Abstract

In "State of Design from the Future," Daiana Zavate employs a speculative broadcast framing to interrogate the evolving responsibilities and political contours of design practice. Pushing the boundaries of the discipline to the point of absurdity, Zavate asks: What happens when design becomes fully politicized, leading to a world of Radical Design and ideological "Design Wars"? Are future designers fundamentally better equipped, or do they lack the foundational understanding to reconstruct a past they never experienced? The central claim posits that the world cannot truly change if designers maintain the same cognitive frameworks as the general populace. To avoid merely flattening differences or succumbing to the fatigue of an entirely Design-centric World, Zavate argues that design must evolve from a strictly practical discipline into a metaphysical exercise that actively interrogates space, constraints, and resources.

The key takeaways emphasize that surviving this hyper-designed future—where practitioners must transparently negotiate with Artificial Cognitive Systems to reconstruct lost human experiences—requires the cultivation of Multi-sight. This core skill is the capacity to hold multiple, simultaneous perspectives on a single entity, viewing it concurrently as an object, a system, an activity, and an effect. The future of design is thus framed not as mere artistic expression, but as reintegration. By utilizing Multi-sight to dynamically work with material, environmental, and political limits rather than simply quantifying them, designers can break through the constraints of contemporary practice and reveal structural possibilities for a radically different, yet entirely unknown, future.

CHANNEL: ARCHIVE 934 – FUTURECAST

Program: News from the Future
Segment: Catch-up/Keep-up Design Bulletin

The Exercise

Before the broadcast begins, a clarification. I am many things, but a good-decision maker ain’t one of them. Whether this piece considers the State of Design or the Future of Design, it will be up to you. The state of design part is a philosophical exercise, the future of design and imagination exercise.

Pushing the boundaries to the point of collapse of the idea, where absurdity might reveal structural questions that were looking tame and harmless, is a risk most of us are afraid to take. What if it reveals the weaknesses in my thinking, arguments, work, etc.? Wanting things to work blocks off possibilities for rethinking design, too. 

Many discussions in the past couple of years have revolved around the role of the designer and particularly oscillating between decision-making power designers should have access to and the political layer of design, more generally.

I thought of assuming the extreme views on that: a world of Radical Design.

In this imagined future, design has become fully politicized. Governments operate large design institutions; one of them is the Past Rescue Department, whose designers attempt to reconstruct fragments of the past which will be our focus, to figure out what kind of work is being done - Is their work “good” design? Are designers of the future better than the ones of today? Do they possess special skills? 

At the same time, the design landscape will include extremist and terrorist design groups that deliberately create disruptive experiences intended to reshape society. These conflicts are sometimes referred to as Design Wars. Fully-designed-informed political ideologies cause dramatic changes hard to categorize as all bad or all good. 

Designers collaborate continuously with Artificial Cognitive Systems, negotiating changes to infrastructure, knowledge systems, environments, and social practices - neither is allowed to work independently; their practice is shared and forced to be made transparent. Education in design has multiplied into countless programs and disciplines, and much of the population aims to become designers in some capacity.

A Design-centric World?

First, by making design central to how we conceive of the world, the world itself will be treated as a design problem.

Second, the task designers face in this scenario is not artistic expression. It is reintegration. The work consists in reimagining a world that once existed before design became so radical. Designers attempt to reconstruct the present using fragments of the past. People are tired of so much change. To feel that all your experiences are shaped by some designer group can be difficult. (One can further imagine that designers are the actors who step in when systems break. Sometimes they are also the system breakers. Some groups are slow change-makers, spreading their work over generations, while others are fast change-makers, aiming for overnight transformation of parts of the world. Imagination can run wild)

However, the deeper premise of the exercise is this:

The world cannot change if designers’ mindsets are the same as everyone’s.  

The exercise is meant to introduce what I take to be the core skill of the designer:

Multi-sight: The ability to conceive of something in multiple ways at the same time, or hold several perspectives on the same thing at once.

A designer must be able to look at something as an object, a system, an activity, a feeling, or an effect at the same time:

  • In how many different ways can this exist?
  • In how many different ways can it function?
  • What happens in each perspective if the conditions around it change?

Designing for something that can be more than one thing at the same time reveals why objects function the way they do and how they might function differently.

It becomes a kind of game of perspectives, maybe? A plurality of viewpoints held together by a mind that can think without flattening differences, a mind that can imagine without losing the point.

From this perspective, design is no longer simply a practical discipline. Beneath it lies a deeper layer of questions concerning space, constraints, and resources: a kind of metaphysical structure underlying design decisions.

Design always operates within limits: material limits, environmental limits, cognitive limits, political limits. But rather than counting the limits, we have to work with them at the same time by multi-sight.

This is why the exercise is not meant to be a purely horizontal act of imagination, simply inventing strange scenarios. Instead, it attempts to add structural possibility, showing how design thinking might operate when confronted with a world that is going to be very different, but we have no idea how exactly - revealing the limits of current design with the absence of multi-sight, and hopefully, creating an opening to break through such limits.

Now, to the future: 

Designer Division Expands Operations

Good evening. Oli-One & Linda34 here. 

This is Archive 9 – FutureCast, reporting on developments in historical reconstruction and the evolving role of design in preserving fragments of the human past.

