Prospective design: A structuralist design aesthetic founded on relational qualities

Abstract

Prospective design is a research program founded on critical dialogues between Global South and Global North philosophies of design. Prospective design expands the current work on designing sociotechnical transitions by including the contradiction between “forces of nature” and “human forces” as a structural feature of Western society, which generates patriarchal and feminist worldviews, colonies and metropolises, and capitalist and socialist economic systems. In prospective design, contradictions are sensed, expressed, and worked out through a structuralist design aesthetic founded on the concept of existential structures, i.e. an accumulated set of relationships needed to reproduce human life. Instead of changing them directly, this design aesthetic guides designers to prospect thriving relationships in their metastructures and infrastructures through a poetics of resensitization that reunites our bodies and minds.