Illustration by Somnath Bhatt

The constitution, scale, and many dimensions of the modern\colonial world-system

This is a special interview edition of our ongoing “AI Lexicon” project. Noopur Raval sat down with NYU professor Ahmed Ansari to discuss how his research and teaching approach the range of discourses on colonisation, coloniality, settler-colonialism, intersectionality, and allyship, as well as where they came from, what shaped them, and why they’ve taken on the certain forms.

Ahmed is an Assistant Professor in the department of Technology, Culture & Society at NYU. His research interests intersect between critical design studies and history, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and pre-colonial philosophy and history of design and technology in the Indian subcontinent. Twitter: @aansari86

Noopur Raval (NR): Today we are going to talk about a certain enduring exercise of drawing borders namely around the West and the East or its variants in the global North and South. But to begin with, can you talk a bit about your own background?

Ahmed Ansari (AA): I did my undergraduate studies in Pakistan, at a conservatory program in Communication Design. The curriculum was very much a traditional design education, with a heavy emphasis on cultivating craft and aesthetic sensitivity, largely in terms of European graphic and typographic sensibilities, with a little bit, with a few modules scattered around various courses dedicated to local — entirely Urdu, actually — graphic art and typography. Even at that time it bothered me that there was so little time devoted, in the context of the education I received, to other areas of knowledge: I was interested in history, politics, and philosophy, and there was not much of a liberal arts curriculum at the time, much less any critical discussion of design in a scholarly manner. All this prompted me to go abroad to study design, and my first trip to the US was for my Masters degree, between 2011–2013, which greatly expanded my sense and understanding of the field, both in terms of its practice and academic scholarship. I had no idea, for example, that designers did anything resembling research at all, that design practice meant much more than just commercial production, or that there was a great deal of critical literature on design as practice, in terms of its products, impact, etc.

At the same time, while I had a greatly expanded sense of the scope and depth of the field, it also bothered me that so much of the politics that underpinned academic cultures of design in the United States mirrored the way design was practiced in Pakistan: the same cults of celebrity and the discursive monopoly held by a few ‘star’ designers and design academics; a fetishization of aesthetics over all else; a lack of critical inquiry into what designed things did to individuals and societies, especially in political terms. There was also a complete absence of scholarship that spoke to or came from anywhere but the Anglo-European world, and a general lack of interest in any perspectives coming from the Global South.

This absence of any kind of engagement with contexts apart from that of the United States (which, in a certain frame, might be read as simple pragmatism given that design programs largely train students to prepare them for the US job market), led to problems when I returned home in 2013 and started to teach courses in research and undertake research projects in Karachi. Design education in the US (and, generally, around the world) doesn’t really prepare you to undertake research in unfamiliar contexts, in encountering difference, thinking through issues of interpretation, of representation, of developing a slower, more careful understanding of people and sites and situations very different from what you’re used to.

For example, I worked with rural patients arriving in Karachi for treatment at its largest public hospital, and here I realized that the way that communities in these parts ‘saw’ and thought about things — how they made sense of the visual and material — was different in some very fundamental ways from how I made sense of the world. Most of the patients that arrived at the Civil Hospital for treatment couldn’t make sense of the English or Urdu verbage or understand the very abstract isotype (signs showing social, technological, and biological information in picture form). Moreover, the hospital itself, a massive, labyrinthian complex that covered multiple city blocks, with large courtyards and narrow corridors separating buildings that housed different facilities; its patrons, largely the urban and rural working class and peasantry, many of whom came in groups, often with accompanying relatives, from remote parts of the province of Sindh to come and stay at the hospital for days, if not weeks on end; and the incredibly complex interviewing of an informal service economy with the formal structures and economy of the institution, with so many gaps in service being filled in by an incredibly resourceful assortment of hawkers, errand boys, and adjunct staff. We found that while a large demographic of patients, especially from rural Sindh, could not understand the visual or typographic language of the formally designed signage systems, they leaned heavily on this informal economy to get things done, and moreover, they had a very rich and complex visual grammar of their own — for example, one of our findings was that illustrations of a very high degree of verisimilitude, i.e. non-abstract, and that were dynamic, i.e. showed some form of action, were immediately understood.

