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Nearly all design is now interaction design. Contemporary design projects are shaped by ongoing processes of digitalization and the economic imperatives of a data-driven sociotechnical ecosystem. This position paper makes two connected points: (1) that in order to design effectively with the digital, it is necessary to develop an understanding of its character (ontology) – what it is and does – and corresponding design methods and approaches for handling platformed relations; and (2) that there is a pressing need for real innovation, imagination, and proposition of genuine alternatives – design as a practice of hope.

Intensifying social and environmental challenges demands restructuring sustainable design frameworks in which communities’ resilience and empowerment are at the forefront. This research draws insights into that by engaging with textile-making communities located across Northern Ireland and Umeå/Sweden to examine their role in creating and networking resistance. It contributes to recognizing social and collective dimensions of sustainability by exploring how textile-making practices foster agency and solidarity. To examine the textile communities’ making practices, the intersection of three key concepts is used: craftivism by Greer (2008), third places theorized by Oldenburg (1989), and communities of practice drawing on Wenger’s (1998) framework. These concepts create a unique lens to examine textile communities’ contributions to reframing sustainability that reflects on cultural and collective aspects. Discussions and empirical data gathered show that involvement in collective textile-making can heal the broken connections between production and consumption as well as increase the well-being of individuals and communities. The paper concludes by providing suggestions to reshape design practice that accommodates collectives as crucial actors of fashion production networks. By understanding the adaptiveness of the textile communities to uncertainties and complexities, design practice can embrace “dancing with complexity” and co-create alternative structures and relations.

Contemporary connected things entail ongoing relations between producers, end users, and other actors characterized by ongoing updates and production of data about and through use. These relations are currently governed by Terms of Service (ToS) and related policy documents, which are known to be mostly ignored beyond the required interaction of ticking a box to indicate consent. This seems to be a symptom of failure to design for effectively mediating ongoing relations among multiple stakeholders involving multiple forms of value generation. In this paper, we use ToS as an entrance point to explore design practices for democratic data governance. Drawing on posthuman perspectives, we make three posthuman design moves exploring entanglements, decentering, and co-performance in relation to Terms of Service. Through these explorations we begin to sketch a space for design to engage with democratic data governance through a practice of what we call revealing design that is aimed at meaningfully making visible these complex networked relations in actionable ways. This approach is meant to open alternative possible trajectories that could be explored for design to enable genuine democratic data governance.

Prototeams are provisional or speculative teams prototyping and rehearsing future design practices.

Public deliberation on data calls for a participatory design approach adapted to the complexities of data-driven systems.

There is a need for spaces that can support reflecting on and reimagining design, and redirecting it toward sustainment and justice. Such spaces would necessarily operate with the understanding that design is ontological and has political consequences. We might think of such spaces as metabolic design museums. In this paper, we imagine how metabolic museums might help to redesign design through keeping process at their heart and critically unpacking design’s involvement in urgencies as well as possibilities to envision and move towards more just futures. To do this, we build on intersectional feminist analysis of existing design museums through museum visits and participatory workshops, as well as inspiration from activist spaces; and we speculate about how feminist tactics applied by para-museums could catalyze transformational processes. If those processes were successful, a design museum would then enter into a state of continuous metabolization and become able to contribute to transforming design.

The design discipline is implicated in thetrajectories that have led us to an unsustainable present. There is an urgency to re-direct the design discipline, so that it can become able to not onlystay with past and present trouble, but also to develop other futures. To see how design museums might support change rather than preservation, welook to the example of protest archives. Based onan analysis of relational space, we suggest that therelative crowdedness of protest archives emerges out of matters of care, and allows for the development of alternative ways of being and creating. We thus identify a set of qualities that might be used to inform development of alternative spaces for care in design that aim to become able to respond to urgencies and to open up more just futures.

In the face of massively increased technological complexity, it is striking that so many of today’s computational and net- worked things follow design ideals honed decades ago in a much different context. These strong ideals prescribe a presenta- tion of things as useful tools through design and a withdrawal of aspects of their functionality and complexity. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, we trace this ‘withdrawal program’ as it has persisted in the face of increasing computational complexity. Currently, design is in a dilemma where computational products can be seen as brilliantly designed and engag- ing to use yet can also be considered very problematic in how they support hidden agendas and often seem less than trust- worthy. In this article, we analyse factors shaping this emergent ethical dilemma and reveal the concept of a widening rift between what computational things actually are and do and the ways in which they are presented as things for use. Against this backdrop, we argue that there is a need for a new orientation in design programs to adequately address this deepening rupture between the aesthetics and ethics in the design of computational things.