One of the consequences of such anthropocentrically attributed ‘progress’ is the reassurance of dominance and power to the majoritarian. To contradict this, the ontological and material processes that sustain such a design-expressed relationality need to be undermined. This demands an ontological reassessment of design in which ‘problem-solving’ principles are not entailed (Fry and Nocek 2021). This means that design must become something else without repeating the same rationalist operations that sustain such an anthropocentric form. Citing a famous human-centred design thinking idea, it is necessary to let go of devising “(…) courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon 1996, 111)—for whom exactly?—and face the crisis as a problematic (Fry and Nocek 2021).
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
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