How can cultural institutions possibly keep step with a field that is faster, more diverse, more complex than anything their founders could imagine? The essay below outlines Beatrice Leanza’s recognition of the concerns, theories and voices contributing to the relevance of design, on the occasion of her new book ‘The New Design Museum’.
This excerpt is published on occasion of the presentation of The New Design Museum (Park Books, 2025) at the Golden Goose Haus during the vernissage of the Biennale Architettura 2025.
This editorial project revolves around one central tenet: that institutions of culture are essential parts of the social infrastructure we desperately need to invest in, to ensure a democratic construction and inhabitation of the future. It is the conviction that the communities of knowledge connected across the capillary network of spaces and initiatives devoted to the production and preservation of culture are an invaluable and under-utilised resource to rethink the organisational structures and deliberative methodologies we need to operate in a radically unstable, divisive, and unpredictable world. And that, in the face of the general collapse of systems capable of managing the polycrisis1 we currently endure globally, they too need to transform to remain relevant assets of collective empowerment through which we can co-create values and ambitions for long-term futures.
What has design to do with this? Everything. Design is both imbricated in the modern constructs of normativity that regimented the territorial, spatial, racial, legislative, biological, and behavioral hierarchies that led us here, as well as the conduit to reconfigure the exasperated asymmetries they have engendered — of access to financial and natural resources, welfare, safety, etc.— into eco-political frameworks of interdependence and co-constitution based on an “economics of the common good.”2
Design is both imbricated in the modern constructs of normativity that regimented the territorial, spatial, racial, legislative, biological, and behavioral hierarchies that led us here, as well as the conduit to reconfigure the exasperated asymmetries they have engendered.
The Western rhetoric of human-centered progress has always associated itself with notions and technologies of environmental control, measurement, and prediction. Preoccupations with anthropogenic climate modification and ecosystemic manipulation reach back to the territorial conquests of the 15th and 16th centuries, as empire-building became coterminous with processes of exploitation, improvement, and normalisation of nature for the accumulation of wealth and geopolitical dominance. This manufacturing of Nature3 as an externality to human society enlisted the discourse around the climate and meteorology (the quantitative science of its observation) onto issues of colonial sovereignty and false imaginaries of civilisational superiority, the legitimisation of warfare, the building of nation-states, the exploitation of vulnerable people, and the monopolisation of resources. Awareness of the environment, of the human effects of its perturbation, and the global scale of their extent are by no means a modern phenomenon, as historical climatology — that is, the study of accurate observation and reconstruction of weather events — is traceable over the past five centuries. The colonial literature of royal chroniclers, conquistadores’ maps and journals of the 1500s, and memoirs and treaties produced by 17th- and 18th-century naturalists, experimental philosophers, botanists, and historians from European imperial societies and academies of science informed the establishment of the first state meteorological bodies in most Western countries in the 1850s, propelled by the advent of technological modernity.4 This institutionalisation and operationalisation of weather forecasting intensified throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, aided by computerised modeling and satellite technology with the capacity to generate extensive information from global monitoring, which then prompted the emergence of global intergovernmental institutions for coordinated research and action. As the historian of science and technology Paul N. Edwards observes, “climate science [can be read] as a global knowledge infrastructure which has ushered in a massive perspectival shift that has helped promote an understanding of the world as a single physical system. […] Building the weather and climate knowledge infrastructures spread a specific way of making global knowledge — one whose techniques, values, and implications now extend not only throughout the sciences but far beyond.”5
The legacy of this origin story is twofold. On one side, the constructs of the colonial project still virulently proliferate today in the socioeconomic asymmetries attendant to the bio physical deterioration of the planet and a still pervasive “boardroom politics” that favors dominant minorities. What sets our epoch apart is that the magnitude and rapidity with which we can effect irreversible change on life-supporting systems is unprecedentedly compounded by their complex interconnectivity and the multitude of challenges we humans are posing to them. The 2023 UNU report on Interconnected Disaster Risks individuates six critical tipping points — that is, the moment at which a given socioecological system is no longer able to buffer risks and provide its expected functions, thus resulting in collapse. They are: accelerating extinctions, groundwater depletion, unbearable heat, melting glaciers, space debris, and uninsurable futures. Among six categories of shared root causes and drivers, the two that are common to all are “insufficient future planning and risk management,”6 which means a lack of perception, preparation, and foresight to act in front of a problem. Climate change and extreme weather events have further exacerbated the phenomena of species migration across different habitats, from oceans to forests, and have particularly affected zones of the Global South where already vulnerable populations reside,7 thus fueling discriminatory border policies and deregulated labour practices connected to disaster recovery while producing a global epidemic of psychological malaise — or solastalgia — especially among the young. Evidently, we are living through an intertidal historical moment when the operative frameworks of past world-systems — that is, systems of governance, information, life-sustaining production and supply, and of technological mediation — no longer hold, and new ones, together with their values, must be created.
