Diseña

Rethinking Sister Cities for the Anthropocene: Cape Town and Reykjavik ― A Reflective Dialogue

2025-10-23T14:49:15+00:00

This design dialogue offers a glimpse into a collaborative environmental design project: Sister Cities for the Anthropocene (SCA). The core idea of SCA is to reactivate and reimagine the Sister Cities International program of the mid-20^th century for the existential crises of the 21^st century. In the introductory section of this dialogue, the environmental anthropologists who conceived Sister Cities for the Anthropocene detail the key principles of the concept as well as its scientific basis. The conversation then turns toward engagement with colleagues in Cape Town and Reykjavík, with expertise in issues of climate adaptation, environmental justice, and ecological systems in their respective cities. This dialogue exemplifies the first phase of the SCA design process: a series of brainstorming sessions among experts on what the optimal goals and forms that a Sister Cities for the Anthropocene relationship might take.

Wilding Practices Through Design: Playful Encounters for Reframing Control in Multispecies Cohabitation

2025-10-21T19:33:11+00:00

This article explores how design can reintroduce elements of wildness into urban environments through artifacts that foster multispecies interaction. Wildness is not defined as a return to nature, but as a relational and semiotic rupture of control. It is an opportunity for nonhuman agency to emerge within human-managed spaces. Drawing on theories of affordances, play, cultural heritage, and metacommunication, we investigate how artifacts can function as semiotic prompts for interspecies encounters, and how cultural familiarity can afford ecological disruption. We use design interventions in a Stockholm allotment garden as our example, where prototypes created as habitat elements for newts also provoked human curiosity, connections to gardening traditions, and multispecies activity. We argue that design should prioritize attunement, ambiguity, and divergence over mastery or harmony, thus supporting new forms of cohabitation within the constraints of urban life.

Mapping Tangible and Embodied Interactions in More-Than-Human Design: A Review of Research Tools

2025-11-27T23:39:23+00:00

This article reviews existing literature on human-animal entanglements to explore how justice-oriented designers utilize tangible artifacts as tools and mediators to rethink multispecies relationships. By analyzing the use of tools in the existing literature through a relationality lens, our research introduces pathways to rethink research tools and ways of doing that foreground justice-oriented multispecies interaction. Our findings illustrate how previous work that follows human-centric knowledge and interaction design modes for human-animal entanglements implicitly supports unjust interspecies power relations. By identifying emergent modes of research tools, this article offers a set of takeaways for designers to consider such tools as participants within entangled, reciprocal, and longer-term relational practices in non-human-controlled environments.

Granular Configurations: Attending to the Material Politics of Planetary Design

2025-12-16T14:20:20+00:00

This paper examines how planetary design is materially enacted through the granular politics of sand. Moving beyond abstract accounts of planetary entanglement, it traces how sand’s trajectories—across extraction zones, supply chains, and reclaimed coastlines—compose volatile and uneven urban futures. Drawing on research in Southeast Asia and the Netherlands, the paper shows how sand operates not merely as a construction input but as a medium of speculation, disruption, and socioecological harm. Through the lens of granular configurations, I develop a methodological framework that foregrounds friction, partiality, and multi-temporality in the making and unmaking of environments. This approach unsettles dominant narratives of design as coherent or systemically integrated, revealing instead its contingent, contested, and more-than-human formations. Attending to sand’s granular materiality opens new possibilities for situated, accountable, and reparative practices in an increasingly unstable world.

Solar Drawings and Moving Shades: An Affective Aesthetics for the Urban Climatic Mutation

2025-11-12T13:46:24+00:00

In a world saturated with planetary images that compel but rarely mobilize, we turn to solar drawings as an affective aesthetics for climate action. How can drawing attune us to changing landscapes while supporting transdisciplinary inquiries? We explored this in a workshop held in Barcelona in 2024, focusing on urban shades and extreme heat. At its core were anthotypes—solar drawings made with spinach emulsion—used to record the flickering presence of shades in different urban arenas. Thinking with anthotypes allows us to be affected by solar exposure as a planetary condition, reframing shades as inhabited or inhabitable regions. As we see it, these unstable records can become relevant forms of experiential research, activating embodied visual sensitivities to correspond to worlds undergoing climatic mutation through speculative explorations that seek to take overheated urban milieus into our own drawing hands.

The Ethics of an Aesthetics of Wonder for Planetary Care

2025-12-01T13:43:01+00:00

In design, the expression of values through form and experience is often referred to as aesthetics. In response to the ecological crisis, we explore wonder as a design aesthetics for planetary care. This exploration occurs through the presentation and critique of three seasonal activities with children in Sweden, aimed at inspiring local ecological curiosity: Appreciating the Wind, Looking for Frog Eggs, and Making Natural Perfumes. From these activities, we reflect upon the ethics of an aesthetics of wonder. This includes addressing the prioritization of human experience and the commodification of nature in design. We offer three contributions: defining and positioning wonder as a possible design aesthetics for planetary care, presenting three seasonal activities that situate wonder as an aesthetics in practice, and offering reflections on the ethics of wonder based on a critique of the activities.

Caring for the Land and Territorio as a Method for Participatory Design

2025-12-23T21:38:19+00:00

Rural communities in Europe that defend land-based practices and livelihoods face pressures to modernize in ways that reproduce a nature‒culture dualism. Design methods informed by Latin American ontologies seek to help communities identify and resist capitalist enclosure, make visible and legitimize local ways of knowing and traditions, and foster learning processes toward autonomy. Here, we report on our experiences in land-oriented, community-led participatory design, making material, communal artifacts in Italy and Spain. The artifacts range from animal stables to bee apiaries. We examine the artifacts and their makings through a lens of territorio (territory) to demonstrate a different land-based reality that resists colonial oppression. In these realities, communities are not mere observers of the changes around them, but they make their own present through the making of artifacts. These relational design methods supporting planetary co-habitability require care-full community-led engagement with the land.

Litany of Loss: Review of Disappearing Cities by Tony Fry

2025-12-01T14:31:39+00:00

Tony Fry’s Disappearing Cities is a catalogue of loss and deprivation, a litany of the many ways in which the contemporary city might meet its end. However, to the active reader, the book is an invitation to critical engagement with the legacy of Western modernist urbanism. It reveals that the infrastructures that currently support the city are precious and precarious and asks readers to understand how much an ethical practice of architecture rests on mitigating risk, and how much this is undermined by contemporary epistemes. Most importantly, it asks the reader to become an active storyteller with Fry, revealing and intervening in the ontological assumptions that structure contemporary urbanism.

Editorial. Designing within the Planetary Condition: Multiscalarity, Attention, and Habitability

2026-01-28T18:55:25+00:00

This introduction to the first volume on the planetary condition aims to situate how design research articulates with debates on planetarity, understood as a condition that exceeds the traditional scales, frameworks, and practices of design thinking and practice. To this end, the first part introduces a set of phenomena that allows us to understand the grammar of the planetary; the second part discusses its implications for design intervention and research. Finally, it proposes reading the articles that make up this first special issue through three analytical coordinates that seek to delineate a planetary design agenda: attention to multiscalar worlds, the deployment of cartographies of attention, and the exploration of forms of diplomacy oriented toward terrestrial habitability.