SoD26 & FoD26: Two Paths, One Conversation

Each year, we host a community project, called The State of Design, to take the pulse of our discipline.

Reflecting on the last two years of State of Design (SoD), we realized something critical: our conversations often get caught in a tension between what is (the messy reality of our industry) and what could be (the systemic shifts we hope for). When we try to do both at once, we often dilute the power of the critique or the boldness of the vision.

Therefore, we are opening two separate calls for participation:

1. The State of Design (SoD26): If you want to analyze, critique, or discuss the current state of the design industry, this track is for you. Contributions will be compiled into our SoD26 collection.
2. The Future of Design (FoD26): If you prefer to experiment and build prototypes that speculate on the future of design, join this track. Contributions will form our FoD26 inventory.

We cannot build a meaningful future if we ignore the broken parts of the present. Conversely, we cannot fix the present if we don’t know where we’re trying to go. By separating these “faces of the coin,” we give ourselves permission to be deeply critical in one space and wildly imaginative in the other.

How to Join

You can register for the track that suits you best — or tackle both! The project concludes in late February with a live convergence session where participants from both tracks will come together to share insights with the community.

Join Track 1: The State of Design (SoD26)

Join Track 2: The Future of Design (FoD26)
Continue reading or register here:

Register to participate — FoD26

If the State of Design 2026 (SoD26, The Anchor) is about debugging our broken present, then The Future of Design 2026 (FoD26, The Sail) is about compiling the code for what comes next.

We are not interested in trend reports, “Top 10 Tools” lists, or linear extrapolations of today’s tech. We are looking for discontinuities. We are looking for the “weak signals” — the glitches in the present reality that hint at a completely new operating system for our world.

This year, we are doing something different. We have intercepted a signal.

The Experiment: A Leak from 2061

The community has just intercepted a corrupted data stream originating from a probable future timeline. It speaks of a world where design is no longer about “users” and “products,” but about entanglements, rituals, and inter-species governance.

To frame this year’s experimentation track, we have built a Temporal Signal Beacon. It is a research probe disguised as a CLI terminal. It allows you to intercept “Shards” and “Map Fragments” of information from unstable future timelines, synthesize them, and map the topology of a future we haven’t built yet.

Launch The Signal Beacon

Important: The Beacon is not a “product.” It is not a utility tool. It is not a polished app designed to “solve” your creative block. It is a narrative experiment. It is a digital toy. It is a research probe disguised as a CLI terminal, built to be played with, broken, and experienced.

The Themes: Weak Signals

We are asking you to explore three specific “frequencies” that keep appearing in the data stream. These are not predictions; they are prompts for prototyping.

1. Synthetic Realities & The New Materialism

The signal suggests:

“Design is not just objects; it is embodied philosophy.”

As the line between the organic and the synthetic dissolves, how do we design for “Bio-Synthetic” convergence? When algorithms have agency and objects have memory, the role of the designer shifts from “creator” to “gardener.”

• The Prompt: Prototype an object that grows, dies, or refuses to function when treated unethically. Design a “Data Ritual” for a synthetic intelligence.

2. More-than-Human Governance

The signal suggests:

“Rivers and forests now have legal personhood and a vote in the Design Senate.”

We have hit the limits of human-centered design. The next paradigm is Planetary. How do we build interfaces that allow non-human actors (forests, AIs, future generations) to participate in decision-making?

• The Prompt: Create a “Voting Interface” for a river. Draft a constitution for a cooperative owned by the software itself.

3. Post-Efficiency & The Slow Web

The signal suggests:

“Efficiency is no longer the goal. Friction is the feature.”

In a world of instant generation, “slowness” becomes a luxury asset. The future points toward “Slow Materials” and interfaces that resist doom-scrolling by having digital “mass.”

• The Prompt: Design a social network that forces you to wait. Create a “Haptic Ethics” framework where difficult choices require physical effort to execute.

Register to participate — FoD26

How to Participate

Unlike the State of Design track, which seeks written essays, this track seeks artifacts, prototypes, speculative Design, and Design fictions.

The Process: “Mine, Synthesize, Create”

We encourage you to use the Signal Beacon as your starting point.

1. Intercept: Use the Signal Beacon to scan for “Shards” and “Map Fragments.”
2. Synthesize: Use the tool’s “Merge” feature to combine two discordant ideas into a “Master Shard” (e.g., combining Algorithmic Governance with Ritual Design).
3. Prototyping: Take the resulting “Master Shard” and treat it as a design brief. Build the thing it describes.

Launch The Signal Beacon

Submission Formats

We are looking for contributions in the following formats:

• Visual Artifacts: High-fidelity renders of impossible/unstable/undecided objects from 2061.
• Diegetic Prototypes: A user manual or an interactive prototype for a device, object, process that doesn’t exist yet.
• Speculative Maps: Cartographies of future data-landscapes (inspired by the Beacon’s vector maps).
• Other Artifacts of possible futures are allowed. Be creative. Be unconventional. We are looking for discontinuities.

Also, you can export shards and fragments

“Master Shard” Exports: The direct output image from the Signal Beacon tool, accompanied by a 300-word commentary on what this future implies.

Timeline & Selection

• Open Call: Now until February 13th, 2026 🎯 (register using the button below).
• Submission deadline: February 20th, 2026 📆.
• The Sprint:
• During the week of February 23rd to February 27th, submitted work will be published here, on the community website.
• On February 27th, will hold a community live event (online, TBD) to celebrate and discuss both tracks (SoD26 and FoD26) collections.

Register to participate — FoD26

A Note on the “Glitch”

You may notice the Signal Beacon is unstable. It requires “Data Allocation Tokens” (DAT) to operate. It will force you to manage memory. It might crash. This is intentional. We cannot design the future if we expect everything to be frictionless.

Last word; future possibilities.

The beacon allows you to:

• Retrieve shards and map fragments, and store them automatically into the archive inventory;
• You find some hidden and secret information of your captured shards and fragments in the archive (or by clicking the “[ SHARD DETAILS ]” button).
• The archive enables you to merge shards and fragments to create master shards.

Also, you can customize some settings.

Also, also, don’t hesitate to play with the interface. There are some easter eggs hidden 😉.

Start Your Scan Sequence Here

“We are not a single voice. We are a chorus of possible futures.”

Join Track I:

Call for Participation: The State of Design 2026 // SoD26

Thanks for reading!

Kevin from Design & Critical Thinking.

Call for Participation: The Future of Design 2026 // FoD26 was originally published in Design & Critical Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

SoD26 & FoD26: Two Paths, One Conversation

Each year, we host a community project, called The State of Design, to take the pulse of our discipline.

Reflecting on the last two years of State of Design (SoD), we realized something critical: our conversations often get caught in a tension between what is (the messy reality of our industry) and what could be (the systemic shifts we hope for). When we try to do both at once, we often dilute the power of the critique or the boldness of the vision.

Therefore, we are opening two separate calls for participation:

1. The State of Design (SoD26): If you want to analyze, critique, or discuss the current state of the design industry, this track is for you. Contributions will be compiled into our SoD26 collection.
2. The Future of Design (FoD26): If you prefer to experiment and build prototypes that speculate on the future of design, join this track. Contributions will form our FoD26 inventory.

We cannot build a meaningful future if we ignore the broken parts of the present. Conversely, we cannot fix the present if we don’t know where we’re trying to go. By separating these “faces of the coin,” we give ourselves permission to be deeply critical in one space and wildly imaginative in the other.

How to Join

You can register for the track that suits you best — or tackle both! The project concludes in late February with a live convergence session where participants from both tracks will come together to share insights with the community.

Join Track 1: The State of Design (SoD26)
Continue reading or register here: Register to participate — SoD26

Join Track 2: The Future of Design (FoD26)

If The Future of Design 2026 (FoD26, The Sail) is about catching the winds of change, then The State of Design 2026 (SoD26) is about acknowledging the weight that holds us back. We call this The Anchor.

In previous years, we have explored the fear of irrelevance and the topography of our narratives. This year, we are turning off the “reality distortion field.” We are not interested in your polished case studies, your “happy path” user journeys, or your “5 Steps to Innovation” lists.

We want the bug reports. We want the friction. We want the “Incident Logs” of a profession in crisis.

The Narrative: Debugging the Present

We cannot build a meaningful future if we ignore the broken parts of the present. Conversely, we cannot fix the present if we refuse to look at the “messy reality” of our industry — the commoditization of craft, the ethical debt we are accruing with AI, and the operational walls we hit every single day.

This track is the System Diagnostic. It is introspective, critical, and raw. It asks us to look at the machinery of Design as it exists now, identify the error codes, the instabilities, the pipeline flows and failures, and document them with radical honesty.

The Themes: Error Logs

We are inviting you to submit written essays (1,000–2,000 words) that act as “Diagnostic Reports” on three critical system failures:

1. The Decay of Craft (Error 404: Soul Not Found)

The system status:

“Optimization is running at 100%. Quality is at 0%.”

We are witnessing the “enshittification” of digital products and the commoditization of creativity. When “good enough” becomes the global standard and generative models replace the messy process of thinking, what happens to the human element of design?

• The Question: Is craft dead, or has it just gone underground? How do we design for quality in an economy that only rewards speed?

2. The Automation of Thought (Warning: Deprecated Dependency)

The system status:

“Agency outsourced to algorithm.”

We are not just automating pixels; we are automating decisions. As we hand over more of the “why” to opaque models, we risk creating a generation of designers who are merely operators of machines they do not understand.

• The Question: What is the “Ethical Debt” we are accruing by deploying AI without guardrails? What happens when the tool starts shaping the hand?

3. The Operational Wall (Critical Failure: Access Denied)

The system status:

“The seat at the table is broken.”

For decades, we fought for a “seat at the table.” Now that we’re there, we find the table is gridlocked by bureaucracy, quarterly metrics, and short-termism. The “Bureaucrat” wins every time.

• The Question: Why are we still hitting the same operational walls? Who is still missing from the room, and why haven’t our “inclusive” processes fixed it?

Register to participate — SoD26

How to Participate

Unlike the Future of Design track, which seeks artifacts and prototypes, this track seeks clarity through writing.

The Format: “Incident Reports”

We are looking for:

• Critical Essays: Deep dives into the structural issues of Design as an industry, a profession, a community, a culture, and a life style.
• Confessionals: Personal accounts of ethical dilemmas or professional failures (anonymity supported if requested).
• “Legacy Code” Audits: Arguments for practices we need to “deprecate” (delete) immediately (e.g., the free pitch, dark patterns, the MVP-trap).

Timeline & Process

• Open Call: Now until February 13th, 2026.
• Review: Essays will be reviewed for depth and clarity.
• Publication: Selected essays will be published as the “State of Design 2026” collection in late February.
• The Event: Authors will be invited to discuss their “Bug Reports” during the State of Design live session (The Anchor Track), serving as the reality check before we pivot to the future.

Submit Your Diagnostic

To submit your proposal or draft, please use the secure channel below. Do not sugarcoat the data. The system can take it.

Register to participate — SoD26

“We can’t fix the present if we don’t know where we’re trying to go. But we can’t go anywhere if we don’t first weigh the anchor.”

Join Track II:

Call for Participation: The Future of Design 2026 // FoD26

Thanks for reading!

Kevin from Design & Critical Thinking.

Call for Participation: The State of Design 2026 // SoD26 was originally published in Design & Critical Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi, Kevin here.

With 2026 just around the corner, I thought it would be good to do a little retrospective of what happened this year, here at D&CT.

This piece is a retrospective of the work we’ve done this year at Design & Critical Thinking, a community for curious explorers and critical thinkers. While I repost selected essays here on Medium, the real conversation — and the full depth of our “sense-making rituals” — happens over on our main website. Join us there to support independent design writing and never miss a post.

1. State of Design 2025: A collection of perspectives on the state of design

We opened up the year with our call for participation in our collective sense-making ritual, the State of Design (SoD). Between January and February, participants could submit their essays, which would then be published over a week-long event, closed by a live session.

Call for participation: State of design 2025

If 2024 marked an overabundance of (misguided) promises around AI and its impact on design (and designers), 2025 was marked by the need to reclaim agency, for catharsis and hope.

