RELATED TERMS: World; World-as-Milieu; World-Building; Worldlessness #1
How are we to understand whether contemporary and past design practices are vitally important or utterly trivial, or a mixture of both. In other words, do they matter and, if so, how do they matter?
From this perspective, it is notable that contemporary design practices are often described as world-building or world-making, even in their more critical or speculative forms, such as that of Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby. For example, in Speculative Everything, they argues that,
“Although design usually references sculpture and painting for material, formal and graphic inspiration, and more recently the social sciences for protocols on working with and studying people — if we are interested in shifting design’s focus from designing for how the world is now to designing for how things could be — we will need to turn to speculative culture and what Lubomír Doležel has called an ‘experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise’.” (Dunne and Raby, 2013: 69)
Dunne and Raby describe a design experiment in which they began with new ways of organising everyday life through alternative beliefs, values, priorities and ideologies, proceeding thereafter to develop scenarios and personas to bring it to life. In doing so, they sought to “tell worlds rather than stories”, as they put it, citing Bruce Sterling (Sterling and Bosch, 2012)[1]. The question they pose for this approach is whether the viewer, when presented with design proposals for objects, would imagine the world to which the designs belong, thereby moving from the specific to the general. They contend that,
“This is very different from other world-making activities such as cinema and game design in which the world itself is shown, and even architecture, which usually presents an overview from which the viewer has to imagine the specific.” (Dunne and Raby, 2013: 173)
World-building, indeed, has been proposed as a design discipline in its own right, for example, by Alex McDowell (2019: 105), who defines worldbuilding as, “a narrative and systems design practice that exists at the intersection of design, technology and storytelling.”
Taking this emphasis on world-building a stage further, architectural theorists Beatrice Colomina and Mark Wigley (2016: 9) argue that, “There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world.” They continue, “Design is what you are standing on. lt is what holds you up. And every layer of design rests on another and another and another.” (Colomina and Wigley, 2016: 10)[2].
Pursuing this line of thought to a conclusion, Rolando Vazquez (2017: 77), whose concern is the decolonisation of design, informs us that, “Design came to name modernity’s way of worlding the world.” Vazquez argues that, from a decolonial perspective, “modernity appears as a world historical reality with universal pretensions, one that in its negation of earth and other worlds affirms itself as anthropocentric and Eurocentric in kind.”
In terms of design theory, practice and research, then, Roland Vegso’s book, Worldlessness After Heidegger: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, is a valuable antidote, complement or supplement to material cultural, engineering, utilitarian, aesthetic, positivist or dialectical approaches to design as world-building or world-forming.
In this context, Vegso may be used to provide an important caveat to the formula that: “we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us”, as expressed in ontological designing by Anne-Marie Willis (2006: 70) and reiterated by the likes of Tony Fry and Arturo Escobar. For example, Fry (2012: 1) argues for a recognition of, “the indivisible relation between the formation of the world of human fabrication and the making of mankind itself” and an acknowlegement that, “we are born into a designed world that designs a great deal of our mode of becoming and acting” (2012: 158); while Escobar (2018: 4) explicitly cites Willis’, “double movement of ontological designing, namely, that we design our world and our world designs us back – in short design designs.”
The Vegso-inspired caveat could be stated as follows:
‘we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us as worldless’.
This concurs with Vazquez (2017: 78), who states that, “Modernity as global design is produced as worldlessness.”
Related to this phenomenon in design, it is also common among activists, artists and academics to speak of worldmaking and worldbuilding, as noted by Roberto Sirvent (Palmer and Sirvent, 2022) in an interview with Tyrone S. Palmer about Black critical thought, poetics and negativity.
This poses the following question for designers, as well as for activists, artists and academics, as formulated by Vegso (2020: 3):
What if your task today, as world builders, is “precisely to imagine worldlessness without an apocalypse?”