Nothing in my US education or in my largely middle-class, English educated, cosmopolitan upbringing had prepared me for this kind of ethnographic research, but those two years in Karachi between my Masters and PhD studies were great in the sense that they made me revisit much of what I had learned, and opened up new areas of inquiry for me. I started to focus on questions of what structures perception and action differently for different individuals and communities. And I believe that because I was far more interested in philosophy than anthropology at the time, my first instinct was to approach these questions of difference as ontological. I started out approaching the question of alterity and ‘being different’ not as ‘shallow,’ in relativist terms — ‘we’re all the same deep down, we just happen to speak different languages, have different practices, values etc.,’ but as ‘deep,’ as something fundamental, that is to say, ‘being different’ entails inhabiting a different kind of ‘world,’ in the Heideggerian sense of the word that means a (historically) structured reality that is disclosed or unfolds through the totality of one’s involvements in it.

NR: And what about your present work?

AA: A great deal of my writing deals with thinking into and through forms of difference, understanding it from different disciplinary perspectives, and thinking about difference: cosmological, cultural, racial, class, etc. in relation to design and designing and designed things. I have also become involved in various debates and discourses around the politics of representation and Eurocentrism in design discourse and practice, which, since then have coalesced into what is now the decolonial turn. Questions of social justice or decolonisation, in my view, are always shadowed by questions of difference. In fact, the politics and praxis of decolonisation is always based on some form of ground, on certain assumptions about the self, about community, and the world, that then play out in the field of human political action: for example, race as a political ontology and as something that differentiates individuals as much as it is individuating, is not only specific to the Americas, but means and is employed as something very different in the context of the United States, with its very particular form of settler colonialism as well as history, than say, in Latin American contexts, or Europe, much less the rest of the world, where it loses much of its operative valence in favor of other markers of difference: say, ethnicity, or faith, or caste. In my own work, I’ve found the work of cultural anthropologists to be very useful, for example the debates around what culture is and how deep it goes, and on cultural difference as ontological difference, like in the work of Eduardo Vivieros de Castro. I’ve also found useful examining the particular problems that one faces when interpreting cultural alterity, for, as is apparent in the debates around representation that scholars like Marshall Sahlins and Marilyn Strathern have pointed out, it isn’t easy to encounter and then instrumentalize, whether in writing about or making for, another culture, when all one has is ontologies, concepts, and beliefs coming from one’s own.

This particular sense of projects of decolonisation as grounded and constituted, in their tactical and strategic specificity, by understandings of difference, is, by the way, in my observation something that doesn’t come naturally to Americans; one of the drawbacks of having global dominance and in fact, near-total hegemony over discursive production and dissemination is that all you see is yourself — it never occurs to you that other cultures and communities around the world might ‘be’ in the world very differently or make sense of themselves in terms that would be completely alien to you, and that these differences may resolve themselves into very different political commitments. This also complicates the ideals of something like a pluriverse, a ‘world of many worlds’ where communities can be free to develop on their own lines, rather than under the conditions of domination exerted by Anglo-European states and institutions, because it means that you cannot assume that communal politics and practices around the world, regardless of whether or not they cohere into large movements, are necessarily fighting for the same things you are, and, in fact, something like a pluriverse, if it were ever to be realised, would entail having to share the planet with people who have incommensurable and incompatible desires, beliefs, and values with you and your culture and community. This then complicates the idea of allyship, and introduces all kinds of frictions in both local and global alliances, especially now when global movements are not only possible but needed, in the wake of existential threats to human existence on the planet.

There are also really interesting questions that deserve to be explored around what we mean when we speak of ‘a’ culture, and what culture is, and how something like a shared culture can change while still maintaining its coherence, for which I’ve found the work of historians, particularly the work of the Annales school and world-systems theorists. I also read widely from historians and cultural theorists who have critiqued not only Eurocentrism in the work of (largely white) Western scholars, but in critiques of the canons of knowledge produced on the East and South by local ‘gateway’ scholars: academics well ensconced in the Western academy that have traditionally acted as mediators between the West and their home countries. Subaltern studies, indigenous studies, and dalit studies in the context of the Indian subcontinent have greatly helped in tracing the contours of what projects of epistemic decolonisation could mean. I think that, perhaps because I was born and raised elsewhere and find myself a first-generation immigrant in the United States, I have to negotiate between multiple worlds, and so find myself attracted to the kind of international scholarship that critiques not only views coming from the US, but also critiques of immigrant scholars by scholars in the South.