In a development that few predicted centuries ago, the Past Rescue Department has officially expanded its operations by creating a Reintegration Designer Division. Their mission is unusual: to reconstruct fragments of everyday life from the past so that future generations can understand how humans once lived and, hopefully, can live again.

The challenge, however, is proving far greater than expected.

Designers assigned to the division frequently report a fundamental problem: they do not understand the world they are trying to reconstruct. Living in a society saturated with technological enhancements, they struggle to imagine basic activities that once took place without assistance systems. Worse, can they imagine a world where they do not hold all the power? Isn’t it this mission self-defeating?

One question reportedly dominated discussion in the department this morning:

"What the hell is paprika now?"

The investigation quickly shifted toward etymology, with teams hoping that tracing the linguistic history of everyday objects might reveal what has evolved into.

Despite a great deal of data, most of it is repetitive and utterly uninformative, and some losses of knowledge appear irreversible such as encrypted memes and inside-jokes.

Designers have been divided outside and inside the project as to how such reconstruction can make a difference. Still, let us find out their most notable progress.

Designer Rescue Team 1

Mission: Retrieve Activities of the Past in a World with Technological Enhancements

The first assignment focuses on children’s games once played without technological mediation.

Early experiments produced surprising results.

  • Hide and Seek has become nearly impossible to replicate. With location trackers permanently active, hiding is immediately detected.
  • Tag has been redesigned so that tagging is confirmed by drone-assisted proximity sensors. While the game can be played to a certain extent, children are relying too much on their drones to win. 
  • Telephone, the classic whispering game might be the most boring of them all. As everyone now relies on an in-ear correction interface that automatically fixes any transmission errors.

The team is now confronting a broader question:

When enhancements become constraints, can the original game continue into the future? Or must entirely new games emerge from the altered environment?

Designer Rescue Team 2

Mission: Retrieve Knowledge of the Past Under Conditions of “Enhanced Learning”

The second team faces a different challenge: reconstructing how knowledge was once acquired without support interfaces.

Their current experiment involves first-hand reading of primary texts: a process historically known simply as reading.

Many participants involved in engaging with these artifacts report severe difficulty and headaches. Most have never interacted with physical books.

The team’s first design task is therefore to redesign classic paperback works so they can survive in a world where paper objects are no longer being made.

Early prototypes include:

  • 100 Years of Solitude
    Reconstructed as a summarized narrative combined with an immersive family-experience module, including hovering character recognition.
  • The Divine Comedy
    Delivered with simplified language, character references, and a musical recital.
  • 1984
    Distributed as concept brief accompanied by a film adaptation.

The central design question emerging from these trials is unsettling:

When new systems make knowledge easier to access, do they simultaneously eliminate opportunities to think independently?

If so, researchers wonder whether some knowledge has been irredeemably lost because of the practices that are no longer available.

Designer Rescue Team 3

Mission: Recover Traditional Recipes for the Global Cook-Robot Network

Food reconstruction may be the most difficult project of all.

Climate change and redesigned production systems have eliminated many traditional ingredients. Entire categories of food are now unavailable.

Designers must therefore reconstruct historical recipes using whatever substitutes exist.

Current trials include:

  • Spaghetti Bolognese
    Prepared using all-purpose flour, now primarily manufactured for hair and clothing washing. The team is still debating one question: what does a tomato taste like - sweet or sour?
  • Cheeseburger
    Constructed entirely from synthetic protein structures. Laboratory tests report the taste difference is now indistinguishable from the original. Critics, however, note that the cheese and meat replacements taste exactly the same. If two ingredients taste identical, they ask, why maintain the distinction at all?
  • Caesar Salad
    Made from dehydrated leaf compounds, it resembles a light snack, but no one knows whether the sauce is actually authentic and whether it has been sweetened with banned sugars.

Researchers are again confronting a larger design problem:

If food production changes what humans are able to eat, what happens to the foods we once took for granted?

And more importantly: can taste survive the future?

Early reports from the department suggest a sobering conclusion.

Most reconstructed artifacts will likely end up in museums. Very few will ever return to safe everyday use or consumption.

Children testing the recovered games reportedly fail to understand the point of playing them.

Participants attempting to read unassisted texts report headaches, eye strain, and episodes of depression.

And several experimental kitchens have already recorded multiple cases of food poisoning.

Other News in the Design World

Authorities are investigating a group of unknown trailblazers using high-pressure acrylic sprays to paint entire streets white. Officials remain unsure whether the act constitutes vandalism, protest, or yet another emerging design movement.

In education news, a school has been temporarily closed after a student hacked the academic network and uploaded top scores on Riga-Broks 3. The act triggered a competitive cascade among students attempting to outperform the record. Administrators ultimately forfeited all classes and examinations.

Transportation regulators have also announced a long-awaited decision: drone racing through abandoned subway tunnels has now been legalized under controlled conditions, allowing professional pilots to compete safely in regulated environments.

And finally tonight, a new Responsible Parenting Law has been enacted. Under the regulation, both parents must attend mandatory training camps before becoming guardians. Participants receive paid parental leave during the program. However, early participants report that the compensation does not account for the stress induced by training dolls programmed to cry at irregular intervals. Some couples have already proposed supplementing childcare with multiple AI child assistants. But the program’s designers insist on maintaining one non-negotiable rule the Artificial Cognitive systems seek to undermine: human contact must remain central to raising children.

This has been Archive 9 – FutureCast, reporting on the State of Design.