I approach design not merely as a functional practice, but as a form of situated knowledge. My perspective assumes a distributed, critical, and relational subjectivity, attentive to socio-material contexts. For me, interaction is a dense site of ethical, political, and cognitive implications, where power, perception, and possibilities of knowing are negotiated.
I conceive design as an epistemic gesture rather than mere functional synthesis
Design is not conceived here as a purely practical or technical activity aimed at the functionality of objects or interfaces. Instead, it is understood as an act of knowledge—an epistemic gesture.
This means that designing also implies constructing, mediating, or problematising ways of knowing, not just solving technical problems.
This vision resonates with approaches such as Anne-Marie Willis’s (ontological designing), Tony Fry‘s (design as a practice that prefigures the world), or design semiotics (Krippendorff).
It is also akin to Schön’s thinking on design as reflective practice.
The designer’s subjectivity is engaged, but not in the modern authorial sense: it is situated, relational, and critically distributed.
The designer is not thought of as an isolated creative genius or as an author in the romantic or modernist sense (à la Le Corbusier, so to speak).
Rather, their subjectivity emerges in a situated way (à la Haraway), relational (i.e., in relation with other human and non-human actors), and distributed (shared among tools, norms, socio-technical contexts, etc.).
This decentring of the author implies that design decisions are co-determined by constraints, rhetorics, material affordances, and collective responsibilities.
It resonates with posthumanist and actor-network paradigms (Latour, Suchman), where agency is distributed.
Interaction is not neutral: it is an ethical-political and phenomenological node where asymmetries, biases, and epistemic affordances are at play.
Human-machine interaction is not seen as simple efficient or natural communication. It is laden with ethical, political, and perceptual implications.
Every interaction choice reflects and shapes:
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power asymmetries (e.g., between user and system, or between different users),
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cognitive and cultural biases (e.g., in training data, in the mental models evoked),
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epistemic affordances (i.e., opportunities or limitations in how one can know or interpret a situation through the interface).
This point is deeply connected to phenomenological thought (Merleau-Ponty, Ihde), critical design studies (Dunne & Raby, Bardzell), and philosophy of technology (Feenberg, Verbeek).