Lastly, and this may be of perhaps most interest to scholars thinking about artificial intelligence in relation to questions of culture and decolonisation, but I’m very interested in what systems of knowledge and belief other than the Anglo-European and Judeo-Christian might offer us in terms of thinking about technology and technics, and ethics and politics in relation to the former. Some of the recent work in philosophy of technology does this, and I’m thinking here of Yuk Hui’s work thinking through Chinese ‘cosmotechnics’ — his argument is that all technologies develop along lines that are proscribed and circumscribed by and through cultural and belief systems, and so the particular trajectory of technology development in the West has been enabled by certain ideas about technology, nature, society etc. that can be traced in a genealogy going back to Classical Greece. And so this raises an interesting question: can we think of, say, A.I, along different lines? What would a Daoist, or an Islamicate, or Vedic, cosmotechnics of A.I look like?

In any case, the great thing about being in a relatively new field like design studies is that you have the freedom to be pretty interdisciplinary. The concerns of designers develop at the intersection of so many different things: material and visual culture, technology, society, culture, behavior, perception etc., that you can pull from any number of fields and disciplines in order to inform your work. So while I am very critical of the lack of reflexivity in the field — designers often borrow freely from other fields and disciplines, but in a largely instrumental manner — I do enjoy the flexibility I have of being able to pull into my work all kinds of perspectives and discourses.

NR: Within popular and scholarly writing on AI Futures, there is often a tendency to talk about democratic AI futures that act as a sort of foil for advancing Western, post secular value systems in the design and imagination of technology at large. Rather than look for easy ways out: to prop up other, especially non-Western moral, religious and cosmological systems as alternatives, how do we move forward on the question of culture and technology?

AA: That’s a somewhat difficult question to consider. You’re certainly right in saying that the whole project of democratically-decided A.I. futures is a cover for essentially continued Anglo-European coloniality and re-asserting global white supremacy because mere representation doesn’t necessarily equate to radical alterity. In other words, you can bring any number of people from around the world together to decide what to do regarding specific issues in A.I., but if they all have the same kind of ‘world,’ operate on the same basic cosmological and metaphysical assumptions, basically interpret and act and think in relation to their reality in more or less the same ways, etc.; or in more academic terms, are victims of successful epistemic colonization, then you don’t really have any capacity to develop any real alternatives coming from the Global South.

This is partly why I find cosmotechnics so interesting. As I’d mentioned, cosmotechnics is a kind of antidote to Anglo-Eurocentricity in discourses about technology, particularly its ‘anthropological universality’ (as Hui states it), or in other words, that any differences in socio-technical milieus are merely a matter of incidental, contingent variations brought about by different natural and social circumstances. Now for me, and Hui delves into this towards the end of The Question Concerning Technology in China too, what cosmotechnical projects open up is a space for speculation on alternatives to the kinds of sociotechnical systems we’ve inherited through European colonialism and subsequently, globalization and development.

To perhaps make what I mean clearer, for example, in philosophy there is are long traditions of thinking about technology in relation to other concepts and within frames: for example, the very influential idea that technology, in Merleau-Ponty, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Gilbert Simondon, Don Ihde, Bernard Stiegler etc., is artifice that extends the physical, somatic, and cognitive capacities of the human. Now, a philosopher approaching this particular definition from a cosmotechnical perspective might challenge it by posing that it is only in the West, with its particular understandings of ‘human,’ ‘body,’ ‘mind,’ as ontologies unto themselves and in relation to each other — as well as other concepts attached to these, ‘reason’ and ‘rationality,’ ‘intelligence,’ etc. — that can yield such an understanding of ‘technology.’

So what about cultures that don’t think about humans (and related concepts like humanity and personhood), or body, or mind, or artifice, on the same grounds? I can give a quick example of this from some of my own explorations: the theologian Placide Tempels, in his Bantu Philosophy, lays out a detailed assessment of the metaphysics of the Bantu peoples of eastern and southern Africa, with something that completely overturns the Western emphasis on thinking the ‘human’ in terms of ‘being’ and ‘self,’ Instead of thinking of being in terms of ontologies, i.e., in terms of elements and attributes, the Bantu have a conception of being as ‘force,’ an untranslatable concept that has no equivalent in any European language, and see beings (living or inanimate) as forces, although the ‘strongest’ forces lie in living beings. So, where in Anglo-European cosmologies the question of whether a being is human, and therefore, a person, is a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ in Bantu cosmologies being, and therefore the status of human and of person, can shift, become stronger or weaker, because forces are dynamic, not static.