The constructs of the colonial project still virulently proliferate today in the socioeconomic asymmetries attendant to the bio physical deterioration of the planet.
On the other side, as the euphoric imaginaries of the “global” folded under their own radical provincialisation by the turn of the millennium, another, more powerful construct emerged, countering the rhetoric of human dominance and centralised control. Enlivened by ecological scholarship probing the laws of scientific rationalisation and technological determinism, the concepts of the “planetary” and “planetarity”8 have increasingly and potently problematised a vast array of disciplinary discourses articulated around conceptions of “nature”’ and what is “natural,” intended as a normative attribute of conformity and authenticity. The various theoretical evocations of contemporary “planetary thinking,” its “techniques, values, and implications,” as Edwards would have it, mobilise the queering agency of ecological thinking by calling into question the epistemological and ontological frameworks of human exceptionalism, and, therefore, its Western origins, to reveal other cosmologies and notions of identity and collectivity as dynamically co-constituted in a relational and perceptual universe of biological, technological, and material diversity.
Tools and technologies make ideas possible. Maps, clocks, the printing press, microscopes, telescopes, and today’s supercomputers have progressively enabled an augmented regime of sensing and knowing the world, from the scale of subatomic particles to the realm of the extraplanetary, placing man back into the web of living biosystems of which it was always a part, rather than its sole creator.
Tools and technologies make ideas possible. Maps, clocks, the printing press, microscopes, telescopes, and today’s supercomputers have progressively enabled an augmented regime of sensing and knowing the world, from the scale of subatomic particles to the realm of the extraplanetary.
Post-natural studies, multi-species ethnographies, post humanism, new materialism, pluriversal and many-world theories, non-Western concepts of embodied sovereignty, multi naturalism and rights of nature, planetary sapience, and synthetic intelligence — all energise an intellectual fieldwork devoted to cultivating a reparatory and regenerative imagination between man and world.9 Relationality emerges here as a theoretical and philosophical position that, while empowering narratives of emancipation of the “global majorities” originating in Indigenous and place-based cultures, is also pragmatically rooted in a praxis of “designing,” intended as a new politics of healing and remaking the web of life.10
Acting on this two-fold legacy is now taking on an irrefutable urgency as its layered impact is making itself visible in an epochal stigma of relentlessly changing and unstable environmental and geopolitical conditions. As observed by Indy Johar and Caroline Paulick-Thiel, “modern democratic institutions can no longer structurally make legitimate decisions at the necessary speed. […] Dealing with uncertainty, shocks, and rapid change requires structures that increase organisational and societal adaptability. This means to center agency around learning instead of control and develop approaches that are systemically agile enough to respond to emerging challenges and at the same time resilient enough to withstand ongoing disruptions.”11 More fundamentally, this systemic shift speaks to the absolute need for thinking well beyond immediate temporal and geographical confines.
