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This paper examines the seeming repositioning of design as a central domain of thought and action concerned with the meaning and production of socionatural life. It suggests that critical design studies are being actively reconstituted –perhaps more clearly than many social and human sciences and professional fields—as a key space for thinking about life and its defense from increasingly devastating anthropogenic forces. There is a hopeful recognition of the multidimensional character of design as material, cultural, epistemic, political, and ontological, all at once. Design, in short, is being acknowledged as a decisive world-making practice, even if often found wanting in this regard. The mood seems to be settling in, at least among a small but possibly growing number of design theorists and practitioners, for playing a more self-aware, and constructive, role in the making and unmaking of worlds. This means that the political character of design is being more readily acknowledged. New design lexicons and visions are being proposed as a result. The first part of this paper summarizes some of these trends, including the uneven but increasingly intersecting geographies from which they arise. Together, they are seen as constituting a transnational discursive formation of critical design studies. The second part shows the tensions, but also potential synergies and bridges, between approaches stemming from the Global South and those from the Global North, broadly speaking. The third part, finally, tackles the question of the relation between design and autonomy, examining autonomous design as a particular proposal within the transnational critical design studies field. While the analysis is offered as a hypothesis more than as a thoroughly substantiated argumentation, the paper hopes to contribute performatively to constructive articulations of the emergent trends.

Autonomous design and the emergent transnational critical design studies field