This turning point was highlighted in SoD25 themes:

1. Topographical understanding of designerly narratives
2. United like sand. Defined by differences
3. Catharsis and Hope

We were glad and humbled to see how many of you participated and the level of dedication and quality of the work! Among 17 participants, 7 contributions were published. Read them all here:

State of Design 2025 - All contributions

2. Design beyond enclosures, part 1: Trioptic design as a mode of being

In my participation in the State of Design, I was interested in exploring why the current design practices (and practitioners) are limited in the kind of impact they can bring to the world and how to go beyond these limitations.

One important aspect is the gap between most design processes ambitions and expected impacts (improve people’s lives, make meaningful technological solutions, no destruction of our world, etc.) and the means to get there — all of them involve a layered understanding of our collective social and societal experiences, while most of design is stuck in the wreck of consumer pop (pseudo) psychology of the fantasmagoric rational individual.

More Than Tools, More Than Humans: Rethinking How Design Actively Shapes the World, by Kevin Richard

I believe this call, to bring a more social design, is more relevant than ever, but I recognize it is only a layer of the rich topography of a landscape.

That’s precisely why I explored and articulated the trioptic design approach, which aims at understanding three dimensions (trio, optic) of a landscape: the social, the political, and the aesthetic.

• The social make sense of the worldviews in a landscape;
• The aesthetic articulates the mediums;
• The political enacts an intent about the future.

Community update: New channel, exploring the trioptic design, and thoughts on the challenges of designing for AI

3. Design beyond enclosures, part 2: Making Under Finitude

In the spirit of the two last explorations — social design and then the trioptic design — I was interested in going beyond the surface of our current societal narratives. One thing I’m certain of is that the discourses around AI, the economy, politics and policies are not only influencing each other, but also part of the same narrative object.

I stumbled upon the work of a French collective, STUP.MEDIA, which did an excellent job showing the vectors of change in the economic landscape, building from French economist Arnaud Orain.

Making Under Finitude: Designing Interactions That Resist Enclosure

I was interested in understanding what these changing dynamics would mean for design and designers in the future, building plausible change in relationships.

On a side note, I hoped to do a better job at applying the trioptic design in a prospective setup, and by that I mean being more precise and more in-depth in each dimension — some of them are somewhat lacking. Anyway, I’m pretty happy with this piece.

4. A return to Deleuzian philosophy for designers: desires rather than needs, body without organs, and manufactured truth

Since September, I’ve been coming back to interesting and relevant concepts from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. I’ve been discovering and rediscovering his ideas over the past several years, which have been a very profound influence on me — probably as important as F. Valera and H. Maturana’s work and the early contextualist/enactivist movement to me.

Why “User Needs” Mislead

User needs. Hard not to talk about them; it’s hard not to use this term. Although they are ubiquitous in modern design practice, systematically positioned as a neutral and objective framing of what people truly and observably want to achieve, they are anything but.

Designing with Desire

In this piece I explore how Deleuze idea of “crystallization of desires” might be a better, more nuanced approach to understanding what and why people do what they do.

Desires proliferate, split, and recombine. They are transversal, cutting across domains of life and refusing to respect disciplinary boundaries.

I combine this with the concept of “power as productive machine” from Foucault, another French philosopher, to show that what and how designers decide to focus on actually shape these desires.

When we adopt the language of user needs uncritically, we are not just responding to reality; we are participating in the production of that reality.

Monism and the End of Identity

We talked about enclosure in several pieces this year. One defining factor of enclosures is that they tend to create fixed and very well-defined objects — preformed identities that fit into predefined categories.

“A chair is meant to be sat on.”

The object embodies a preformed identity, and with it expectations that shape desires in a way that thinking about something to be sat on leads to the object.

The Designer Without Organs: Monism and the End of Identity

Here I wanted to explore a very interesting but difficult-to-grasp idea developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their seminal work “A Thousand Plateaus,” the notion of “body without organs.” This idea subverts the notion of a fixed identity and proposes to build “systems of becoming,” letting people shape the object depending on context.

I also introduce the philosophical paradigm of Monism, necessary to understand Deleuze’s work.

Manufactured truth: Design as crystallized shards

Lastly, in this short update I wanted to explore the relationship between design, the truth, and the real. This led to the idea that the truth — and, to an extent, what we consider to be real — is a fabrication process.

If design creates material, virtual, or philosophical objects meant to be interacted with, then yes, design produces truths. These objects become true to the people who use them.
[…]
If we accept that design produces truth, it implies there is no higher “morally right” or “absolutely real” truth in this context. Instead, truth is a fabrication process: it is manufactured.

Design as Snowflakes and Shards of Truth

Conclusion

Each exploration links back at least to one of the themes of our 2025 State of Design (SoD25):

• The concept of gaining a “topographical understanding” with the notion of social design and the trioptic design as a mode of being.
• We came back to the notion of identity formation through differences and even explored unconventional approaches (differences).
• We burnt it all, in essays like “Making under finitude,” “Designing with desires,” and “Body without Organs,” not by fear of what might come but as a means of reclaiming agency and hope.

We created a burning place for what we hold true. Truth is an ever-becoming, immanent process. We build hope through the reclaiming of agency.

We wish you all the best for 2026. Stay curious explorers, critical thinkers, and design makers.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin from Design & Critical Thinking.

2025 Retrospective: Reclaiming Agency and Designing Beyond Enclosures was originally published in Design & Critical Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi, Kevin here.

I find very interesting, in many ways, the current atmosphere in (our?) society. And I’m not only thinking of the overrepresented discussions around artificial intelligence. In my informed view, AI is not (just) a technical “innovation” or “revolution” proposition anymore (if any), but a socio-political proposition that fits a broader transition, motivated by social and geopolitical dynamics, but also climate change.

What I would like to explore here are some vectors of this broader landscape. I recently came across a very interesting thesis that, conversely, fits other relevant signals: that our global economic system, namely liberal capitalism, is transitioning towards something different as a regime.

How is this useful to design, one might ask?

I’ll come back to this later, but to keep it short, design operates mainly (not only) within the confines of what is perceived as “good,” “desirable,” and “valuable.” And we can see how this change, which has already taken form, is shaping design practices and designers’ own perception of what and how they are doing design.

From liberal to mercantile capitalism

This section draws heavily from the French collective Stup.media’s work. If you can, I invite you to look at their very well articulated post.

Our economy isn’t a monolithic and immutable thing, but rather a dynamic and evolving system. Arnaud Orain, a French economist and historian who recently published “Le monde confisqué: Essai sur le capitalisme de la finitude (XVIᵉ — XXIᵉ siècle)” (“The Confiscated World: Essay on the Capitalism of Finitude (16th — 21st Century)”), proposes that we are heading toward more than just an iteration of our current neoliberal capitalism. His thesis, which corroborates many vectors of change observed by other economists, is that the very rules of the game are changing: we are moving away from a liberal capitalism to what Orain calls “Capitalism of the Finitude.”

To understand its significance, we have to come back to the main characteristics that constitute the system we have experienced since the end of industrialization: liberal capitalism.

STUP.MEDIA - La fin du libéralisme ? Entretien avec Arnaud Orain

As the Arnaud Gantier, who interviewed Arnaud Orain, explains:

“[Under liberal capitalism] parties of the left and right that take power share quite a few values: market economy, competition, free trade, and facilitating access to private property. The main economic disagreement that remains [between the left and the right] is defining a more or less important role for the state in the economy. To illustrate this, the opposition is between social programs — for example, housing allowances or building social housing — or tax breaks for construction. This is the type of opposition that has dominated economic debates in Western countries since at least 1945.”

But what Orain points out is that before that period of time, our world was governed by a capitalism that was not liberal, which did not care about competition, free trade, or individual freedoms. Because in an imparialist and expansionist world, the purpose of capitalism was to enable states to be more powerful than their neighbors. And we see today many superpowers moving towards a more explicit form of imparial powers.

“Obviously we see this with Russia. China’s New Silk Roads also have this dimension, with the construction or rehabilitation of infrastructure. There are actors, for example in Pakistan, who consider the port of Gwadar to be a new East India Company, a new form of colonization being put in place by Chinese firms. We are obviously thinking of the United States of America, with desires for acquisition or protectorate over Greenland, and the Panama Canal returning to the U.S. sphere. That is just one sign. But there are many others, notably all the limits to the freedom of trade at sea, which is a truly central idea because almost everything we consume daily is transported over thousands of kilometers across the oceans.”

But why talk about mercantile capitalism then? The interesting part that Gantier highlights is the role of merchants and traders in the history of capitalism, but overall in the history of societies and their politics — better exemplified nowadays by the influence of billionaires on governments.

“[In the 17th and 18th centuries] the planters were the farmers in the French colonies who used enslaved labor to produce sugarcane, […] were powerful, armed, and sold highly valued products. But in reality the ones who controlled this economy were not the planters themselves, but the merchants and traders, who were indispensable for transporting both enslaved people and sugar. They could choose which planter or producer would be able to sell their goods and thus become rich. So they held the power.”

Interestingly, the history of our liberal period, which sees merchants and companies as peaceful organizations, trade as a way to avoid wars, and capitalism as a way to enrich workers, does not provide the necessary model to understand the effects that these merchants and their companies have, whether the emancipation of workers they can sometimes allow or, on the contrary, their central role in colonization and slavery.

“This view of history is too partial and is fundamentally contradicted by the present. We can start with the most radical examples, like private military companies. For example, the American firm Constellis, formerly Blackwater, or the Wagner militia, which have grown in importance in recent years. What they do is employ soldiers under contract. They are private armies, and in the last ten years they have been deployed all over the world, whether in Iraq, Yemen, Israel, Mali, Ukraine, and they often leave behind crimes against humanity.

We also see this in high-intensity conflicts, for example in Ukraine, which reminds us that wars are won in factories, that is, by companies. It is no coincidence that GDP was invented during World War II. It was an indicator to measure production capacity. Who can produce the most missiles, tanks, fuel, food, clothing, shoes. So controlling industrial capacities, controlling companies, merchants, traders, this entire world, is not an abstract question. It is a major power issue.”

What’s changing might be better encapsulated in the notion of company-state: companies that are both merchants and possess sovereign powers. This was true of many companies back in the 17th and 18th centuries, who could buy and sell things, mint money, administer justice, and raise armies, and it is becoming more apparent that, today, many companies are in such a position. These companies are sometimes aligned with the public power, and sometimes in competition with it. For these reasons, big modern merchants depend less on free trade than others, and we see this clearly in their media.

In an adjacent case, I find interesting the recent takeover by a techno-corporate power of the digital open-source community, marking here again the decline of liberal ideals, and the colonization and exploitation of yet another form of territory.

GitHub's Fall: Microsoft's AI Takeover, Developer Betrayal, and the Next Fight for Digital Sovereignty

Another interesting change is that, for long, liberal capitalism worked mainly on the idea of seduction and promises of improved living conditions. Mercantile capitalism does not bother with promises of enrichment for all in order to expand.

“What Orain is saying here is simply that for socialists, the more violent capitalism becomes, the less it relies on seduction to expand, and the easier it becomes to present socialism as a positive idea.

Today many [French] people think they can improve their living conditions outside union struggles. For them unionism is even hidering the improvement of their personal situation. But that can change quickly.

In a mercantilist capitalism where companies are increasingly monopolistic, the workforce has no real alternatives. There is not one employer really better than another when there are very few. In each sector you do not have a choice among a dozen companies. It is either one or the other. They probably talk to each other and align their working conditions. In such conditions, unionism and socialism appear as logical choices to improve one’s condition.”

Finally, Arnaud Gantier concludes with some very interesting points.

First, we should acknowledge the death of neoliberalism. Many still operate on obsolete ideas of a neoliberal world declining, among which are most traditional political parties. Ideas that are no longer promoted by the parties we see rising in the polls (in Europe). For instance, many far-right parties rising in popularity are in fact mercantilist, notably because they display ideas of labor exploitation, and they consider the grandeur of the nation to come before the rights of those who live and work there. This model of capitalism no longer rests on the existence of a large middle-class and social policies.

Second, the role of the most visible representatives of these neo-mercantile companies, the billionaires, is a consequence of actors no longer bound by the same rules. They all own media, and their political actions go far beyond humanitarian actions, making them obvious political enemies. Here, neo-mercantilism describes a capitalism, that is, private ownership of the means of production dominated by merchants, and with it the decline in influence of the traditional economist-intellectuals that marked neoliberalism.

Finally, climate change plays an important role in this economic transition by adding a compounding factor in precipitating this neo-mercantilism, by adding social and resource pressures –hence the term “capitalism of the finitude” coined by Arnaud Orain.