The methodologies and practices of systemic reconfiguration required for planetary survival are rooted in the disciplinary ecology of design: they are rituals of world-making.
In this light, today we encounter design on other avenues than those set by its modern foundations as a solutional apparatus engineered to serve the all-important human factor, perfecting spaces, objects, and machines to assuage users’ needs, shape social mores, or fabricate desire. These instantiations of design certainly persist and continue labouring within the attention economy of ubiquitous platforms and the emotional capitalism of “good design” for smarter cities and happier individuals. But the aim of this editorial project is to detect how design reflects on the complexities of contemporary reality by producing a new politics and aesthetics of engagement with its transitional, often precarious, and fluid state, and therefore how this affects the mission and agency of the cultural institutions that have historically harboured it, as well as how it is simultaneously prompting new ones to emerge.
Design is an agonistic practice, to borrow an expression from the political theorist Chantal Mouffe;12 it is somewhat never an accomplished state, but the investigative journey towards its fulfillment. Design is a form of future-thinking that constantly probes the rules that organise the “present” — the principles that govern its environments, the materials, mechanisms, processes, and formulas that hold them together and render them habitable constructs. This productive pull between contingency and intuition places design in an always emergent field of participatory observation which locates and maps the appearance of possible worlds into uncharted ecosystems of interaction — among disciplines, objects, technologies, living beings, and therefore different forms of intelligence. Both a science and poetics of relations, design is a collaborative enterprise through which we measure the extent of our “being human” and attempt to fathom what dwells beyond its reach.
Design is a form of future-thinking that constantly probes the rules that organise the “present”.
The theoretical and practical agendas of 21st-century design are cross-pollinated by three interconnected notions: biocentrism, decentralisation, and hybridity. First, in the emerging Bio Age,13 human-centric constructs are no longer viable if we are to sustain life on the planet for future generations, thus preserving biodiversity, championing bioregional approaches, and deploying nature-based methodologies that foster inter-species flourishing, address material scarcity, and combat moral apathy. Second, as hegemonic ideologies of domination — biological, racial, and political — are being vocally opposed by civil society at large, emancipatory practices valuing collaborative decentralised actions to support vulnerable territories, populations, and marginalised groups are emerging forcefully on a global scale. Third, we are already living in a fluid world of hybridity and post-binary agency, disaffected by rigid categorisations of materiality, class, or territoriality (digital/analogue, human/machine, centre/periphery, etc.), where planetary futures are inconceivable if not articulated in the encounter of human, natural, and artificial dimensions of existence.
These arguments confer new formal and temporal dimensions to the project of design; they enlighten a wider remit of its actions, but most significantly, they reveal trajectories for novel subjects and methodologies of knowledge produced under the planetary paradigm that support inclusive and egalitarian modes of coexistence. They also set forth new parameters for the role of designers and design practice, and therefore beg the question of whether the institutions of education and culture that contribute to fostering design’s relevance and impact on contemporary and future societies are equally interrogating their methodologies and purposes during such a pivotal moment of change.
Bio
Beatrice Leanza is a cultural strategist, museum director and critic with expertise in design, architecture and the visual arts across Asia and beyond. Beatrice has served as director of both the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon (MAAT) and the Museum of Design and Applied Arts in Lausanne (MUDAC), and also as creative director of Beijing Design Week. Her international projects include include Across Chinese Cities, a research program presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2014, 2016, 2018), Visual Natures: The Culture and Politics of Environmentalism in the 20th and 21st Centuries at MAAT (2021–22) and the national pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Notes
1 The term was coined by complexity theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern and was first used in their book Homeland Earth, Hampton Press, 1999. It refers to the entangled state of global problems which are not reducible to one single cause.
2 On the economic theory of mission-oriented innovation and the common good see the work of economist Mariana Mazzuccato, particularly relevant are “Governing the economics of the common good: from correcting market failures to shaping collective goals”, Journal of Economic Policy Reform, 27:1, 2003, pp. 1–24; her report for the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission Mission-oriented Research & Innovation in the European Union – A Problem solving Approach to Fuel Innovation-led Growth, Publications Office, 2018; the books The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, Anthem Press, 2013, and Mission Economy — A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, Penguin Press, 2021.