This, of course, has interesting implications for thinking about technology and technicity from within a Bantu worldview — firstly, since all beings are forces, the channeling and manipulation of the world-as-force becomes a way to think technology; in fact, Tempels considers that beings that have ‘more’ force, i.e. living beings, can act upon and manipulate beings with less force, i.e., inanimate things, and use inanimate beings as mediums by which the force of other humans or living beings can be affected.

Moreover, since all beings are forces, and all forces are causally the work of the divine, the distinction between the artificial and natural is not a matter of quality or kind; there is, in effect, no distinction as clear-cut, as in the Greek tradition, between poiesis and physis. This causes us to wonder whether technology as we moderns understand it is even possible in Bantu cosmologies — certainly, for the Bantu, the Western conception of technology as extending the capacities of the human doesn’t appear because they have a completely different conception of the latter.

And, if we bring the question of what Bantu cosmology and metaphysics can offer us in terms of (re)thinking A.I., these conceptions of the being and persons raise a number of objections to certain core assumptions at the heart of the field of A.I. studies and ethics. Obviously, the ‘artificial’ in A.I. ceases to have any meaning, as I’d noted before. I think the above description of Bantu personhood raises an interesting mirror to the Western practice of according legal personhood to institutions on the one hand, that do not possess bodies or consciousness in the traditional biocentric conception of personhood, and there is, I’m aware, an ongoing debate around whether A.I. systems should be granted legal rights, and if so, which ones. The West constructs its social order on arbitrary and artificial symbolic distinctions, on magic, as much as any other society.

I also think that it is interesting to pit these ideas against the Bantu idea of personhood as being ‘more’ or ‘less,’ not ‘either\or’, and if I were take the egregious task of speculating and extending this idea into the arena of legal rights, there might be an interesting debate on whether A.I., if defined as being a force that has the capacity to enhance or diminish human force, is ‘strong’ enough to warrant the status of ‘living,’ i.e. that A.I. systems are alive, and therefore worthy of being considered people. And if I were to supplement this argument with John Mbiti’s claim that Bantu philosophy is sociocentric in its conception of personhood: “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am,” you begin to arrive at the question of precisely what kind of ‘culture’ it is that networked A.I. systems have that then imbues them with the status of personhood — or you could frame it a different way and move into the critique, as echoed in Hubert Dreyfus’ work, that A.I. systems cannot have any personhood precisely because they cannot enter into meaningful relations and have no world — there is no sense of ‘we’ for A.I.

Now, I would like to add, and this lays out what I think are problems with these kinds of comparative readings: firstly, I’m an outsider relying on second-hand accounts of Bantu cosmology, and, even if the task of using a different cultural system does the very useful task of challenging and upending Anglocentric ‘universals,’ it is dangerous for me to start extending these observations into the kinds of speculative ‘futurisms’ that Hui proposes. So, I agree that using comparative studies of this sort to speculate on alternatives is dangerous and undesirable. In any case, there is a huge gulf between being ‘in’ a world, a culture, and ‘borrowing’ concepts from another, a process that inevitably involves a process of translation. You can change and transform your own culture through your own understanding of another, but you can’t recreate the other in your own. The more hopeful take on this would be that cultural change and syncretization is always happening and a continuous historical process: cultures borrow from each other all the time, and in doing so give birth to new forms, new modes of existence, but this again is a contentious question given the kind of global dominance the Western world enjoys at the present moment in history.

I also think that even if one were, as a native, speculating from within the bounds of one’s own cultural system, there are still issues to consider. The colonial rupture, for one, fragments historical time and cultural continuity; that is to say, ‘we are not who we used to be, and our relation to our own past is tenuous.’ The question of ‘who’ translates cultural knowledge, ‘who’ speculates and futures, and for whom, as highlighted by subaltern studies and subaltern scholars, is also a principal concern. And, since technology does not, as we have seen, even appear as-such in many cosmological orders, is it even possible to think of technology or A.I. futures through non-Western lens? Maybe what we’re looking for when we start thinking through non-Anglo-European systems is not technology at all, but something else entirely.

