, queer, and critical race theory, poststructuralism, phenomenology, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and the most current postconstructivist and neomaterialist frameworks). Adopting this criterion, one could say that a critical design studies field is indeed emerging. Several caveats are in order. First, as should be clear, the ele­ments and contours of the field are far from being restricted to the acad­emy; many of its main contributions stem from design thinking and activism, even if often in some relation with the acade­my. Second, despite t­hese thought-­provoking ideas, it is not far-­fetched to suggest that such a field is still nascent. Not only is t­here still a dearth of critical analyses of the relation between design practice and capitalism, gender, race, development, and modernity, but the limits of Western social theory’s ability to generate the questions, let alone answers, needed to face the unpre­ce­dented unraveling of modern and most other forms of h­uman life on the planet at pres­ent are becoming patently clear (at least to this author). Third, the relations among design, politics, power, and culture still needs to be fleshed out.

Design and Politics

We ­will end this chapter with a preliminary discussion of design and politics. Is design at pres­ent inextricably tied to capitalism and a liberal conception of politics?²⁸ Conversely, can design be infused with a more explicit sense of politics, even a radical politics? We already mentioned in passing the socialist orientation of some design pioneers during the heyday of modernism. Climate change is, of course, pushing a wide sector of the design profession ­toward ecological forms of design consciousness. Humanitarian crises are creating unpre­ce­dented spaces where cap­it­al­ist production and liberal politics no longer work, or at least not entirely, and designers are finding an unusual niche t­here. Some ecologically minded architects and urbanists are thinking deeply about the relations among design, Earth, and democracy. By giving up expert control over ser­vice design in the nongovernmental organ­izations and the public sector, designers, it can be argued, are exercising a kind of epistemic politics. ­These are instances in which more explicit connections between design and politics are being tried out. But the vexing question of the relation between design and the making of deeply unequal, insensitive, and destructive social ­orders seems to remain design’s own “wicked prob­lem.”

This is beginning to change. Con­temporary Scandinavian design has been more successful at pairing social democ­ratic goals and design, for instance, as superbly analyzed in Ehn, Nilsson, and Topgaard (2014a) and by Keith Murphy (2015) for the Swedish case. Their exploration of the relation between design and innovation contains a much-­needed critique of the elitist notions of culture industries and creative classes, which de facto reduce innovation to a ­matter of expertise at the ser­vice of capital. “­There is a genuine call for innovation through user-­centered design, and even a belief that innovation is getting demo­cratized,” Ehn, Nilsson, and Topgaard claim. “At the same time, inventive as it may seem, the new paradigm is surprisingly traditional and managerial,” that is, oriented ­toward markets and profits (2014b, 3). Fostering a dif­fer­ent conception of innovation, for t­hese authors, demands assiduous and committed work with marginalized publics, adapting design methods such as makerspaces, fabrication labs (fab labs), and friendly hacking while exposing the class basis of the professionals and positioning the knowledge and experience of the subordinated groups as legitimate. This is a constructive call to take into account in relation to all the tendencies discussed in this chapter.

Carl DiSalvo’s (2012) framework of adversarial design makes a cogent case for approaches that broach explic­itly the agonistic connection among design, technology, democracy, policy, and society. T­hese are impor­tant steps. Further inroads into the design-p­olitics relation are being made, as we shall see, in the fields of transition design and design for social innovation. The class and race character of design has barely begun to be tackled, for instance, by Damian White (2015) and Elizabeth Chin (2017). As Chin unequivovally states, ­there are few social spaces more unrelentingly white than the art and design studio. For her, this unreflective whiteness in design territories is unable to excavate the racist and sexist ideologies embedded in Bauhaus-­derived aesthetics that constitute good design for many (2). Radicalizing design politics ­will require dealing openly with t­hese issues, situating design squarely in relation to inequality, racism, sexism, and colonialism. It ­will also imply moving at the edges of the Western social theory episteme, beyond the rationalistic, logocentric, and dualist traditions of modern theory. The rest of this book is in many ways devoted to substantiating this latter proposition. At some point we’ll get back to the questions with which we started: Which “design”? What “world”? What “real”? But this ­will come ­after a par­tic­u­lar problematization of our ways of thinking about, and enacting, “world” and “real.” That will be the basis for an ontological approach to design.

To sum up: impor­tant tendencies have emerged in the design world over the past de­cade, aiming to re­orient design practice from its traditional meaning as linked to objects, technological change, the individual, and the market and carried out by experienced experts, t­oward a conception of design as user centered, situated, interactive, collaborative, and participatory, focused significantly on the production of ­human experience and life itself. It is fair to say, however, that taken as a ­whole the U.S. variants of ­these changes—m­ost aptly summarized in the concept of design thinking—are less critical in their analy­sis of politics, governmentality, power, and capital than some of their Eu­ro­pean counter­parts. We ­will arrive at the perspectives from the Global South only in the last two chapters and the conclusion.

Brenda Laurel, whose work over the de­cades constitutes a critical cultural studies of design, has provided an imaginary for furthering the dissenting imagination within design that is apt for concluding this first chapter: “New paradigms continue to be explored by p­eople who poke at the edges; the public responds by reframing hopes and expectations; and the character of a new medium begins to emerge. The pro­cess of maturation in new media requires creativity, time, investment, optimism” (2001, 8). Transition and autonomous design proposals are “poking at the edges” of cap­i­tal­ist modernity’s onto-­epistemic formation and may thus be considered an integral part of the cds (Critical Studies of Design) field.

Notes

Epigraphs: Mau and the Institute without Bound­aries, Massive Change (2004), 23; T. Brown, Change by Design (2009), 3; Manzini, Design, When Every­body Designs (2015), 1, 31.