3 On the dialectical construction and therefore alienation of nature versus the human as coterminous with the birth of capitalism see, among others, Jason W. Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature” in Jason W. Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism, PM Press, 2016, pp. 70–115.
4 There is a growing scholarship around the connections between climate study, imperial histories, and past societies. A significant list of references can be found in Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher, Chaos in The Heavens– The Forgotten History of Climate Change, Verso, 2024.
5 Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine — Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming, The MIT Press, 2010, Introduction, p. xix. See also Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber and Volker Wenzel (eds.), Earth System Analysis — Integrating Science for Sustainability, Springer, 1999 and H. J. Schellnhuber, “‘Earth system’ analysis and the second Copernican revolution,” Nature, 402:6761, December 1999, pp. 19–23. On the Gaia Hypothesis co-developed by James Lovelock, and Lynn Margulis which postulates a vision of Earth as a self regulating system of co-evolving organisms see James Lovelock, Gaia, a New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford University Press, 1979.
6 Caitlyn Eberle, Jack O’Connor, Liliana Narvaez, Melisa Mena Benavides and Zita Sebesvari, United Nations University – Institute for Environment and Human Security. Interconnected Disaster Risks: Risk Tipping Points, United Nations University – Institute for Environment and Human Security, 2023.
7 Gaia Vince, Nomad Century – How to Survive the Climate Upheaval, Allen Lane, 2022.
8 The notion of planetarity was originally put forward by the literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who first used it in a paper presented at Stiftung-Dialogik in Zurich in 1997 entitled “Imperatives to Re-Imagine The Planet” and later expanded in her book Death of a Discipline, Columbia University Press, 2003. Various thinkers have tackled the implications of planterarity as a new operative framework of thought and method and its ramification across different disciplinary ambits, from systems of governance to techno science and philosophy. An extensive bibliography can be found in Nils Gilman (ed.), The Planetary, Berggruen Press, 2024. Among others see also Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru (eds.), The Planetary Turn — Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty- First Century, Northwestern University Press, 2015.
9 This is a vast array of theories that covers studies from critical anthropology to artificial intelligence, as numerous thinkers, scholars, and practitioners have contributed to expanding and interconnecting the implications of ‘planetarity’ over the past 30 years. These bibliographies are widely available in relation to the cited concepts. It is also worth mentioning a more recently ascendant perspective encapsulated under the field of Earth Juris prudence that centers around the concept of the Rights of Nature (which recognises nature and natural systems as subjects of legal rights), emerging from countries of the Global South, which profoundly challenges the dominant political economy of Western legal knowledge. See Daniel Bonilla Maldonado, “Global Legal Pluralism and the Rights of Nature,” Max Planck Private Law Research Paper No. 23/15, August 2023. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4510374.
10 See Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma, Relationality–An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human, Bloomsbury, 2024. For extensive references see also Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Duke University Press, 2017.
11 “Designing Next Institutions,” Version 2.2, paper by Indy Johar, Dark Matter Labs & Caroline Paulick-Thiel, Politics for Tomorrow, May 2024, https://darkmatterlabs.org/. Also see “A New European Bauhaus Economy, Designing Our Futures–An Invitation Paper V 01” developed by Dark Matter Labs as part of the New European Bauhaus lighthouse project, Desire – an Irresistible Circular Society, funded by the European Union and presented at the New European Bauhaus Festival in Brussels in April 2024. Available at [online] – accessed 11/06/2024.
12 Chantal Mouffe, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?,” Social Research, 66:3 1999.
13 See Wendy L. Schultz and Trish O’Flynn, Law in the Emerging Bio Age, Horizon Report for The Law Society, August 2022. Available at [online].
