Design has long been a practice of smoothing away the rough edges of the world. Designers continue to play a role in streamlining products, optimizing processes, improving efficiency within organizations, automating user experiences, making interfaces more “user friendly” or making services and systems more seamless. But, in the present moment, the world is kicking back. 

Whether through lived experiences with technological glitches, homes full of networked devices that fail to understand global accents, alienating and dehumanizing work cultures in organizations, the breakdown of health systems during Covid-19, and the ongoing and intensifying climate crises, it is not difficult to conclude that a great deal of uncertainty, even chaos, characterizes the present moment. It makes no sense to continue using the same methods, approaches and processes to solve problems as those that created this state of affairs in the first place.

As designers, we see the themes of resistance, recovery, reflection and reimagination as ways of opening up alternative methodologies for the field of design in order to reconsider our knowledge, methods and approaches.

These themes offer design scholars and practitioners the opportunity to reflect on the epistemologies and assumptions embedded within the human-centered design tradition; the kind of methods and processes that are needed to engage with multiple crises of unchecked capitalism and environmental devastation; the modes of resistance that are possible across academic and cultural institutions as well as government, business and activism; and, importantly, we must participate in the reimagining of our ways of life with attention to design justice.