Abstract
How to overcome design ‘defuturing’ effects? Design scholarship argues that design’s adverse contributions stem from its limited projective capacities to reflect about what design designs and the inherent power structures it conceals. Several design approaches emerged to equip designers with philosophical and social science frameworks and overcome design’s ‘defuturing’ effects. Yet, the ability of these theoretical frameworks to fundamentally change design remains debated. This paper contributes to this discussion by exploring the epistemological underpinnings of five approaches – Transition Design, Mission-Oriented Design, Speculative Design, Pluriversal Design, and More-Than- Human Design. We develop an ‘anticipatory archaeology’ of these theoretical formations to study how the epistemic discontinuities introduced to overcome prevailing modes of doing and knowing in design reconfigure the design’s object, agency, and process altering the world. We argue that overcoming defuturing effects by design depends not only on new projective capacities for designer, but on rethinking what projecting means within design practice itself.
Keywords
Design futuring; Design epistemology; Transition design; Speculative design; More-than- human design; Design project
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.356
Citation
Chataigner, M.(2025) From Projecting Futures to Projecting Otherwise: An Anticipatory Archaeology of Emerging Design Epistemologies, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.356
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 2 - Design Futuring
From Projecting Futures to Projecting Otherwise: An Anticipatory Archaeology of Emerging Design Epistemologies
How to overcome design ‘defuturing’ effects? Design scholarship argues that design’s adverse contributions stem from its limited projective capacities to reflect about what design designs and the inherent power structures it conceals. Several design approaches emerged to equip designers with philosophical and social science frameworks and overcome design’s ‘defuturing’ effects. Yet, the ability of these theoretical frameworks to fundamentally change design remains debated. This paper contributes to this discussion by exploring the epistemological underpinnings of five approaches – Transition Design, Mission-Oriented Design, Speculative Design, Pluriversal Design, and More-Than- Human Design. We develop an ‘anticipatory archaeology’ of these theoretical formations to study how the epistemic discontinuities introduced to overcome prevailing modes of doing and knowing in design reconfigure the design’s object, agency, and process altering the world. We argue that overcoming defuturing effects by design depends not only on new projective capacities for designer, but on rethinking what projecting means within design practice itself.