So, in summary, Orain’s thesis can be summed up as such: Liberal capitalism is giving way to a neo-mercantilist “capitalism of finitude” where state power, monopolies, logistics chokepoints, and “company-states” dominate, and allegiance becomes a central political problem.

This transition is marked by key signals/components:

1. Re-imperialization of great powers and growing limits to “freedom of the seas.”
2. Merchants as political actors, historically and today, via debt, logistics control, and media ownership.
3. Militarization of enterprise, including PMCs; war as industrial capacity.
4. Shipping giants under state pressure and possible self-militarization.
5. Allegiance problem of multinationals through opaque corporate architectures.
6. Company-states in tech with sovereign attributes (space, satellite, platforms).
7. Divergent capitalist blocs: exporters of branded goods prefer free trade; defense/logistics fit mercantilism; media lines mirror owners.
8. Return of monopoly capitalism, making nationalization and unionization logically salient again.
9. China’s model of national champions and enforced corporate allegiance, with systemic fragilities.
10. Political realignment in Europe: neoliberalism fades; the far right is mercantilist rather than liberal; the left’s anti-billionaire stance gains traction.

This is great and all, but why should designers care?

Well, modern design practices have been mainly in service of a liberal capitalism. The modern idea of liberal arts and applied arts, which gave birth to most current Western (globalized) design movements, and the history of neoliberalism and its means of production have always been tightly coupled. When Dieter Rams talks about “good design,” he does it in a neoliberal globalized worldview, built on the shoulders of prior movements such as Bauhaus. That’s actually one of the main criticisms of Viktor Papanek.

Today’s UX/CX, product, and service design are predicated on the rules of a liberal regime. What is defined as “good design” and the means through which it is valued (e.g., customer satisfaction, conversion rate, user’s autonomy and consent, etc.) and operated will likely become obsolete as the system’s conditions mutate.

If capitalism is indeed pivoting from a liberal, competition-led order to a mercantile one organized around state (firm blocs, choke-points, and extraction), then digital design’s mandate and its yardsticks shift with it:

1. Value theory: Liberal UX treated people as choosing users; the mercantile turn will likely treat them as managed subjects inside vertical stacks (identity, payments, logistics, compute). “Good” becomes what secures allegiance, reduces contestation, and locks channels.
2. The real client: Expect more briefs from hybrids of state and “gatekeeper” firms. “Good design” will likely be redefined in law, not just taste.
3. Metrics mutate: The center of gravity will likely move from conversion and NPS to contestability, compliance, and provenance.

If you think this connects well with the notion of enshittification and techno-feudalism, this is no accident.

Anyway, if the debate nowadays revolves mainly around the impacts AI has/will have on liberal professions (such as artists and designers), we might be very well myopic to the very context in which this is unfolding.

The error of many designers is to treat it as yet another technical or alignment challenge to solve (supposedly between user needs and a technical system), while failing to recognize that AI is not just another technology, it is a catalyst to unfold certain political ideals, which in turn unfold a certain aesthetic (see trioptic design).

Community update: New channel, exploring the trioptic design, and thoughts on the challenges of designing for AI

Finitude, violence, AI, and fascism

I would like now to connect what we just explored with another highly compatible thesis: the idea that Platform capitalism (that is, a capitalism dominated by digital platforms, themselves owned by merchants) enabled a new form of fascism, what Bertram Gross calls “Friendly Fascism”.

Platform capitalism already happened, and likely enabled the transition we see towards neo-mercantilism, as platform ownership reorganizes power: labor is “platformized,” markets become gatekept, and public rules increasingly run through “private UX” — that is, interfaces and interactions that govern quasi-public life (speech, trade, work, ID, mobility), but are designed, owned, and enforced by private companies rather than public law. See how this description fits the notion of company-states we just discussed?

In his work “The New Aesthetics of Fascism”, Ben Hoerman, who draws from B. Gross work and many others, explains how fascism has been “redesigned” for platform capitalism into a friendlier, quieter form: it advances through technocratic bureaucracy, corporate control, culture-war monetization, and AI-driven aestheticization that makes cruelty look normal, pretty, or ironic so people won’t resist it.

It highlights several key signals/components:

1. Form factor shift: from overt militarism to technocratic bureaucracy, corporate control, and manufactured media staging.
2. Culture-war governance: class conflict is displaced by culture war, algorithmically amplified; soft authoritarianism hollows institutions while the shell remains.
3. Bureaucratic violence: repression by policy stack: union-busting, surveillance, deregulation, and paperwork that punishes instead of guns.
4. Corporate neofuturism: minimal, cold, speed-obsessed tech aesthetics plus founder cults and deep ties to the military-industrial complex.
5. Eco-fascist drift of solarpunk: harmony-with-nature visuals repurposed to whitewash regimes and sell exclusionary nationalism.
6. Everything as content: politics becomes spectacle for mass consumption; “nothing is obscene anymore” normalizes the previously unthinkable.
7. Irony pipeline: edgy sarcasm and memes trivialize harm and provide a shield against critique: “just joking.”
8. AI slop and deepfakes: endless reproduction dilutes meaning; deepfakes become an oppression tool (noted as overwhelmingly pornographic in surveys).
9. Cute-wash: moe/anime aesthetics soften or trivialize violent or exclusionary messages, making “friendly” fascism literal.
10. Edgelord/incel iconography: dehumanizing caricatures and eugenic “attractiveness metrics” repackage hierarchy and cruelty.
11. Oligarchic alignment: private firms and unelected elites increasingly steer policy; corporations enable the drift so long as profits are protected.
12. Desensitization + cynicism: constant spectacle and ironic remixing create meaninglessness, eroding shame and consequences for fascist rhetoric.

Difficult to not see many convergence points with neo-mercantilism indeed. Although fascism is not an intrinsic feature of mercantile capitalism, its imperialist feature and allegiance politics (here mainly expressed through culture war as a means of control) make the perfect conditions for fascism to grow.

Also, the idea of a pervasive violence that comes with this new system is very well encapsulated in this sentence:

nothing is obscene anymore.

This new aesthetic, facilitated by AI, is about making the violence acceptable, the obscene beautiful, and the absurd funny or sarcastic. Because then, you won’t do anything about it.

Memes and AI generated images turn everything into irony, in a kind of meta-self-fulfilling realization of the now-famous illustration of a cartoon character sitting in a room on fire who tells the audience, “This is fine.” Except here the character knows they are in an illustration, as an allegory to inaction in times of crisis, but diverted and subdued from its original meaning. In a cynical way, the scene becomes, then, purely performative: it has become the very thing it was denouncing.

If climate change adds ecological, social, and economic pressure, it is turned not into a force for change (as many hoped at some point) but into another form of control — whether it is believed to be real or not isn’t even remotely the point.

Nothing escapes the cultural reappropiation of this new engine: solarpunk and Afrofuturism have been subdued and repurposed to serve ethnic exclusionism, eugenist exceptionalism, and social hierarchies. Corporate minimalism signals purity. Christian symbolism, echoing neo-Christian nationalism and fundamentalism, has replaced Nazi mysticism.

Beyond the very finitude of our world, exemplified by the effects of climate change, the system behind this aesthetic is, itself, finite. Much like the architecture of fascist regimes of the 1930s, there is an order, a hierarchy, and the intent to find perfection through its minimalist completeness (purity). It’s made to erase any sense of personality and diversity. It is huge and yet enclosed. Furthermore, it projects the grandeur of the nation while being inhuman to its visitor.

Why should designers care?

This “new” fascism does not only live in images; it lives in decisions. It lives in roadmaps, risk registers, taxonomies, policy playbooks, moderation criteria, brand charters, data schemas, model prompts, vendor contracts, and KPIs. These are design artifacts. They decide what is visible, sayable, and countable before any interface is drawn. Designers operate inside this assemblage. We convene the workshops, write the definitions, choose the thresholds, and specify the workflows that become everyday governance. Because aesthetics is the materialization of these choices under political constraint, the look is not separable from the order that produced it. The “friendly” tone is an artifact of process, not just taste.

The likely impact is a rotation of purpose. Where liberal practice prized optionality and consent, briefs will increasingly ask for stability, risk containment, and allegiance. Decision artifacts will be evaluated by their throughput and their capacity to suppress volatility. Designers will be pulled into culture-war administration: incident playbooks, trust and safety roll-ups, and “brand suitability” rules that quietly redefine who may speak and on what terms. Metrics will follow. Fewer teams will be rewarded for enabling criticism or organizing; more will be rewarded for reducing appeal rates and moving enforcement faster. The profession’s autonomy will narrow as state-platform blocs set the frame and as procurement translates political priorities into non-negotiable requirements. Aesthetic conventions will harden around this: streamlined authority, hygienic calm, the absence of trace or conflict. It will feel professional. It will also be political.

Counter-strategy begins where decisions begin. Treat every key artifact as a site of resistance. In policy and taxonomy, name harms and externalities explicitly; make provenance, ownership, funding, and edit history first-class fields. Use aesthetics to witness rather than to launder: show cost, labor, and risk at the level of the artifact.

The Trioptic design approach follows from this: socially, return people from spectatorship to participation by designing recourse and assembly into the system; aesthetically, break the spell by materializing what the order tries to hide; politically, write enforceable rights into specifications so that power meets constraints upstream.

New Space, Anti-science, and Astrocapitalism

Finally, this is the last piece of the puzzle. In this interview, Arnaud Saint-Martin, a French sociologist of sciences specializing in the space domain, discusses the notion of astrocapitalism he developed in his recent book “Les astrocapitalistes: Conquérir, coloniser, exploiter” (“Astrocapitalists: Conquer, colonize, exploit”).

Les astrocapitalistes

The reason I connect “Astrocapitalism” with our discussion is because it is the extension of platform capitalism and company-state power (mercantile capitalism) into orbital space: private mega-constellations and launch providers, aligned with national projects, enclose orbital commons, privatize gains, socialize risks, and normalize minimal regulation through seductive “New Space” visions.

Its relevant key signals/components discussed during the interview are:

• Vision work as ideology. Futures are framed as desirable and inevitable; “New Space” functions as a political project, not just tech progress.
• State ↔ firm fusion. Start-up rhetoric “transforms the state”; governments adopt the New Space lexicon and build national champions.
• Orbital enclosure & massification. Mega-constellations (e.g., Starlink) crowd orbits and frequencies; a “Fordism in space” logic scales rapidly.
• Platformization in orbit. Closed user-bases, lock-in, and sovereign constellations (Starlink/Kuiper/Guowang; EU IRIS²) mirror platform capitalism’s walled gardens.
• Regulatory minimalism. Talk of “space traffic management” often displaces stronger planning/limits; current rules leave externalities unpriced.
• Privatize gains, socialize risks. Publics carry debris, spectrum, security, and environmental burdens; firms capture rents.
• Hegemonic geopolitics. U.S. leadership is staged as “get in line” at venues like the IAC; space power is openly strategic.
• European mimicry + “sovereign cloud/space.” Large data-center and “sovereign” infrastructure pushes reveal energy/water/material loads and security theater.

Conclusion

It is important to recognize what is happening, this reorganization of power, and take a step back from narrow discussions that may give the illusion that these changes and how they unfold are about technical or alignment challenges to be solved. However, we should not focus only on the negative impacts and ramifications of this transition.

The three theses are, in fact, three angles on the same movement. Liberal competition yields to mercantile blocs that secure chokepoints and allegiance. The obscene is normalized by an aesthetic that folds cruelty into paperwork, humor, and spectacle until nothing bites. The frontier shifts upward into orbit, where platforms and states co-manage enclosure. None of this sits outside design. It is organized through design. Aesthetics is the materialization of decisions under political constraint. The message cannot be separated from the space that produced it.

There are opportunities: the transition does not only remove, it also reveals where to intervene and with whom. It reminds us that designers are makers, and makers do not have to exist only by serving someone else’s power, money, or agenda. The artifacts we make are set conditions for others; they are means for change.

There is another route that matters, and it belongs to culture. Artifacts of fascist regimes present themselves as total. They project grandeur yet are closed and finite: their power is to exhaust the imagination of difference. Designers can counter by making room for plurality by adding diversity and ambiguity on purpose, not as noise but as a practice.

