Abstract
Across contemporary design practice, an attitude has been consolidating design as diffractive sensemaking. It is not method- or outcome-oriented, nor even necessarily a discipline, but a habit of attention in which fragments, measures and memories, timings and routines, infrastructures and more-than-human traces are placed so they read through one another to develop conscious, situated practices. Often grounded in research practice, these approaches lead to diverse outcomes. In all of them, an ecosophic orientation keeps environmental, social and mental ecologies mutually in play without collapsing them into a single index or metric. In such practices, care appears as activism: framing, positioning, staging, doing and returning keep obligations alive beyond the designed event. Drawing on a diffractive reading of theory and exemplary practices, the article offers a compact synthesis that clarifies design’s role as situated diffractive sensemaking, making worlds more thinkable and, on that basis, more livable and answerable.
Keywords
oikos, sensemaking, diffractive, care
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1431
Citation
Vellvé Rafecas, J. (2026) Making Worlds Thinkable: Design as diffractive sensemaking., in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1431
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Making Worlds Thinkable: Design as diffractive sensemaking.
Across contemporary design practice, an attitude has been consolidating design as diffractive sensemaking. It is not method- or outcome-oriented, nor even necessarily a discipline, but a habit of attention in which fragments, measures and memories, timings and routines, infrastructures and more-than-human traces are placed so they read through one another to develop conscious, situated practices. Often grounded in research practice, these approaches lead to diverse outcomes. In all of them, an ecosophic orientation keeps environmental, social and mental ecologies mutually in play without collapsing them into a single index or metric. In such practices, care appears as activism: framing, positioning, staging, doing and returning keep obligations alive beyond the designed event. Drawing on a diffractive reading of theory and exemplary practices, the article offers a compact synthesis that clarifies design’s role as situated diffractive sensemaking, making worlds more thinkable and, on that basis, more livable and answerable.