I would re-phrase Vegso’s question to take into account some of the ten speculative propositions he offers on pages 293-296 in his pursuit of an affirmative view of worldlessness. The question then becomes:
What if your task today is to imagine worldlessness without an apocalypse;
in non-eschatological terms, (that is, not in terms of the ‘end of the world’) (Proposition 6);
in non-messianic terms (that is, not in terms of saving the world or anyone or anything in the world) (Proposition 7);
without a sense of loss [because you cannot lose what you have never had and cannot have] (Proposition 2)
In other words, to cite the slogan of Serpica Naro, a fictitious Anglo-Japanese designer invented by a Milan-based activist fashion collective:
“Why save the world when you can design it?” (Vanni, 2015)
This slogan may count as an ironic counterpart to Vegso’s sentiment articulated on p.307 that:
“if the world is neither all that is possible nor an absolute necessity, in the end humanity might have always been free from the burden of having to save that which does not need to be and cannot be saved.”
Notes
[1] In this interview (Sterling and Bosch, 2012), Sterling defines design fiction, a little contradictorily, as, “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change. That’s the best definition we’ve come up with. The important word there is diegetic. It means you’re thinking very seriously about potential objects and services and trying to get people to concentrate on those rather than entire worlds or political trends or geopolitical strategies. It’s not a kind of fiction. It’s a kind of design. It tells worlds rather than stories.”
If people are concentrating on potential objects and services and not entire worlds, how is it that these objects or services tell worlds and not stories; or, indeed, how is it that they ’tell’ at all?
[2] A tangential corroboration of the worldly dominance of design, through a kind of quantitative or metric confirmation, assuming that design practices are closely associated with material production, is highlighted by Jose Luis de Vicente (2025: 14) when he notes that, “anthropogenic mass, or the [weight of the] number of things produced by human beings, surpassed for the first time all biomass, that is, the weight of all living things on the planet.”
Elhacham et al. (2020) define anthropogenic mass as, “the mass embedded in inanimate solid objects made by humans (that have not been demolished or taken out of service, which we define as ‘anthropogenic mass waste’).”
For Elhacham et al. (2020), from whom this comparative measure is derived, “This quantification of the human enterprise gives a mass-based quantitative and symbolic characterization of the human-induced epoch of the Anthropocene.”
“Beyond biomass,” Elhacham et al. (2020) also note that, “it is becoming ever more imperative to quantitatively assess and monitor the material flows of our socioeconomic system, also known as the socioeconomic metabolism. This quantification is at the heart of the economy-wide material flow analysis framework, under the field of industrial ecology, which is based on mass balance accounting.”
References
Colomina, B. and Wigley, M. (2016) Are we human?: notes on an archaeology of design. Zurich, CH: Lars Muller.
Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2013) Speculative everything: design, fiction and social dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Elhacham, E. et al. (2020) Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass, Nature, 588, pp. 442–444. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5.
Escobar, A. (2018) Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Fry, T. (2012) Becoming human by design. London, UK: Berg.
McDowell, A. (2019) Storytelling shapes the future, Journal of Futures Studies, 23(3), pp. 105–112. doi: 10.6531/JFS.201903.
Palmer, T. S. and Sirvent, R. (2022) BAR Book Forum: Interview with Tyrone S. Palmer, Black Agenda Report. Available at: https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-interview-tyrone-s-palmer (Accessed: 14 January 2026).
Vanni, I. (2015) “Why save the world when you can design it?” Precarity and fashion in Milan, Fashion Theory, 20(4), pp. 441–460. doi: 10.1080/1362704X.2015.1088738.
Vazquez, R. (2017) Precedence, Earth and the Anthropocene: Decolonizing design, Design Philosophy Papers, 15(1), pp. 77–91. doi: 10.1080/14487136.2017.1303130.
Vegso, R. (2020) Worldlessness after Heidegger: Phenomenology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
Vicente, J. L. de (2025) 30 billion metric tons of things, in Subiros, O. (ed.) Matter matters: Designing with the world. Barcelona, ES: Barcelona City Council; Actar Publishers, pp. 14–16.
Willis, A.-M. (2006) Ontological designing, Design Philosophy Papers, 4(2), pp. 69–92. doi: 10.2752/144871306×13966268131514.
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