The twentieth-century lesson from music and art is useful here: scenes in the seventies, eighties, and nineties grew by selecting, curating, sampling, decomposing, and recomposing. They created meaning by recombination and citation rather than by a single heroic line. Similarly, we can compose systems that are forkable, repairable, and open to local authorship. We can create patterns that permit remix, rather than forbid it, that curate dissent inside the work so that difference is not an afterthought but a condition of use.

The conclusion is not that design should save the world. It is smaller and harder. Design should accept that it already governs parts of it. If that is true, our task is to make that governance legible, contestable, and open to correction. To make alternatives when the market offers only enclosure. The future will be designed all the same: the choice is whether we design it as if people and worlds will have to live inside it, and whether we leave enough opportunities for others to participate and make it their own.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin from Design & Critical Thinking.

The future of design in a transitioning economy was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi everyone, and a (late) happy new year!

Let’s start 2025 by opening up our State of Design, once again. If last year saw the rise of the fear of becoming irrelevant, being replaced, and even working ourselves out of relevancy, this year marks another turning point in our grand narrative: accept change or leave the space altogether.

The State of UX in 2025

This new form of escapism is different from the blind techno-optimism we’ve seen in 2024, the likes of “AI is great; we must learn to work with it to stay relevant; etc.”, which was not true in that the current market conditions have little to do with AI itself (rather, AI is a consequence) and much with an overall economic slowdown, inflation and the end of “free money”, less government subventions (or lack thereof), geopolitical tensions, political instabilities, etc.

Why is the UX Job Market Such a Mess Right Now? - A Comprehensive Explanation

The themes for the State of Design 2025

👋 We are looking for members and designers alike to participate in this collection.

Through the following exploration, I’ll lay out several themes that I will sum up at the end in a series of questions, along with the conditions and rules of participation.

Last year we had 17 members who joined the call and 8 submitted contributions which went through review and made to final publication.

If you’re interested, don’t hesitate to contribute and bring your own perspective!

[Register & contribute]

1/ A topographical understanding of our narratives

Generally speaking, there is one main internal fallacy to our designerly narratives, a pattern of “seemingly automated collective reasoning” which is applied in two ways:

1. On one hand, design itself and/or designers themselves are the cause of their own predicament; reducing causality to a single or narrow set of internal factors.
2. Which helps justify, on the other hand, that design and/or designers can and must focus on X, Y, Z narrow set of internal factors to escape or solve their dire situation.

If the narratives change, they tend to gravitate around similar patterns, like strange attractors or gravity wells. Tools and frameworks, skills and crafts, predefined ways of thinking and sometimes even personality traits. “If design is fading away, you see, this is because such and such designers are missing one of these [insert arbitrary factor]” –or so it goes. And I can’t help but see a rather toxic feedback loop.

This unfortunately compounds with other toxic dynamics, which I call the apex predators of our design ecologies and permitted by the techno-capitalist space in which (most) of us find ourselves bounded to –and soon to be techno-feudalist perhaps?

But I wonder: when will the realization comes that design and designers aren’t causing their downfall, the space (and rules) we are working in do? When will the realization comes that design isn’t fading away, but the very meaning we attach to it does?

Design, like many cultural object, is composed of many intertwined formal and informal elements, be it codes and norms, practices, ways of doing, language, etc. Over time, because it is bound to a broader context that evolves, some of its informal meaning evaporates and only the formal remains.

Perhaps because the world looks like a liminal-space (now more than ever), a place we weirdly recognize but feel strange at the same time.

The Apex Predators of Design * State of Design 2025 * Next community event

2/ United like sand. Defined by differences

I’d like to present this metaphor:

Design is like sand; from afar, it seems coherent and homogenous enough to hold itself together, but once you try to hold it in your hands it elusively slips away in tiny individual heterogenous grains.

It is a counter-intuitive reality. Once dive into the many expressions of design, there appears to be no true unity between designers. What makes us “designers” and not “engineers” or anything else? What characterises us? Is it just our flimsy, inconsistent (and sometimes meaningless) job titles? Our uneven (and sometimes shaky) education? Our preconditioned behaviours? Is it the space we are working in –the tech world we find inadvertently intertwined to? Why are some reluctant to even call themselves “designer” or use “design” to describe what they do?

Most probably, these are unanswerable questions simply because they lead to costly claims about the world that can never truly encompass the very diversity design necessitates at a meta-level, a meta-diversity if you will. And I would be fine with that.

Borrowing from, Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher, who rejected identity as commonly accepted as an object and proposed instead that the self forms through differences and repetitions, thus constantly evolving and mutating as an ever-forming concept.

“I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentered centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them” — G. Deleuze

For Deleuze, repetition is inherently transgressive for humans. He identifies humour and irony as lines to avoid the “generalities of society” because they create distance from laws and norms even while re-enacting them.

We, as designers, are indeed very too often a bit too serious. We are professionals, you see. But is it all we are? Where is the alternative culture, or even counter-culture, offered by humour and irony? Where are the small rebellious acts that give back a sense of autonomy through differences and unique repetitions, rather than through escapism and delusional optimism?

3/ Sometimes, all you need is to burn it all

I find hope and catharsis to be very interesting things in this discussion. First, because they both exist in a continuum, and second, because they are active and loose processes rather than fixed objects. Catharsis helps us abandon certain things we hold dire, lifting an emotional burden so we can move forward. Hope helps build new desires and anticipation about that uncertain, changing future, allowing us to act on our own terms.

As you may know, I live in Switzerland, a small country full of contrasts and cultural diversity. Each year, during February, an interesting practice is held in my small town. The fanfare, called Guggenmusiks, beats the rhythm as the giant idol (resembling Perch fish) goes around the town. People, disguised, cheer, dance and party until, on the second day, the joyous procession reaches the fire place.

The idol is brought through, and the fanfare plays one last time, perhaps even louder as if to say goodbye, as the fire is lit. Everyone cheers the burning idol, representing all the hopes and sorrows of last year, and welcomes the gentle renewal of everything, as springs is coming and with it, new hopes arise. As the fire dies out, the carnival ends, on a cold Sunday in February.

So to conclude this exploration, I like the idea that we need a similar carnival for design, with a burning place. What are the idols, which encapsulate our deepest hopes and sorrows, that needs to be burnt away? What should be the anthem of our joyous fanfare? What hopes should spring arise?

Themes summary

1️⃣ Topographical understanding of designerly narratives ⛰️

• How do collective narratives shape perceptions of the designer’s role in their downfall?
• Are design challenges rooted in external systemic issues rather than internal faults?
• How can we redefine the meaning and purpose of design in liminal, transitional spaces?

2️⃣ United like sand. Defined by differences 🏝️

• What defines a designer in the face of diverse practices and perspectives?
• Can differences and repetitions, as proposed by Deleuze, help reshape our understanding of design?
• How can humour and irony offer counter-culture and autonomy in design?

3️⃣ Catharsis and Hope 🔥

• What practices or approaches enable designers to “burn it all” and start anew?
• How do hope and catharsis contribute to evolving and transforming design paradigms?
• What new desires and anticipations can guide us in uncertain futures?

How to participate?

Format 📝

You can write something as long in length as you want (no format restrictions), but we ask that add links to sources and references whenever possible.

Your name will be displayed in the title of your section and your profile details/links (at your discretion) at the end.

Process 📆

You have from January 21st, 12 pm CET, to February 21st, to submit your piece through a dedicated form, shared upon registration.

Each essay will be reviewed before publication, then posted separately on our website under the State of design tag, between February 24th and 28th. All essays will then be put together in a final post, as a collection, which will conclude this year’s collaboration.

👉 As a major contributor, you’ll also be invited to our “State of Design 2025” event, on the March 4th, 6 pm CET, to speak about your contribution, share your thoughts and discuss with other contributors and members of the community.

Bring your voice, register to this collaborative project
[Register & contribute]

State of Design 2025: Exploring the Future of Design Together, Tue, Mar 4, 2025, 6:00 PM | Meetup

Thanks for supporting our community projects by reading and contributing!

Kevin from Design & Critical Thinking community.

Call for participation: State of design 2025 was originally published in Design & Critical Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi everyone, Kevin here.

It’s been some time since the last post and update, sorry for that. I hope you’re all doing well despite these turbulent few months.

I’ve been a bit busy on other projects. First, a long essay on Design Sociology, New Materialism, and a proposed approach coined Social Experience Design:

Design Sociology and New Materialism philosophy

Second, some experiments with Speculative Design:

• Mindful and Emotional Interfaces: Imagining a future of human-machine interactions
• The future of Swiss health insurance in an uncertain world

Misty experiences

The view from my small Swiss town, coated in thick mist as of late, a typical occurrence in autumn, seems impassible and serene. The not-so-angular-line of the Jura mountains are no more visible in the reflection of lake Neuchâtel, but the peaceful giants remain a natural and immutable protective presence in people’s minds.

The mist blurs the lines between spaces, objects, distances and dimensions. It creates a weird sensation of depth filled with mysteries in its enveloping nature. Mist always stimulated the imagination, sometimes described as a gate to new worlds and other dimensions, sometimes it accompanies the presence of mysterious and mythological creatures, and it is thought to hide many dangers and wonders for those who dares to explore it.

It is a liminal-space that often marks the beginning of a journey or a rite of passage, a transition between the present and the extraordinary, foreshadowing the challenges the protagonists will have to face along the way.

What’s lurking in the silent mist? It can be adventure, wisdom, friendship, and more.

Narratively speaking, it can be seen as a metaphorical structure, as the mist dissipates the more the protagonists advance, fail, and grow from their experiences, and as such, making the dangers more manageable and the wonders more conquerable.

Counter intuitively, this means, as a narrative device, the mist reveals hidden-in-plain-sight truths. Sometimes subtle, sometimes crude, sometimes contradictory, but always coherent.

The world is engulfed in an always-evolving-mist that call for explorers to reveal its monsters and dangers but also its treasures and wonders. Some might call this the true expression of “progress”, as opposed to “innovation”.

Design, as a form and substance that goes beyond “tools”, is both about exploration, creation and evaluation. Creation as an act of catalysing possibilities into mediums for interactions. Evaluation is not about the medium, the object itself, but about the possibilities it enables through its interactiveness. Let’s call this loose process “Creative Exploration”.

Creative Explorations

At Design & Critical Thinking, we believe that most designers are not (always) well-equipped for this kind of creative exploration. Creative exploration is not only about tools, but first and foremost about body and mind preparation.

What the best pair of shoes can do if you never climbed a mountain ever in your life? To start with the [object], the shoe, tells nothing about the path you’ll be taking.

You need training to drill some good muscle memory: you need physical reflexes. You need to understand the terrain, its topography and the geometry of relationships, and you need to understand how you can act and affect this space: you need mental reflexes. But more on that in a future post.

Designing for Hope: Facts + Narratives + Principles

Sometimes, the mist is scary. The undistinguishable shapes that emerge from it are reminiscent of ugly monsters –really, who could tell. And the ugliest are not always the most obvious to discern: we all heard the stories of monsters taking the form of familiar faces, playing with our imperfect memories and most reactive emotions to get us lost in the mist for an eternity, in an indiscernible simulacrum of reality.

I was recently thinking about the concept of “hope”, as different from the concept of “optimism”, from a non-religious perspective.

To be optimistic is to expect certain results despite all odds.

To be hopeful is to look for signals of better potential outcomes, given all odds.

Note: they are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

In my parable, optimism would make us double-down on this simulacrum, a skewed illusion of reality, and expect something positive to come out of it anyway. Hopefulness, on the other hand, would be to acknowledge the situation as a simulacrum, and then to look for different signals for better outcomes, sidestepping the illusion.

Something I’ve seen a lot during the recent political events in the USA is this opposition between facts and narratives, as if they were immiscible, like water and oil (miscibility is the property of two substances to mix to form a homogeneous mixture).

This is a false dichotomy.

Facts alone don’t tell anything. Don’t get me wrong, facts are very important. But they are like individual pebbles on the shore of a lake. Like droplets of water in the morning mist. They compose the scene, they are not the scene.

See the metaphors used here? Would it sound the same if I had said: “They are like individual bullets in the guns. They tell you nothing about the war.” A different story.

Opposing facts to narratives is meaningless to those who don’t understand what landscape these facts are supposed to represent. Worse, facts becomes nonsensical if they are used to contradicting pre-existing “maps” of the landscape –regardless how wrong they might be.