NR: Last summer, you offered a course called Modernity + Coloniality, which looked into the constitution, scale, and many dimensions of the modern\colonial world-system — I attended and thought it was brilliant — I’d love to know more about what motivated you to offer the course?

AA: At the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in New York City, I wanted to contribute in some substantial manner to the ongoing moment. Moments like the protests, I tend to think of them as decisive moments, moments of opportunity, moments where people are attentive to, and are ready to listen to, things that they otherwise wouldn’t be open to. I found myself thinking around a series of questions that have stayed with me for years but that became much more urgent and imperative: “I’m a brown Pakistani immigrant who is relatively very privileged, part of a ‘model minority,’ what is my relation to Black and Native American people here in the US; can I find a role, as an ally; what does this moment need from someone like me, who teaches; where can I have an impact?”

At the time I was re-reading some of the Black critical race theory literature, and in particular there were two books that had made a great impression on me: the first was this collection of essays called Otherwise Worlds, edited by Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith, which was all about navigating through, and negotiating, the frictions and incommensurabilities of African-American and Native-American allyships, which have not always sought the same goals and have even come into conflict over their long histories of political activism in this country — but the essays in that book also celebrate the kinship between these two incredibly oppressed populations and explore the possibilities of what kinds of culture, what kinds of futures, these alliances could create together.

The other book was Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk (recommended by my friend Gemma Sharpe), on the nuances, difficulties, and constraints of being a South Asian immigrant and being constructed as a model minority in the US and UK. Throughout the 20th century, South Asian immigrants, alongside East Asians, have been constituted as a weaponized alternative cultural and social imaginary against black and native folk by the settler colonial state, and the US in particular selectively brings in South Asian immigrants to fill particular roles in the economy that pits them against native populations but at the same time divests them of much political agency. Model minorities have been held up as exemplars of obedience to the state even as the state commits violence against them and holds them in chains. At the same time, there’s been long histories of allyships between South Asian immigrants and black and native communities.

I found these books really helped me think through this trifecta, as I now call it, of figures that represent alternatives to the white supremacist settler-colonial state that is the United States: blacks, natives, and immigrants. I wanted to explore this question of the relations between these three populations, and their intertwined histories going all the way back to the colonial period, and the best way to explore anything is to teach it.

I was also influenced by discussions going on in the larger design community: suddenly, everyone was interested in learning and discussing race and culture, and I saw that as an opportunity to educate designers, and to guard against the possibility of ‘junk’ discourse, which I’m very wary of in my field. There has been so much shallow hijacking of what were otherwise incredibly nuanced and sensitive discourses in design research and theory that I wanted to provide a real, rigorous, and well-structured pedagogy.

I wanted to give students a good foundation in understanding not only the present range of discourses on colonisation, coloniality, settler-colonialism, intersectionality, and allyship, but also where they came from, what shaped them, and why they’ve taken on the certain forms. I wanted to provide readings for each class that were incredibly different from each other, that offered different perspectives on what we consider to be singular things, but really aren’t — for example, ‘allyship’ begins to mean something very different depending on its employment within a global or local sense. I wanted to create a truly global curriculum so that students would begin to understand, and internalize, and eventually see, reality as never reducible nor homogenous. I did this by sometimes pairing readings that brought almost antagonistic or incommensurable views to bear on the same thing — for example, in pairing Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth with Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, two great thinkers with completely different views on how the colonised subject responds to the coloniser.

The course, in effect, is almost what my dissertation would have been like if it was a taught class; at least the foundation-laying parts of my dissertation. Surprisingly, the class drew more people than I expected. I was expecting for a few people to show up, or maybe 20–30, but then hundreds came week after week for the whole course. I was secretly pleased at my intuition of that summer as a decisive moment being proved right, and of the difference that that course made in the design community at large. I’m very happy my dissertation didn’t end up in some musty library shelf at CMU collecting dust, as most PhD dissertations do, but ended up helping a lot of people in an accessible way.

NR: What is your pedagogical philosophy behind teaching students at a North American University readings on History, Coloniality, Border Thinking, and Pluriversality?

