︎ Writing
—Thinking Through Intervention: Design, History, and the Artificial can be read here.
This essay reconsiders Clive Dilnot’s concept of thinking through intervention to address a critical gap in design theory: the lack of a reflexive, historically attuned framework for understanding design’s role as historical agency. I argue that intervention—understood as both an epistemological and ontological act—offers a speculative, pluriversal, and ethical mode of engaging with contemporary complexity. Drawing on critical and interdisciplinary perspectives, I contend that design’s agency lies not in solving problems but in reconfiguring relations among people, ecologies, and futures—proposing a pedagogical reorientation toward care, accountability, and situated world-making. This requires a shift from seeing design merely in history—as a practice unfolding within given historical contexts—to understanding design as history, actively constituting the trajectories, relations, and conditions through which history itself is made.
—Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset can be read here and is available in print in Further Reading Journal, “Learning Within, Learning Without: Modes of Design Enquiry,” No. 4 (2025).
(TSPS)..., is a manifesto of sorts for design and our collective future. TSPS is far from revolutionary or exhaustive—if anything, it serves to instigate a conversation to help build imagination or capacity to think within and beyond our present moment. TSPS is part of a larger body of work which examines the role of the conventional practice of design and traditional design curriculum under conditions of unsustainability.
—Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset can be read here and is available in print in Further Reading Journal, “Learning Within, Learning Without: Modes of Design Enquiry,” No. 4 (2025).
⌱Design as a conventional practice is problematic, it offers few solutions.
⌱Design should encompass a new circulation of thinking and acting.
⌱Design should look beyond capitalist/modernist agendas.
⌱Design is more than a tool for the benefits of the commercial sector.
⌱Design as a conventional practice is inherently exclusionary.
⌱Design is ALWAYS political, never innocent.
⌱Design should understand its ontological dimensions.
⌱Design as a conventional practice sustains unsustainability.
⌱Design is entirely social.
⌱Design should consider the potential of undesign.
⌱Design and technology are indivisible.
⌱Design should be a practical and intellectual project for transformation.
The conventional practice of design is defined by the standardized and systematized practices commonly employed in the field of design focused on the planned production of images, signs, symbols, objects, and experiences operating in the service of commerce acting on client instruction. The conventional practice of design, along with its traditional disciplinary knowledge, is a product and service of its historical relationship with the interests of capitalism and the development of technologies. The use of the term conventional practice refers to an attitude about design activities, behaviours, or procedures that seem habitual within the field. Within the context of the conventional practice of design, the term is used specifically to underscore this attitude and or cultural value system—the prevailing normative perspectives shaping the understanding of design within both academic curricula and commercial contexts.
Global change is defined by changes in the global environment (including alterations in climate, land productivity, oceans or other water resources, atmospheric chemistry, and ecological systems) that may alter the capacity of the Earth to sustain life.
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/13330/chapter/5