To build hope requires facts, but it also needs narratives. Narratives that are based on purposeful principles. Narratives that draw people into seeing that the possibilities for positive outcomes exist and can be enacted in practical and experiential ways, not just in opposition to another antagonistic narrative.

Although narratives are blurry and porous by nature, allowing other narratives to coexist in a coherent way, some things are plain wrong and facts provide a sound ground to critique and carefully dismiss them.

This concept of hope proposed here is not to be thought as an object, because focusing on hope as a self-evident object only deepens a threefold gap between: 1) a harsh reality; 2) the barrier to act; and 3) a proposed future concept; making it ever more unrealistic. Rather, this idea of “hope” is akin to a scaffolding structure, emergent by nature.

Shared in the community

Here are some interesting links & thoughts shared in the community.

On hope, societies and narratives

Human Nature, Hope & Ice Cream

Futures

Futures design and distortion

The Four Types of Dystopia

School of Possibilities

“an interactive experience conceived of and designed alongside youth in Romania to imagine a more humane and impactful education system”

School of Possibilities

Solarpunk

More-than-human governance experiments in Europe

More-than-human governance experiments in Europe

Philosophy

The Reality Ouroboros — An interesting take on the connections between all fields

Nautilus: The Reality Ouroboros

Why I’m not a Bayesian

A better approach is to view Bayesianism as describing a special case of epistemology, which applies in contexts simple enough that we’ve already constructed all relevant models or hypotheses, exactly one of which is exactly true, and we just need to decide between them.

Why I'm not a Bayesian - LessWrong

The hostile telepaths problem

This is a template for what I’ve come to call “the hostile telepaths problem”. I think it’s a common feature of social problems. The hostile telepaths problem is when you’re dealing with a being (a) who can kind of read your internal experiences and (b) whom you don’t trust won’t make your situation worse due to what they find in you.

The hostile telepaths problem - LessWrong

Tech

The Cult of Microsoft

At the core of Microsoft, a three-trillion-dollar hardware and software company, lies a kind of social poison — an ill-defined, cult-like pseudo-scientific concept called ‘The Growth Mindset” that drives company decision-making in everything from how products are sold, to how your on-the-job performance is judged.

The Cult of Microsoft

Financialisation of Social Networks

One of the things that becomes apparent when you study the nature of social networks is that incumbents are not disrupted by a better alternative. Instead, they are taken over by a vastly different product that serves the same function…The future of Web3 social networks will not look like a better Twitter. Instead, it would look closer to the attributes that the industry does well today. Those of speculation, verifiable rank (clout), and ownership.

Financialisation of Social Networks

Thanks for reading!

And huge thanks to Vinish for always being active in our Slack channels, sharing thoughts and interesting links, and to Marc, Daiana and Lee for their investment in the many community projects.

Kevin from Design & Critical Thinking.

Misty Experiences + Designing for Hope was originally published in Design & Critical Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This speculative design mini-project envisions a future where careful use of Brain-Computer Interfaces and AI redefines human-machine interaction within sustainable urban environments. This narrative offers a strategic lens for UX design and business development.

This speculative scenario explores the future of human-machine interactions in a world responding to climate change. This narrative-building approach helps envision a future where purposeful use of technology –like Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) and specialised AI algorithms– anticipates human needs while prioritizing minimal energy use.

The approach highlights the potential of Design Fiction and Speculative Design in guiding UX, business and Tech strategies focused on innovation and sustainability. This iterative process implemented the use of AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney) at some specific touchpoints.

World building

In the year 2045, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have become ubiquitous, fundamentally altering how we interact with computers and connected devices. A diverse array of interface technologies has emerged, ranging from invasive neural implants that require surgical insertion into the brain, to non-invasive devices that interpret muscular signals through skin contact.

The widespread adoption of BCIs has rendered traditional input devices like keyboards and mice largely obsolete, leading to the rapid decline of companies specializing in these technologies. However, Logitech has emerged as a notable exception, reinventing itself by pioneering an innovative fusion of non-invasive BCI technology, conventional mouse functionality, and highly specialised AI algorithms.

Logitech’s flagship product — an intelligent, mind-responsive input device that serves as an extension of the user’s cognitive processes — has revolutionized workflows across various professional domains. From esports competitors and visual effects artists to financial traders and beyond, this device has garnered recognition as one of the most transformative tools of its era.

The device’s ergonomic and aesthetically pleasing design bears little resemblance to traditional computer mice. Users report an almost prescient level of responsiveness, with the device anticipating and executing commands almost instantaneously, often before the user has consciously formulated the intention. This capability eliminates the need for physical manipulation or clicking.

By redefining the spatial dynamics of human-computer interaction, this groundbreaking technology has ushered in a new paradigm of digital interfacing, profoundly impacting productivity and creative expression across industries.

Futures archetypes: Equiprobable objects

“Stories are prototypes of potential near futures, drawing likely connections between unevenly distributed weak signals.”

The Future Walks With Us

Stephanie woke just as the first light of dawn filtered through her window, the gentle pulse of her forearm device stirring her from sleep. She stretched and glanced at Lola, her golden retriever, who was already waiting patiently by the door. A soft blue glow appeared on Stephanie’s device, accompanied by a low hum — a sign from Lola’s collar-like device that she was ready for their morning walk. Stephanie knew why they had to go early; in 2045, the heat was unbearable for most of the year, and only the cooler morning hours were suitable for a walk.

After dressing quickly, she clipped Lola’s leash, though it was more a formality than necessity. They stepped outside into the crisp morning air, making their way down the quiet street. The city had changed so much over the years. Recently, giant shades made of organic fabrics had been stretched between buildings, shielding the streets below from the harsh sun. These canopies didn’t just protect the city from the heat; they also generated energy, using the very sunlight they blocked to power the homes and shops below. It was a perfect blend of necessity and innovation, aimed at minimizing the city’s carbon footprint while keeping people, animals, and plants safe.

As they walked under the shades, the air was noticeably cooler, and Stephanie breathed a little easier. The city felt serene in these early hours, with the soft rustle of the fabric above and the hum of a few early risers going about their day. The plant life along the streets was thriving, thanks to the combination of shade and careful urban planning. As they walked, Stephanie’s forearm device glowed with soft green pulses, syncing with Lola’s emotions — contentment, curiosity, and excitement when a squirrel darted out of a nearby bush. The technology quietly monitored their walk, never intrusive but always present.

While they walked, Stephanie’s thoughts shifted to her morning routine. She didn’t need to pause to think too hard, though; her sleeve-like device, a sleek, flexible extension of her arm, was already anticipating her needs. With just a few mental cues, she ordered her usual coffee from the local eco-friendly brewer, the system smartly balancing convenience with sustainability. The device barely registered her actions outwardly, only a soft flicker of light as it handled her order.

Once back home, Lola’s collar device shifted to a soothing blue, signalling contentment after her breakfast. While Lola settled down, Stephanie tidied the apartment, her intelligent mouse — another piece of seamless tech — working quietly in the background. Designed to read her intentions, it sorted through her morning emails and prepped files for an upcoming meeting, all without her lifting a finger. She loved how the technology in her life was designed for efficiency and restraint, only stepping in when needed.

The giant shades outside continued to protect the city as the sun rose higher, and by the time Stephanie’s coffee arrived via cargo-bike, the delivery person notifying her on her forearm device while the heat was already starting to build. She took a sip as she sat down at her desk, the cool interior of her apartment a stark contrast to the bright world outside. Her intelligent mouse, nestled by her laptop, seamlessly guided her through documents as she joined her first virtual meeting. It was like the device knew exactly where she needed to focus, zooming in on key sections as her team discussed them. The whole process felt effortless, like a natural extension of her thoughts.

In the background, Lola rested peacefully, her emotions and needs quietly monitored through the gentle signals from Stephanie’s device. The combination of high-tech and thoughtful, low-energy living shaped every part of her day, from the shaded streets to the understated tech that helped her navigate her life. For Stephanie, it was a future where balance mattered most — between nature and innovation, simplicity and technology, and the quiet, unspoken bond between her and Lola.

Thanks for reading!

Interested in how I could bring new design technics and approaches to your company or project? Let’s have a chat! Reach out on LinkedIn.

Hi, Kevin here.

I often talk about design –and most of its practices, to which, subsequently, UX is part of– as going further than the individualistic understanding/vision it has been framed into, this “personal-level experience”.

But in practice, User Experience Design (UXD) and its parent approach Human-Centered Design (HCD), is hardly capable of reflecting on an entire population, its set of shared socio-cultural practices within an ecological landscape [1], and this has become ever more problematic.

UX design and other corollary practices, like Product design, Service design, etc. have all the same issue: they are heavily focused on both the products/services then the individual characteristics of their users (their brains, needs, preferences, etc) as core fundamental assumptions. These are assumption-based practices.

Part of the issue stems from, counter-intuitively, its origins (Ergonomics, HMI) [2] and its unequal mingling with some cognitive psychology knowledge, and with it, a tendency to bring everything to the brain –but not only. Its roots in engineering and influence of business management heavily oriented the design practice towards a problem-solution paradigm. Furthermore, the datafication of our life, as a necessary solution-enabler, permitted an unprecedented shift in value extraction for businesses [3]. The personalisation of experiences in modern products and services is less about you as a human being than it is about the dividuation of certain characteristics of your personhood, in its extractive form, and its alienation [4].

Design practices are rendered myopic –or to the very least, incapable to adjust– to such dynamics, which the reinforcing of individuation (and dividuation through value extraction) only participate in increasing inequalities, injustices, polarisation, lack of belonging, etc.

A philosophical & practical critique: Understanding the issue

We need to explain a few things on the critique made here, before moving forward. For the sake of the argument I’m simplifying a few core concepts here. I’m also purposefully putting UX, Product and Service Design in the same basket for reasons which will become apparent below.

User experience (UX) design is focused on understanding the users, and users are defined by the very interfaces they use. The product or service is a prerequisite intermediary to that end as the conveyor of said interfaces.

The interface here has to be understood as an explicit, hard, tangible object (or constraint) –and due to UX origin’s tightly coupled to computing tech, it is most likely a digital (graphical) interface (UI). Therefore, without tangible interfaces –meaning without products and services– there are no clearly defined users.

Users are not necessarily humans –although it is generally assumed to be the case– and they have to be using the interface in order to achieve goals.

Goals are defined as explicit desired end states, and tasks are merely means to reach such states. Thus, it is believed that their maximization is desirable.

Note: while I’m happy if you disagree with me on definitions, please note these are considered largely shared beliefs in the field.

This unit of analysis is actually dehumanizing: even when defined as human, a user is not really a complete being, not even a living being, but merely an entity reduced to selfish and rational motivations. It has been suggested for some time now to move away from “users” towards “people”, but this only exacerbates further the ontological-epistemological tension baked in the field’s very axioms: the interface, the product, the service, is the real underlying layer of interpretation that matter and this acts as a great filter.

If we add that most products and services are the visible apparatus of, the materialisation of, business models, which are still mainly defined by their strict transactional aspect of the value exchange between “rational agents” on a market, and you end up with an even narrower and skewed understanding of said “people”.

Hence, UX, Product and Service design practices focus heavily on individualistic values within a problem-solution paradigm, further reinforcing them. People’s goals and preferences are sorted, homogenised and generalised to much simpler characters (e.g. persona), removing people, at least partially, some form of their meaning attribution, interpretation and agency in their own context.

On the other hand, most digital experiences ask people for their unique and exclusive attention, mandating intrusive behaviours, while providing an inequality class-based experience –the push for neo-feudalist and especially anarcho-capitalist ideals in recent years is a continuation of such dynamics, enabled by a process towards decentralisation. Here, the notion of “personalisation” (of experience) is believed to be the holy grail of experience only because it maximizes these dynamics. And AI will certainly play a role in further exacerbating them.

All of this is the very definition of the concept of “dividuation” [4] which G. Deleuze talks about in his work on “Societies of Control”, exemplified.

I’m not saying that nothing is done to mitigate the issue, but when it is, it’s treated as extra things to do rather than the default modus operandi.

A social critique: Design practices are memetic engines

UX design is, for better or for worse, tightly coupled with tech and, despite all good intentions, willingly perpetuates its worst tendencies.

