Design and Culture

Design Anthropology: Designing for Radical Alternative Futures

How can design anthropology contribute to addressing the contemporary polycrisis and the shaping of social transformation and radical alternative futures at scale?

This special issue explores the potential of design anthropology as a transdisciplinary, interventional, future-oriented research field committed to co-creating socio-cultural change and fostering sustainable and just worlds. It asks how design anthropology can mobilize localized knowledge, cultivate collaborative approaches, and employ imaginative speculation to confront interconnected global challenges and envision larger-scale alternative futures, and it examines how it does and might do so.

Design anthropology combines the situated, comparative study of societies and cultures with design’s orientation toward shaping futures. Design anthropologists therefore investigate emerging cultural practices and can generate situated possibilities, socio-material insights, and collaborative engagements to inform new behaviors, modes of knowledge and reflection, technologies, and practices of world-making. As global societal and socio-ecological crises intensify and multiply, there is arguable an urgent need for design anthropology to extend its potential beyond localized and near-future perspectives and interventions to engage with larger-scale, long-term, and complex challenges—without abandoning the ethics and deep engagements of situated practice.

In this special issue, we aim to explore these questions with attention to a range of open issues facing contemporary societal and planetary conditions from design anthropological approaches, including—but not limited to—questions of change, transformation, scale, temporality, knowledge, relationality, and epistemic justice.

We invite design anthropology and other work at the intersection of anthropology of design, futures, technology, and socioecology, with particular emphasis on responses to the polycrisis—the entangled dynamics of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, systemic inequity, extractive data economies, geopolitical volatility, democratic erosion, towards radical approaches to regeneration, justice and pluriversality. We welcome theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and empirical contributions, including research articles, visual essays and statements of pedagogy or practices. We encourage strong theoretical, methodological, and conceptual contributions anchored in real-world cases of transformation. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Designs for socio-ecology: addressing climate adaptation, biodiversity restoration, degrowth and regenerative practices, transition and resilience design.
• Navigating the polycrisis: designing amid cascading risks and uncertainty; linking local interventions to large scale social change and societal transformation; design anthropology in urgent times, connecting radicalism and scale.
• More-than-human sources of alternative, radical futures: multispecies and non-anthropocentric approaches to designing for planetary limits.
• Responsible digitalization in times of crisis and increasing digital divides: epistemic justice of AI, algorithms data management and digital infrastructures for socio-ecological goals.
• Decolonizing and pluriversal design: Indigenous and marginalized knowledges, place-based and situated knowing, equity and alternative world-making practices.
• Green transitions and degrowth: circularity, bio-based materials, repair cultures, circular procurement, regenerative economies, the roots and radical nature of such movements
• Reimagining socio-political and economic futures: cooperative platforms, alternative forms of social, political and economic organisation and institutional experiments at scale.

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