The text discusses the significance of contemporary design practices, particularly focusing on world-building as a vital approach for shaping societal values and ideologies. It explores the interplay between design, modernity, and worldlessness, proposing a shift from traditional world-making to envisioning worldlessness without apocalyptic implications, challenging designers to rethink their creative responsibilities.
Category Archives: Design and World
Worldlessness #1
RELATED TERMS: World; World-as-Milieu; World-Building; Worldlessness #2: Worldlessness and Design A Possible Phenomenology of the Anonymous, the Invisible, the Im-material and the Im-mediate It was noted in The Paradox of the Anonymous that Dan Hancox (2025) projectively and retrojectively ascribes to Walter Benjamin a wish or a command for us, “to sift through the rubble,Continue reading “Worldlessness #1”
Technology, Process Knowledge, Temporality and Design
RELATED TERMS: Hypomnesis, Hypermnesis and Anamnesis; Methodology and Method; Practice Dan Wang (2025: 71) distinguishes among three meanings of technology. The first is technologies as tools, for example, the pots, pans, knives, ovens and so on required to prepare a meal. Second, technologies can operate as explicit means of instruction, for example, the recipes, blueprintsContinue reading “Technology, Process Knowledge, Temporality and Design”
World as Geoeconomics and Geopolitics [Snippets 10]
RELATED TERMS: World; World-Building; Design, the Buddhisms, Geo-Politics and Geo-Economics The context for design practices in the 2020s, the macro framing ‘world’ or the macro framing narrative environment in which they operate, might be described as a period in which the existing world order is in transition. Many of the practices and verities of neoliberalContinue reading “World as Geoeconomics and Geopolitics [Snippets 10]”
(The) Common (World)
RELATED TERMS: (The) Everyday and Design; World; Worldlessness USE FOR: Shared World; World in Common You-I interconnectedness and Being-with The initial discursive sources for the recognition of the common, as the shared world, the only world that there is, are firstly Beata Stawarska’s dialogical phenomenology, which establishes the ontological primacy of the the You-I relationContinue reading “(The) Common (World)”
Design, the Buddhisms, Geo-Politics and Geo-Economics
RELATED TERMS: Mono No Aware and Ma; Sabi and Wabi-Sabi; World as Geoeconomics and Geopolitics [Snippets 10] Preamble In a post on David Lynch’s film set design in relation to the design of narrative environments (Narrative Environments – Lynchian Set Design), the significance of Tibet, meditation and yoga in Twin Peaks was seen to exhibit signsContinue reading “Design, the Buddhisms, Geo-Politics and Geo-Economics”
Design, Narratives, Pasts
RELATED TERMS: Design, Narratives, Futures Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) contended that we were finished with grand narratives or master narratives or narratives of mastery. Nevertheless, in 2017, George Monbiot contended that the political history of the second half of the 20th century could be summarised as the conflict between its two great narratives: the stories told,Continue reading “Design, Narratives, Pasts”
Theoretical Practice
RELATED TERMS: Actor Network Theory; Avant-Garde Movements; Cinema and Film Theory; Creative Thinking; Critical Theory; Critical Thinking; Design and Theory: Total Design; Design History; Design Practice and Functionalism; Heidegger; Interaction Design; Methodology and Method; Open Systems Theory; Postmodernism; Poststructuralism; Practice; Sculpture; Sloterdijk; World-Building It could be argued that a design, in bringing theory together withContinue reading “Theoretical Practice”
Terraforming
RELATED TERMS: World-building The name of the architectural practice, Terreform, was derived from the combination of “terre”, meaning earth or soil, and “reform”, meaning to rebuild, reconstruct or recreate. The founders sought to differentiate their practice from that of “terraforming”. In planetary engineering, terraforming is a process of transforming an alien atmosphere to create a habitableContinue reading “Terraforming”
Storyworld
RELATED TERMS: Imaginary; Dasein; Ontological metalepsis; Diégèse and Diegesis; World; Lifeworld – Lebenswelt – Umwelt; Actant; Actor Network Theory; Methodology and Method “The founding story of the academic world is Socrates being a gadfly.” (Jonathan Haight, quoted in an interview with David Shariatmadari, 2025) Design practice involves the articulation of (interpreted) narrative world/worlds and (embodied)Continue reading “Storyworld”
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