“Tech” here is not just any “technology” but an extension of globalisation of corporate and modern capitalistic values, and as such, it doesn’t care about people and their environment, it cares about itself as a system of power. To an extent, this system (disdains?) dislikes the human (and more-than-human) condition as it is a hindrance to its “ideal fulfilment”, marked by a constant acceleration towards more of itself –and therefore, the processus of exploitation, objectification, exclusion, reduction, and removal of said humans (and non-humans) is a feature of such a system, not a bug.

This is not a dystopian prediction nor a personal judgement, rather a description of dynamics at play. Design practices operate in a special role in this, the one of memetic engines [5], of self-replication of the very cultural markers of the system by copy, alteration/mutation and recombination. To function, this requires a lot of diversity and, as such, design practices are in a perpetual state of tension –which is, ultimately, a good thing.

This means that, on one hand, we indeed participate in its continuation but, on the other hand, we have opportunities to inject change. Adaptive systems are not monolithic and immutable, but rather always evolving as their initial conditions change overtime.

Design is social. Design creates social objects.

For several years, I’ve been talking and thinking a lot about Deleuze & Guattari’s work on Assemblage Theory [6] [7] and Schizoanalysis [8], its relationship with the study of complex adaptive systems [9] in the context of human social systems and how this can be translated to design.

Design, people, and the social

The study of human social systems is the domain of Sociology [10], which is the study of people and their ecologies at the level of societies. All of which are extremely relevant to design (and designers) but also to innovation practitioners, as it equips them with means to make sense and act according to a broader understanding of the landscape they are intervening in.

The impact of Deleuze & Guattari (and others like Latour) on social sciences, combined with the feminist movements, the development of the interdisciplinary field of Complexity Sciences [11], and the inclusion of other living forms in the face of climate change and ecological collapse led in recent years to a new broad field of contemporary philosophy called New Materialism (see here [12] and here [13]). See below the New Materialism key approaches.

Many of the themes and topics I discussed in my exploration of Solarpunk [14] [15] are in fact coming from (or at least, heavily connected to) this field and philosophy, which I definitely feel closer to than the Solarpunk movement [16]. Don’t get me wrong, this is an interesting movement to observe and follow, but adopting its views brings its own set of issues and is not a prerequisite to adhering to some of the ideas and principles.

Anyway, why is this relevant? Well, as I entertained earlier, I’ve come to critically think that design practices have a granularity issue: a focus on the solution (product and service) and a focus on the individual as unit of analysis and understanding.

What can designers learn from SolarPunk?

New Materialisms: Key Approaches

Source: Deborah Lupton 2019, New Materialisms: Key Approaches

Find more resources on the interdisciplinary field of New Materialism in this compilation:

New Materialism resources | Design & Critical Thinking Library

Sociology (new materialism)

Ideas: What can bodies do? All matter has an agential capacity to affect — ‘we need to explore relations’ capacities when assembled together and intra-acting’ — affects are ‘the engines of assemblages, altering capacities’ — using empirical data to identify affect-economies and relations and what capacities are generated and the affects producing these capacities — can identify lists of human-nonhuman relations forming assemblages from interview data — affects can have negative consequences for capacities (‘constraining affects’) (Fox & Bale). Retheorising power and resistance — resistance as continuing process — importance of acknowledging materiality and material forces, agency of things — no structures of power, just events that are emergent and dynamic.

Key researchers: Fox and Alldred, Duff, Fullagar

Key theorists: Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari, Barad, Braidotti, Latour

Indigenous materialisms

Ideas: Identifies the antecedents of new materialism in indigenous worldviews. E.g. the Indigenous Australian concept of Country as ‘a living and life-giving nexus of energy-matter’ (Ravenscroft) or the Inuit concept of climate as the vital breath of life and of knowing for humans and others (Todd). The importance of sensory relational connections and atmospheres that are more-than-representational between humans and other phenomena.

Key researchers: Tallbear, Todd, Kukutai and Taylor, Bird Rose, Cariou, Roziek, Ravenscroft

Key theorists: –

Environmental feminism, material ecocriticism, Anthropocene feminisms, environmental materialism

Ideas: focuses on the nature-culture divide and the material agencies that are part of environmental systems and the Anthropocene. Attempts to understand the intersections and relations of humans and nonhumans in ecologies. Works towards ‘a posthuman environmental ethics’ (Alaimo) and ‘a better understanding of humans’ kinship with nonhumans. ‘Posthumous life’ (Weinstein & Colebrook). Recognises indigenous knowledges and philosophies of nature. Sees materials and humans as ‘storied matter’: matter as ‘a site of narrativity’ (Iovino and Opperman).

Key researchers: Colebrook, Alaimo, Wilson, Morton, Plumwood, Kirksey, Malone, Kirby

Key theorists: Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Barad, Haraway, Braidotti, Grosz

Education — gender and posthuman performativity

Ideas: Focuses on assemblages of sexuality/bodies/gender (including digital images such as selfies) and spacetime-matterings in education contexts. What are the affective intensities and the larger apparatuses of knowledge-making at work? (e.g. ideas about and material arrangements concerning girls’ and women’s sexuality and how they should act and look) — intra-activity/affect — activities directed at establishing boundaries.

Using examples from data that have affective force and resonance with the researchers.

Key researchers: Ringose, Renold, Coleman, Osgood, Blaise, Davies

Key theorists: Barad, Braidotti, Deleuze, Guattari, Butler, Foucault, Latour

Diffraction theory, post-qualitative inquiry

Ideas: Focuses on diffraction theory and method. Reading theory diffractively — engagements with different disciplines to make new theories — reading insights through one another. Develops a method of diffractive analysis of data — looks at what data do rather than what they mean. Analysing data by tracing affective intensities in their empirical contexts — what do affective forces ‘do’? How does matter make itself felt? — look for the agential cuts, where meaning is made from the constantly changing choices of meaning — reading the data with theory after coding — ‘renewed’ rather than ‘new’ materialisms (Coole and Frost) — ‘plugging’ theory and data into each other — diffractive analysis.

Key researchers: Davies, Lenz-Taguchi, Mazzei, Jackson, Hicke-Moody, Ivinson, Lather, Coole, Frost, van der Tuin, Gullion, Fullagar

Key theorists: Foucault, Barad, Haraway, Deleuze, Guattari, Butler

Vital materialism

Ideas: The power, vibrancy and enchantment of more-than-human assemblages (‘the force of things’ and ‘thing-power’ — Bennett) — we are all compost (Haraway) — post-Anthropocene politics. Critical life studies. Animacies.

Key researchers: Coole, Frost, Colebrook, Chen

Key theorists: Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Bennett, Haraway, Braidotti, Merleau-Ponty, Latour, Agamben

Education — materiality and enactment theorising

Ideas: Builds on Ball’s policy enactment/implementation work (Foucauldian) by incorporating greater emphasis on materiality and actor-networks and dynamic nature of assemblages and enactments (‘becoming’) — policy as performative agent/object that creates material effects — policy takes form in practices, territoralising and de/re-territoralising — lines of flight — policy assemblages as ‘messy objects’/micro-negotiations of policy.

Key researchers: Mulcahy, Fenwick and Edwards

Key theorists: Foucault, Deleuze, Latour, Mol, Law, Singleton

Anthropology of material culture

Ideas: Focuses on making, doing, skills, articulation, becoming, moving through the world, creativity, cultural improvisation, incorporation of objects, the life of objects — decay, reinvigoration, ‘mutable things’ (DeSilvey).

Key researchers: Inghold, Hallam, DeSilvey, Edensor

Key theorists: Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Barad, Bennett, Appadurai, Douglas, Bourdieu

Posthuman archaeology/museum studies

Ideas: Puts things at centre: how things connect with other things and with humans. Focuses on the properties of materials, their social lives and networks of things. Entanglement analysis — making ‘tanglegrams’ (Hodder and Mol). ‘Symmetrical archaeology’ — humans emerge from their relationships with things (Oleson).

Key researchers: Hodder, Oleson, Conneller, Alberti, Jones

Key theorists: Foucault, Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Barad, Latour, Haraway, Bennett

Cultural geography/anthropology — sensory ethnography/affective atmospheres/non-representational methodologies

Ideas: Focuses on the interaction between the senses, embodied habits, emotions and engagement with the more-than-human world.

Key researchers: Pink, Howes, Classen, Bissell, Vannini, Lorimer, Dowling

Key theorists: Haraway, Meleau-Ponty, Thrift, Latour, Law, Deleuze, Guattari, Whitehead, Marcus, Clifford

Design anthropology/sociology and arts-based practice

Ideas: Focuses on use of design and art methods for inspiring creative, speculative and imaginative thinking about presents and futures — generating more-than-representational artefacts.

Key researchers: Michael, Gaver, Suchman, Dunne & Raby, Pink, Hickey-Moody, Pink, RC Smith, Otto

Key theorists: Marcus, Latour, Heidegger, Stengers, Whitehead, Serres, Law

Information systems/organisation studies/management studies — sociomaterialism

Ideas: Focuses on the relational ontologies of digitised information systems and organisations (data, archives, libraries, management and other infrastructures). Iterative material-discursive performances — entanglements — of assemblages of people, work, organisations and technologies. Builds on the sociology of scientific knowledge. ‘The mangle of practice’ — trajectories and ‘dances’ of human and material agency (Pickering).

Key researchers: Orlikowsky, Scott, Pickering, Wagner

Key theorists: Latour, Callon, Law, Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, Barad, Ihde

Object-oriented ontology (OOO), speculative realism

(NB: often grouped with new materialism, but actually quite different — included here for sake of comparison)

Ideas: Focuses on the ontologies of objects: there is more to objects than humans’ knowledges and understandings of them. Monism (flat ontologies). Objects can rely on and relate to each other, but these reliances do not exhaust their capacities. There is a reality of objects beyond human perception. What a thing is is more interesting than what it does. Sees objects as independent from other objects (the ‘thing-in-itself’, ‘objects, not actors’, ‘immaterialism, not materialism’ [Harmon]). Less interested in relations or epistemologies. Privileges form over matter.

Key researchers: Harman, Bogost, Bryant, Morton

Key theorists: Whitehead, Latour, Heidegger, Husserl

Design aims at change. But change isn’t grounded in the individual.

What I am suggesting here is that design, and especially UX/Product/Service design need to move from practices heavily focused on the solution, the individual and purely transactional interactions between the two, and move towards more sociological and ecological considerations.

Rather than focusing in characterising individuals by generalising them to personas and archetypes, we should do so with the very places they inhabit, their environment, the flux, interactions, and both positive & negative constraints which happen within them. Starting from the context to derive what’s possible and what’s not, to identify patterns.

In How to change a culture: Lessons from NUMMI, John Shook describes how they changed the Culture at a joint General Motors/Toyota manufacturing plant [17], back at the time Lean Manufacturing practices started to be imported from Japan.

What my NUMMI experience taught me that was so powerful was that the way to change culture is not to first change how people think, but instead to start by changing how people behave — what they do. Those of us trying to change our organizations’ culture need to define the things we want to do, the ways we want to behave and want each other to behave, to provide training and then to do what is necessary to reinforce those behaviors. The culture will change as a result.

This is what is meant by, “It’s easier to act your way to a new way of thinking than to think your way to a new way of acting.” […]

If we as management want people to be successful, to find problems and to make improvements, we have the obligation to provide the means to do so.
When NUMMI was being formed, though, some of our GM colleagues questioned the wisdom of trying to install andon there. “You intend to give these workers the right to stop the line?” they asked. Toyota’s answer: “No, we intend to give them the obligation to stop it — whenever they find a problem.”
– John Shook 2010, “How to change a culture: Lessons from NUMMI”

One might read a confirmation that, indeed, change happened through individuals, but this is anything but.

What Shook is pointing out is that people had to first change what they do to change how they think and what they value as a group, and to do so they needed an environment with affordances to enable new behaviours. Much like more lanes on a highway afford more traffic (induced demand), environmental constrains -artificial or not- increase the likelihood of certain behaviours through their affordance.

Change happen at the interaction level, the connective tissue between all the individuals –or rather, the actant– their environment and the objects that composes it [18] [19] (see also the Actor-Network Theory [20]).

Now, that is not to say individuals have no agency. On the contrary, they have agency and autonomy, but within both enabling and limiting constraints. Every individual has a different threshold at which enough environmental constraint (built environment, social pressure, etc.) will be effective at changing their perceptions, behaviours, and narratives (see Mark Granovetter’s work on “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior” [21] [22]).