AA: I want what most teachers want from their students, I suppose: to become more critical, more inquisitive, more reflective thinkers; I want them to hold a healthy skepticism of knowledge claims, even the ones held as axiomatic, as core, to their fields of practice. Not enough of this happens in fields apart from design; to always situate their work and practice in concrete particulars, as emerging out of certain conditions; and to build a healthy appreciation for difference and different perspectives, to be open to being challenged by them instead of trying to escape or work around them, and to open oneself to the possibility of transformation.

I think that this emphasis on research as the continuous production of the novel and new is somewhat worrying, when research should be transformative, changing not only your understanding of your object of inquiry but yourself in relation to it and your world. This is perhaps most explicit in doctoral education, where you’re supposed to come up with something ‘new’ that changes the field or the world, while, for many PhD students, you’re also living in mind-numbing precarity. I also think that it is worth paying attention to the observation that we place perhaps too much emphasis on research in doctoral education when in fact the vast majority of traditional academic research jobs are becoming increasingly rarer and more narrow and prescriptive, and where the vast majority of PhDs have to think about how else they might put their experiences and knowledge to use: as researchers in non-academic contexts, teachers, administrators, public intellectuals, professional practitioners.

Teaching, on the other hand, is very underrated in academic culture here in the United States, when great teachers are precisely that person who can transform you. Given how western academia has built itself on the theft and subjugation of local knowledges and uses its rules and norms to structure the way people think and relay what they think, I’m not interested in creating courses where the emphasis lies in training students to (re)produce knowledge, but am interested in seeing students transform into subjects other than what they are; into having them ‘see’ the world differently, develop a critical relation to their beliefs, desires, and values.

I think part of good pedagogy is setting up, creating the space, and scaffold, for students to allow themselves to question themselves and be transformed by insights. I do put thought into who my audience is going to be and what would challenge them in ways they haven’t been accustomed to. In general, I want my students here in the US to break out of this narcissistic focus on themselves and what Americans think and feel and want and expose them to other ways of being in the world. There are realities other than American realities even as American realities are not homogenous or monolithic. I do the same thing, in the opposite direction, when I teach in Pakistan: I open students up to discourses and practices outside of what they’re used to hearing and seeing, give them more insight into what things look like from perspectives here in the US, make them see the nuances, the contours of thought and action here.

NR: What kind of change do you hope to create within design thinking? And how does that relate to your positionality as a global South/postcolonial/immigrant researcher and teacher in a North American Settler colonial society?

AA: You know, that’s precisely it, isn’t it: what does it ‘mean’ to be an academic from Pakistan teaching critical design studies in the United States and Pakistan? I want designers\design scholars to ask themselves that before they get down to work, instead of assuming that whatever they do or what they talk about will speak to global audiences or make universal sense. At least that way, we can approximate some measure of safeguarding against Anglocentrist tendencies, even if there isn’t a more substantial and positive commitment to political action, and in that renewed awareness and attention to Anglocentrism, there opens up, hopefully, the way to question and consider alternatives.

And, as importantly, I want them to start questioning what they take as ‘truth’, as axiomatic or fundamental, in their work: for example, like this facile nonsense about ‘needs’ and how design starts from a needs-assessment — anyone who’s read any Marx, or even better, the Frankfurt School (Adorno lays this out really clearly in his theses on needs), would immediately dismiss the notion of needs as anything other than socially produced under the domination of the prevailing ruling systems masking themselves as natural tendences. Once one begins to pay attention to just this very small thing, ‘needs,’ in the light of larger social, cultural, and political dynamics across space and time, then the entire field begins to unravel and design is exposed for what it really is — a historical product of a particular set of systemic tendencies that concretized into both a domain of practice and an academic field over several centuries (but particularly the 20th) as an instrument of maintaining the dominant (capitalist) mode of production.

You cannot separate, cannot think, modern design (just as you can’t think any of the fields of the 20th century academy — can you really think modern psychology, or computer science, or sociology, apart from largely colonial assumptions around the mind, logic, or social structure?) from colonialism, from capitalism. But I think that this place, this place shorn of dogmatic commitments to one’s fields truths, and therefore its political claims, is a good place to be, because then one can begin to ask what else it could be. And I’m glad to see that this is finally happening in my field, that academics (and I see echoes of this in commercial practice too) are finally beginning to ask: what can design be other than what it is today? It is vital to remember that this kind of critical appraisal of one’s own field shouldn’t be a cause for despair, but rather, for thinking and acting!