Abstract
Design’s vocabulary is saturated with metaphors of control (targets, strategies, impacts), revealing a militarized ontology that frames design as domination over problems, contexts, and futures. This paper examines the politics of wording and introduces Unwording Design as a practice of ontological care: dismantling violent grammars that sustain extractive imaginaries and cultivating vocabularies grounded in affection, reciprocity, and relational ethics. Drawing on Haraway’s insight that the thoughts we use to think matter (2016), Butler’s performativity (2006), and Escobar’s ontological design (2018), we argue that transforming language transforms the worlds design brings into being. Unwording shifts from languages of war to languages of tenderness, from users to companions, from targets to relations, from innovation to care. In dialogue with feminist, decolonial, and earth-being perspectives (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 1993), this paper envisions design evolution through a living vocabulary of care, inviting plural, situated practices that affirm coexistence and collective flourishing.
Keywords
ontological design, ethics of care, decolonial design, semiotics
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.596
Citation
Sánchez de la Barquera Estrada, X., and Dávila Urrutia, S. (2026) Unwording Design: Demilitarizing the Imaginaries of Design, 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.2026.596
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Unwording Design: Demilitarizing the Imaginaries of Design
Design’s vocabulary is saturated with metaphors of control (targets, strategies, impacts), revealing a militarized ontology that frames design as domination over problems, contexts, and futures. This paper examines the politics of wording and introduces Unwording Design as a practice of ontological care: dismantling violent grammars that sustain extractive imaginaries and cultivating vocabularies grounded in affection, reciprocity, and relational ethics. Drawing on Haraway’s insight that the thoughts we use to think matter (2016), Butler’s performativity (2006), and Escobar’s ontological design (2018), we argue that transforming language transforms the worlds design brings into being. Unwording shifts from languages of war to languages of tenderness, from users to companions, from targets to relations, from innovation to care. In dialogue with feminist, decolonial, and earth-being perspectives (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 1993), this paper envisions design evolution through a living vocabulary of care, inviting plural, situated practices that affirm coexistence and collective flourishing.