Design + Sociology

Design sociology is different in that it looks at understanding people through their environment and the stories they tell about it as a starting point. The objects created through design (products, services, etc.) are therefore understood and analysed as catalysts for social interactions and social change, rather than a neatly isolated single-point solution.

Design Sociology is a term coined by Deborah Lupton, Sociologist and professor at UNSW Sydney, and developed in her 2017 review essay titled “Towards design sociology” [23]. The approach is proposed as a meeting point between design research and sociocultural research, which, as Lupton explains, hardly ever crossed before. As she points out in the introduction:

“Many design researchers have become progressively open to incorporating sociological and anthropological concepts and theories in their work. Sociocultural research drawing on design methods has also been developing over the past few years.” — Lupton 2017, Towards design sociology

Lupton’s proposed approach is three folds [23]:

• One, it can focus inward to design, that is, understanding the “social worlds and material practices of designers” from a sociological perspective.
• Second, it can involve “conducting sociological research through design”.
• Lastly, design sociology offers a transdisciplinary collaboration between sociology and design disciplines, enriching them both.

Although Lupton’s work is clearly directed at the sociological research discipline as a means to enrich its research practices, this has the potential to address our granularity issue, and even cover some of my Solarpunk-inspired design principles [14] –or rather New Materialism-inspired principles:

• ✊ Design principle #4: Design for human and non-human autonomy
• ✨ Design principle #5: Design within multi-world-views

Indeed, world-views are not simply intrapersonal, meaning it is not defined by what a specific individual believes, experienced, and behaves (that would be a granularity issue), but, as the story of Zapatistas suggests (see “‘Worlds within worlds’ and the need for multi-ontological approaches” [14]), they are instead a set of shared narratives and sub-cultures which are permeable-enough to hold and porous-enough to co-exist within various others.

Design sociology works around two core concepts:

1. Design sociology creates cultural probes as a means to generate shared understanding of a cultural landscape;
2. Design sociology relies on participatory design methods to maximize the inclusivity and diversity of the approach.

Cultural probes is a technique that is used as a means of gathering inspirational data about people’s lives, values and thoughts. The probes are “small packages that can include any sort of artifact (like a map, postcard, camera or diary) along with evocative tasks, which are given to participants to allow them to record specific events, feelings or interactions.” [24]

Cultural probes aren’t new to design practices, on the contrary, and if you have a HCI or interaction design degree you might already be somewhat familiar with this approach, sometimes under the label “design probes” [25] [26] [27] . It seems, however, this has become a lost practice in the current professional UX design landscape.

Participatory design methods are nothing new either and has been largely developed in the field of social design practices, a largely (but not limited to) European movement. There is a very real and interesting tention between a social design and a more techno-solutionist design approach that characterises the current UX design field:

Published in 1971, designer Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World introduced critiques ostensibly about consumption and green politics. […] as summarized by Whiteley, there was no justification for designing trivial and stylish consumer items for the affluent of the advantaged countries, when the majority of humankind was living below subsistence level” […]

Design is for the most part still complicit with constructing the social for good or ill, and while designers may attempt to address manifold issues of inclusion and representation as these unfold in the “real world,” they are part of complex, technocentric, and market-driven systems of governance and production that typically streamline and reduce the complexity of social issues in representations, in what is still broadly perceived as a process of reductive “problem-solving.” — Rethinking Cultural Probes in Community Research and Design as Ethnographic Practice, Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research 2022 [28]

In Lupton’s Design Sociology, “design” is in act of probing itself. Design serves to generate and capture qualitative and meaningful relationships, for and by participants: design here is a form of public ethnography. It is framed, after all, from a sociological perspective –and this is a good thing. Design can and should be used to create shared understanding rather than only seek validation.

From a design perspective, however, this is seems only half the path towards catalysing change –I‘ll address this point later.

In the 2022 book “What People Leave Behind — Marks, Traces, Footprints and their Relevance to Knowledge Society” [29] published on Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research, part 1, chapter 3 “Rethinking Cultural Probes in Community Research and Design as Ethnographic Practice” [28] discusses the limitations of cultural probes in social design practices:

Contemporary ideas of social design utilize a broader mandate for change through participatory approaches and collective outcomes in addition to market objectives (Armstrong et al., 2014: 15). […]

However, designers (as a worst-case example) often choose a particular method from the book to use as a quick exercise with potential “users” to lend validity to a design proposal. This “toolbox mentality” stems from an acceleration and acceptance of instrumentalist values that have become the core of design, business, and education to assert control in response to increasing conflicts in social and cultural realms. Consequently, design interventions and modernist-inspired solution finding continue to be critiqued as abstracting and devaluing lived, material experiences, instrumentalizing community knowledge, and compromising people’s agency while potentially exacerbating complex problems (Escobar, 2018). […]

This calls for an open, explicit negotiation of the relationship between researcher and participants, starting from a recognition that both parties carry their own cultural, social, professional perspectives and interests and, subsequently, that the outcomes of the research process reflect such a negotiation of cultures and intentions (Palaganas et al., 2017).

Ezio Manzini […] discusses the process of “sensemaking” to eventual “problem-solving” as a co-design process of catalyzing existing context-specific knowledge in communities. — Rethinking Cultural Probes in Community Research and Design as Ethnographic Practice, Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research, 2022 [28]

In short, the medium is the message, and the act of choosing the medium of expression of one’s lived experience is often determined by the motivations of the one in charge of collecting the data. This can remove or limit the mediation of different interpretations. Designers often seek validation rather than true sense-making through navigating different world-views, forcing interpretation to be reduced to pre-established tacit assumptions (the tool-box mindset).

Something quite interesting when we look at collective meaning creation is that it is linked to the notion of narratives (semiotics). Narrative-building works on the underlying cultural and tacit understanding of one’s environment and its meaning attribution. This means, narratives are emergent cultural objects which can reveal environmental patterns and constraints.

Using narrative research mixed methods, such as Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) [29], developed by Cynthia F. Kurtz, we can blend qualitative and quantitative data, overcoming the limitations of cultural probes (see figure 1 and 2).

On a side note, my research, together with Krasi Bozhinkova and Daiana Zavate, on “The Multi-Ocean Strategy Framework” [30] was intended to directly work with narratives as a means to explore adjacent spaces (innovation). Although it is limited as a fixed canva, in the form of a board game, it allows people to use abstractions to inject their own meaning and connect various perspectives, and surface weak signals.

Conclusion: Towards a more social UX design practice

Here I want to address the missing part. As said, design aims at creating change. Building knowledge and understanding can be part of design but is not sufficient to serve this purpose. So what could a more social design UX practice looks like?

Here‘s my humble attempt at consolidating an approach (Social Experience Design?):

Probing

• Collecting narratives
• Cultural/design probing

Sense-making

• Pattern identification: assemblages & metaphors

Futuring

• Design fiction

Scaffolding

• Entangled Trios
• Adjacent prototyping

Evaluating

• Narrative-based evaluation (change in narratives over time)

Thanks for reading!

This is a long time exploration on my side of various topics of interest to me. This might sound theorical –and perhaps, it is– but I always try to apply my thoughts as best as I can in my work and/or through the Design & Critical Thinking community. Feedbacks, comments and criticisms are more than welcomed!

Kevin

Design has a granularity issue was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Abstract

Web can be viewed from many angles: Old and new, big and small, uniform and diverse. It’s hard to pick along a continuum because the tribes like to territorialize. This poses a problem and an opportunity for planeswalkers to take advantage of three key evolving themes of the web: javascript vs all the other languages, corporate monopoly of backend data, AI’s role at completing the trilogy of the semantic cybernetic future of intelligence.

Web Designing, Architecting, AI-ing

Consider carefully what UX means in a market system environment and what that entails for designers and their roles. First and foremost, let’s deconstruct that term, market system environment, before this article becomes an exponential word salad. A market is where buyers and sellers engage in negotiation and transactional behavior. A system is a framework for analyzing the traces, feedback loops and connections between individual nodes of buyers and sellers. Are you with me so far? Because now we’re talking about the environment, which is all of the ignored relationships that has never needed analysis because it was never measured or even imagined. It is this third sphere where the creativity and adaptability of designers shine the most but is also at the highest risk to exposure to be percieved by others to have a sort of irrelevant thinking.

Simple case: QWERTY

The oft-mentioned QWERTTY keyboard layout is an artifact of design. It was first introduced to slow down typing speed so the old-fashioned typewriters didn’t jam. It was a design-implementation success because it served the intended purpose of making sure the device interfaces robustly with users. Unbeknownst to the original designers, the design was so successful that it hijacked the market system environment upon further commercial adoption and ingrained feedback loops to make QWERTY the successful standard that it is today.:

However, a designer who is looking to solve a different “higher-level” problem might take a look at ergonomics a little more seriously. The very intent of the QWERTY design was to slow on the pain of wrist discomfort. Today, that constraint of keys jamming might be gone but the standard remains. That designer might introduce something like the Dvorak key-layout below after indoctrinating new party members to its cult.:

Depending on your design politik worldview on keyboards, you either: (1) believe that once something becomes a standard, it is an “already-”solved problem and attention should be directed elsewhere or (2) aim to radically tear-down outdated standards in favor of typing nirvana for both yourself, others and future generations. Clearly, there is a “secret third thing” betwixt these views but it is hard to consider where to even begin without the dialectic placeholders of conservative and liberal political stances especially when it comes to design. And who knows? Maybe the highest-level of keyboard layout design is no keyboard, because why would ergonomics be a thing when health/pain is solved in the future?

The Dao of Web Design

The Dao creates one.
One creates two.
Two creates three.
And three creates the ten thousand things.
– Dao De Jing — Lao Tzu — chapter 42

The intended objectives of a designer isn’t to one-shot a solution but play with the apparatuses that works. Works is also a fuzzy term which is why I re-introduced the key-layout example in the context of standards and feedback loops. In other words, you kind of have to create a cult if you want to trigger mass adoption of your particular way of doing things, whether it be a new programming language or an AI tool. And within this playground of frameworks, a designer will often be met with this panlogic conundrum of chapter 42 of the Dao De Jing or Schelling’s Hegelian Dialectic.

So what does this mean for webdesign and UX. The current state of the design is heavily favored in the javascript frameworks that prioritize beautification elements and components that engage a user through the browser with glowing and flashy buttons. It really is a sensory overload dark design pattern that is meant to serve the purpose of a unitary CTA, or Call to Action in web design parlance of getting a user to click “I Agree” or “Buy Now” without being subversive. This is a pattern that, once again, makes a recursive look-back at the market system environment feedback loops that reinforce this practice.

Attention is a valuable scarce resource to the user; but to the provider, it is a commodity that serves as the platform to alienate, isolate and rectify an individual and transmute it into a unit of exchange

This is the sad current state of UX today. Users are delighted by the inane overstimulation and their attention is trapped. Is there a way out of this trap? You betcha’. Every ‘QWERTY’ has its ‘Dvorak’. Indeed, web developers have manifestos written like Resilient Web Design which sets up an accessibility awareness mindset. Those who know study and know these concepts deeply wield unimaginable Jedi-like powers. But for those developers, mindlessly droning away to create red and blue buttons serving as soul-less puppets to their big tech employers, what can be done to serve, enrich and empower them to re-invigorate the web with a new slant towards transparency?

This is where the focus turns toward DX, or developer/designer experience. As anybody who has touched business applications knows, things are ugly or broken on the back-end but flavorful and colorful on the front-end. Why? Now you have a better inkling of this phenomenon to answer this question yourself.

To follow the formula that has worked in the past: we need a dialectic, auto-generator, one that culture intrinsically provides, serves and replicates for eons in our memetic universe.

HTMX vs Javascript Frameworks

There is a story of a funny guy out of Montana who works as an assistant professor at Montana tech. He has been larping as a twitter troll and in the past year became a little bit of a viral hit among web developers. HTMX is the new buzzword floating around and it is centered around making HTML cool again while being hyper-ironic in a very gen-Z-esque meme-ing fashion. Quite a juxtaposition!

What does this mean for web developers?

