Queer has the capacity to undermine the way of designing (in) the symbolic field of perception. In such a field, undifferentiated flows of senses and impulses are confined into falsely flexible meanings within language. Thus, queer invokes an anthropocentric abolitionist power (puissance) towards other and new trajectories, relationalities, and jubilantly unimaginable ways of being.
The non-object of queer design grasps abjection theory to formulate a design philosophy concept. It tries to contribute to the effort of imagining and practising design as capable of creating physical and conceptual objects beyond human-centred ontological biases that impact the way we relate to the world. It tries to contradict production standards and materiality that frame our perception of temporality, relationality, and experience within Cartesian divisions. It embodies the abject desire to move beyond fascination and repulsion and to overcome the boundaries of identity. The non-object of queer design tries to conceptualise design as a queering puissance, of which the ultimate target of critical inquiry is focused on human-centred design approaches and their founding anthropocentric biases.
The non-object of queer design has nothing to do with individuality or with human-centred design approaches. It aims to transgress identity and forms of relationality grounded and restrained on the desire of the lacking self. It is not authorship as the identity is superseded and the self is long annihilated. It is not a reifying materialistic process that imprints the Protagorean statement—the human as the measure of all things—into the genetic code of industrial manufacturing. It does not comply with materialisation processes that follow a set of standards based on the dimensions of the few majoritarians, letting the status of misfit, failed, disposable and forgotten for minoritarians, let alone when the minoritarian is not human. It is not representation as it inherently leads to bias and systems of signification within human perception. It is not a problem-solving adventure that claims to provide adjustments, corrections, and fixes to a problem we ourselves created and that we do not really want to solve. Such a ‘solution’ would entail a complete restructuring of not only social and material organisation, but mainly a new/other ontological redesign of how we are and how we relate. Instead, we prefer the medicalisation of euphemisms and myths like sustainable development for their potential domesticating effect. In this way, we keep things as they are and continue making from Earth’s exploitation a very profitable enterprise at the expense of both human and non-human life. This is the actual ‘solution’ sought.
The non-object of queer design entails a critical reflection and an immanent action that is inherently queer for collapsing seemingly stable categories with a making that is neither about and for me (or those like me) nor about and for you (or those like you). In such a making, there is neither subject nor object. There is a desire to design beyond and outside of the industrial, the professional, the digital, the artisanal, the zero-tolerance precision—that is, a desire to design beyond the ‘made by humans for humans’. This implies (un)thinking and (un)doing design with collective endeavours that entail unknown participants. For this purpose, co-creative and participatory design processes are compelling, if undertaken with no hierarchy or stratification of difference. The non-object of queer design embodies philosophical concepts like ‘radical compassion’, the making for the other at the expense of the self (MacCormack 2020b), to disengage from authorship, from the individual command of the process, and from assuring that the outcomes will always address the needs of the subject of design. In fact, it claims to design from the absence of the designer’s ego for a shared and collective production of physical and conceptual objects yet unthinkable for human significance. The non-object of queer design is the apocalypse of the designer.
The non-object of queer design may be undertaken as a concept in non-anthropocentric design approaches. It would potentially allow for the semiotic puissance of queering processes in the perverting of both human ontology and human materiality. To imagine processes, elements, epistemologies, and materialities of design as not entailed by anthropocentric and humanist signification systems and regimes is necessarily to interrogate us, humans, and our threatening forms of relationality.
Modern technology is enframed in a state that turns nature into an inexhaustible resource for human consumption and exploitation (Heidegger 1977). As design and technology are intrinsic to each other, the same enframing state of technology appears in design due to the shared modern and rationalist traditions. This prevents design from devising processes and methods further than those already established. In this way, a design process that embodies a queer methodology may pervert such linear continuity of materialisation and objectification processes. Both relate to normalisation in commensuration of desires as market goods, commodities, and consumer lifestyles (Hesford 2020). Such a perversion occurs because queer produces liminality: a moment of suspension in meaning where agency and structure emerge (Beech 2011; Kinane, Downey, and Parker 2016 apud Xu 2023). This liminality undermines regimes of normalisation by producing alterations in meaning because it creates a ground zero of experience from a set of undefined possibilities (Fonseca et al. 2018).
Giantini, G. (2024). The Non-Object of Queer Design: Anthropocentric Design on the Edge of Abjection, Perversion, and Ecstasy. Australian Feminist Studies, 39(122), 399–418. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2025.2499859