Abstract
As design becomes increasingly automated and abstracted, the act of designation, once tied to human intentionality, appears to be lifting away from the human. In the era of exocapitalism, defined by Poliks and Trillo as a system unbound from the human condition and driven by self-replicating logics of value extraction, design too is being reconfigured through machinic and algorithmic processes. This paper introduces the concept of exodesign to describe this shift: the deterritorialisation of design’s human-centred agency amidst the rise of software stacks, machine learning, and cybernetic optimisation systems. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s notions of epiphylogenesis and general organology, alongside ontological and meta-design theories, it argues that design’s locus of operation is now distributed across recursive, inorganic strata that sense, adapt, and redesign themselves. Rather than opposing this exogenic drift, the paper proposes a hybrid account of design’s organological condition, an exo/endo interplay necessary for rethinking practice under planetary-scale automation.
Keywords
Design philosophy; Critical design; Philosophy of technology; Design politics
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1594
Citation
Sutevski, C. (2026) Designations drift: Exodesign and the epiphylogenesis of practice, 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.2026.1594
Creative Commons License
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Included in
Designations drift: Exodesign and the epiphylogenesis of practice
As design becomes increasingly automated and abstracted, the act of designation, once tied to human intentionality, appears to be lifting away from the human. In the era of exocapitalism, defined by Poliks and Trillo as a system unbound from the human condition and driven by self-replicating logics of value extraction, design too is being reconfigured through machinic and algorithmic processes. This paper introduces the concept of exodesign to describe this shift: the deterritorialisation of design’s human-centred agency amidst the rise of software stacks, machine learning, and cybernetic optimisation systems. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s notions of epiphylogenesis and general organology, alongside ontological and meta-design theories, it argues that design’s locus of operation is now distributed across recursive, inorganic strata that sense, adapt, and redesign themselves. Rather than opposing this exogenic drift, the paper proposes a hybrid account of design’s organological condition, an exo/endo interplay necessary for rethinking practice under planetary-scale automation.