He has already written 3000 lines of javascript code so you dont have to. All you have to do is add this one snippet of code to your html (approx. 14 kB) and now your webpages can bypass the complex javascript libraries that ceaselessly render and hijack hardware memory and your system’s energy (an actual state improvement when we consider environment-writ-large):

<script src="https://unpkg.com/htmx.org@1.9.11" integrity="sha384-0gxUXCCR8yv9FM2b+U3FDbsKthCI66oH5IA9fHppQq9DDMHuMauqq1ZHBpJxQ0J0" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>

Not so fast! For the past two decades of front-end web development, roles have been separated so that front-end cannot mess or touch the server components. For good reasons because you dont want that one button guy to accidentally take down your website because he/she introduced an infinite for loop animation. In order for HTMX to work, web devs have to have full access to server components which means having to write the logic of balancing server load of a webpage, which ultimately amounts to Jedi-powers.

In many ways, htmx has become a sort of silent revolution on its own amassing a cult following in reddit sharing tips and tricks of implementing server call functions and taking webpages away from SPA frameworks, single-page-applications and back to statically rendered pages with clever modernized features such as serving partial html without embeddings, iframes limitations, and page reloads. This leaves a web designer with more capabilities of rendering the website without having to make compromises to the UX of shifting through full-reloads making an html library of files work seamlessly like one single page application without having to deal with any javascript.

One of the biggest issues of introducing htmx to newbies is that it is virtually impossible to share an example via a plain blogging or article format because none of today’s modern web architecture allows server side calls placed directly on HTML due to the distrustful nature of the two-ends. Which is why HATEOS, hypermedia as the engine of state, is a breath of fresh air as an old-new web design philosophy.

Web Design and AI Apex

In many ways, this undercurrent of htmx bubbling to the surface is a godsend moment in web development because the camps of programming language have been divided for a decade. A lot of the front-end has been in javascript while other programming languages like python haven’t had much time in the sun when the competitive nature of attention has been more about dynamically rendered pages. But at the same time, python has become a language of choice for data science and machine learning. Extensive libraries are written in python so a clever designer has a treasure trove of content to dig and highlight from that are categorically different from more javascript UI/UX focused libraries and functions offering a paradigmatic dialectic Jihad in web development today.

There is an opportunity with explosive potential of combining the feel of modern web apps infused with AI powered content to really shine and lead this new era. Javascript has never really been allowed to handle server components until recently. This means databases and backend architecture that are known for speed and performance like the search engine Google can now be democratized so long as the right policies are enabled like filtering fact from fiction. Everything is now up for grabs.

Jedi Power #1: Queries per second

If you sign up for a Google Gemini Developer API key, you will see that your super power is listed as 60 queries per second. How do you maximize the use of this feature to your users? With traditional chat bots, it might take a few seconds for the user to type in a question. But what if for each key stroke, you have an auto-fill populate several ‘hypothetical prompts’ and generate answers and displaying those to the user even before they can click send? It seems like magic but it’s not. A very basic implementation of this leads to a very buttery UX that makes chat-modules seem antiquated.

• Minimalistic Demo of Chat App using Python:Flask:HTMX

Jedi Power #2: Instant data-sharing architecture

This is one of those privacy, security paradigms that can be flipped now that we are dealing with synthetic data. In the current perspective of looking at data privacy, a consumer doesn’t want trackers and data stored in websites because it is intrusive and terrifying at a future time after the engagement with the webpages are over. But what if all user inputs are default anonymized and all AI outputs are displayed for seamless collaborative work? Databases cleverly have this as a default mode, but it is perhaps our paradigm to blame for authentication, login pages, the password manager privacy industrial complex that sells you VPNs. Corporations, in my opinion, have collectively ignored or misinterpreted what consumers want when they say they want customization and privacy. They read that the need to make very data-rich tagged profiles with extensive security and multi-factor authentication apps. The Ockham’s razor is anonymize and give users the dashboard controls for the customization.

Jedi Power #3: Offline AI

This strays away from web development but is a massive hot topic. One reason not to use online web chat AIs could be that the user inputs can be used to train future models and might have key private information or proprietary stuff that companies don’t want to share. This means no ChatGPT in the work place. But can you imagine if a company says no google? The incessant need to protect proprietary stuff while also requiring the speed and flexibility of new tools offers designers a platform to create and build offline AIs. A simple one to get started like Ollama can help get you started. Furthermore, you can add vector embeddings to the offline model so that you can ask questions about your schedules and appointments and files on your folder without it being shared. It is up to the designer to make choices about the amount of interactivity it has with other online AI models but that will be probably a more advanced topic.

Engineering the Ocean

No one ever designs the ocean.

The ocean is there and it moves and is governed by Navier-Stokes.

But the ocean does collect plastic garbage islands.

You probably need to design boats and tools to collect those. You don’t need to micro-manage the fishes. Everything is just part of that vast ocean.

I want to wrap this long article up with a simple and optimistic message to meditate on. Clearly, there’s a lot of fear-mongering in every industry and communities about the threat of AI taking designer jobs. But this brief intro to this interesting play in web design trends hopefully garners some curiosity and insights to how designers can think and do jobs better than the employers by using new tools and abstractions. Basically, a few key tech stacks are needed and you are off to the races ready to conquer the multi-trillion dollar industries of big tech AI. Designers are planeswalkers and timetravelers in the market system environement and with the right mindset, the universe is yours to conquer.

Written by Matt Ji.

About the author
Born in Shanghai, China. Grew up in Texas.
Studied Petroleum Engineering in Colorado. Worked as a Frack Engineer.
Studied Renewable Energy in Germany. Worked as an Asset Manager.
Traded Stocks during made a lot then and lost everything.
Built web apps to become an full-stack engineer tinkering with AI tools, htmx, and ‘Excel’…
Opposites, dialectic, lived and breathed.

Links

• Website: https://bountystash.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattji/

Web Designing, Architecting, AI-ing, by Matt Ji was originally published in Design & Critical Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Abstract

In 2024, there will be both possibilities and difficulties in UX design. While affordable and flexible, online education programmes might not give us enough real-world experience. UX designers are in high demand in both the tech and non-tech sectors, but competition for jobs is fierce, particularly in the wake of pandemic-related layoffs that have favoured seasoned designers with experience in specific domain. The reality of UX practice includes complicated collaborations, quick changes, meeting deadlines, and striking a balance between user wants and company objectives. The business is changing as a result of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) as well, which streamlines procedures while posing questions about the possible replacement of human designers. Nevertheless, creativity and emotional intelligence are still crucial.

The hype is over or not! How to prepare for ux practical scenarios?

As an UX designer, the state of design in 2024 presents both exciting opportunities and challenges. With education becoming more accessible and the tech industry heavily promoting UX design as a hot career path, it’s crucial to strike a balance between the promising programs and the realities of practice. However, how newcomers could navigate around the pool of information and how to break into the industry is still a vague path to many. Some stops due to the life burden, some quit after so many failed attempts.

The Rise of Online Education

One of the most significant developments in 2024 is the proliferation of online UX design courses and programs. Platforms like Coursera, Udemy, and edX offer a wide range of UX design courses, from introductory levels to advanced specializations. These online programs provide a flexible and cost-effective way for aspiring designers to gain theoretical knowledge and practical skills.

However, it’s important to note that while online courses can be valuable resources, they may not fully prepare you for the complexities of real-world UX design challenges. Hands-on experience and mentorship from seasoned professionals are still essential for developing a well-rounded skillset. That’s why many experienced designers use social media, such as Linkedin, Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok to build their personal brand in order to create business with their talent and experience as well.

This give us a wide range of getting design education. However the question is the practicality of these courses, and the credibility also a big issue as well. Of course, word of mouth is a good method to know the quality of the courses from other designers but the big part of success lie on us.

The Demand for UX Designers in Tech

The tech industry has been actively promoting UX design as a highly sought-after career path, fueling the perception that it’s a hot job market. Companies recognize the importance of delivering exceptional user experiences, and they are willing to invest in talented UX designers who can create intuitive and engaging digital products.

While the demand for UX designers is indeed high, it’s crucial to understand that the job market is also becoming increasingly competitive. As more individuals pursue UX design education, the pool of candidates grows larger, making it more challenging to stand out and secure desirable positions.

Especially, when the tech sector has experienced a slowdown in UX job growth after pandemic, with companies implementing cost-cutting measures and layoffs. This has led to a surplus of experienced UX designers seeking employment, making it more challenging for newcomers to secure entry-level positions. Companies hiring in 2024 are likely to favor seasoned designers with AI knowledge and practical experience over junior candidates. The perception of market saturation has intensified, with the supply of designers outweighing the demand in certain regions or sectors.

Everything changed rapidly during and after the pandemic, the urge to expand design team in the market increased which lead to the explosion of demanding for design role. However, it created a knowledge and experience gap when the workforce tried to fill it with fresh batch of designers pretend to be experienced one.

However, since 2022 the downfall started for tech industries, mass layoff happened overnight and continue till 2024.

What happened? Why interest in expand the design or product team and then cut them off? Is it because of the hype of having design team to create value that stakeholders cannot foreseen yet?

Looking back, as a UX designer myself and UX design instructor at different bootcamp and short training courses, quite a significant number of designer wannabe just take courses because of appealing message about the promising future career. Graduate with few capstone projects does not promise a place in a team anymore. I have experienced first hand the mass layoff in tech around here, business is smarter in hiring an individual nut just because you have some things that might work for them but you have to prove that you bring in a certain value. Years of experience also does not promise that you’re a value member, they have way more ideas about what to look into when hiring a designer now.

The Reality of Practice in Tech

While the tech industry presents exciting opportunities for UX designers, it’s important to understand the realities of practice in 2024. The field of UX design is constantly evolving, with new technologies, methodologies, and user behaviors emerging at a rapid pace. Successful UX designers must be adaptable, continuously learning, and able to navigate complex cross-functional collaborations. Ego is something we have to check frequently. Setting too high might lead to overpraise yourself but cannot allow others to undermine your importance within the team as well.

Furthermore, the tech industry often operates under tight deadlines and high-pressure environments, requiring UX designers to balance user needs with business objectives and technical constraints. Effective communication, problem-solving, and stakeholder management skills are essential for navigating these challenges. Easier said than done in CEO driven company or any driven environment but Product/User driven approach.

The unstoppable rise of AI and automation technologies is reshaping the UX industry as well. While AI can streamline many aspects of the design process, such as user research, prototyping, and trend analysis, it also presents new challenges and ethical considerations. Companies are increasingly adopting AI-powered design tools and leveraging generative AI to identify user needs, draft technical documents, and create product designs. This trend raises concerns about the potential replacement of human designers by AI, although experts argue that AI cannot fully replicate the emotional intelligence, creativity, and human connection required for effective UX design, but who knows what might happen. Nobody had believe that we could travel further than the Earth until the scientists proved us wrong.

Despite the advancements in AI and automation, the core principles of human-centered design remain essential. UX design is not solely about aesthetics or web design; it is about creating intuitive, accessible, and convenient experiences tailored to specific user needs and behaviors.As consumers become more discerning and demand high-quality digital products, the human touch and expertise of UX designers will be crucial in maintaining consumer trust and delivering exceptional user experiences. Companies cannot rely solely on AI-generated solutions and must prioritize usability, accessibility, and convenience to remain competitive. Hence, we are still have to room to growth with a solid foundation and the advancement when using AI to help us create value for the business.

Diversification of UX Opportunities

Despite the challenges in the tech sector, the demand for UX designers is growing in non-traditional industries such as finance, government, and healthcare. These sectors are undergoing rapid digitization and actively seeking talented individuals to contribute to user-centric design and improve customer experiences.The diversification of UX opportunities presents a promising avenue for aspiring designers, as these industries may offer more entry-level positions and growth potential.

However, in order to get into these sectors require specialized knowledge or industry-specific skills which even senior designers find it difficult. In addition to, most employers prefer people who have worked in those sectors to non-experience one no matter how well their process and mindset could be.

Conclusion

As a UX designer in 2024, it’s crucial to approach the promising programs and industry promotions with a balanced perspective. While online education and the tech industry’s demand for UX designers present exciting opportunities, it’s important to recognize the realities of practice and the competitive job market.

Successful UX designers in 2024 will be those who combine theoretical knowledge with hands-on experience, continuously develop their skills, and cultivate essential soft skills like communication, problem-solving, and adaptability. By striking a balance between the promises and realities, aspiring UX designers can navigate the challenges and seize the opportunities that the field presents in 2024 and beyond.

Written by Linh Nguyen.

About the author
Linh Nguyen is a UX Designer.

Links

• Substack: https://linknguyen.substack.com/

The Evolving Landscape of Design in 2024, by Linh Nguyen was originally published in Design & Critical Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.