Abstract
Nearly all design is now interaction design. Contemporary design projects are shaped by ongoing processes of digitalization and the economic imperatives of a data-driven sociotechnical ecosystem. This position paper makes two connected points: (1) that in order to design effectively with the digital, it is necessary to develop an understanding of its character (ontology) – what it is and does – and corresponding design methods and approaches for handling platformed relations; and (2) that there is a pressing need for real innovation, imagination, and proposition of genuine alternatives – design as a practice of hope.
Contemporary design projects are shaped within ongoing processes of digitalization across all societal sectors and a sociotechnical ecosystem in which data and data-driven platforms are central (Alaimo and Kallinikos, 2024; Törnberg and Uitermark, 2025a) and driven by the imperatives of what has been described variously as informational capitalism (Castells, 2000), platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017), surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), and data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias, 2019). With the possible exception of purely analogue craft, nearly all industrial design now includes interaction design. However, this kind of interaction design is not at all straightforward. Interaction touchpoints are now mechanisms for producing data about the world and making it actionable. The sociotechnical ecosystem that some years ago seemed to offer such possibility for genuinely democratic participation, collaboration, community, and innovation (e.g. Benkler, 2006; Shirky, 2008) is now one in which platform power is consolidated in just a handful of giant tech companies attempting to capture attention (O’Reilly et al., 2024; Wu, 2016) and maximize engagement in service of shareholder profit. While these dynamics might seem far removed from the kinds of physical things that people can interact with that are typical objects of design, they are now central in shaping dominant trajectories of development as well as how the possibilities of connected things are framed and the kinds of parameters that are used for their evaluation and regulation.
This position paper will briefly make two connected points. First, in order to design effectively with the digital, it is necessary to develop an understanding of its character (ontology) – what it is and does – and corresponding design methods and approaches. Given that things are now generally interconnected in multiple platforms, this means designing with and for platformed relations within power-laden sociotechnical ecosystems. Second, there is a pressing need for true innovation, imagination, and proposition of genuine alternatives. Design is and needs to be, more than ever, a practice of active hope.
Digital ontology: What contemporary connected things are and do
Digital, connected, computational things (which I will here refer to simply as ‘digital things’ or ‘the digital’ for short) are inherently malleable and adaptive. Johan Redström and I have argued that they are more like fluid assemblages than stable things (Redström and Wiltse, 2019), building most directly on the concept of assemblages developed by Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Whereas previous objects of industrial design were mass produced on the basis of a final prototype that was the outcome of a careful design process, digital things are now always in the making. There is no final prototype, only current iterations that are also adapted to the data objects (Alaimo and Kallinikos, 2017) of particular user profiles and contexts.
One simple and common way this always-in-the-making quality of digital things can be seen is in software updates. Software is under continual development, often with quite frequent releases in varying levels of release status (e.g. the Orion browser that I use is currently version 0.99.136-beta). Another mechanism for changing digital things that is less obvious to end users is A/B testing, which is a way of running experiments on users to test how different versions of a website, for example, perform according to defined variables.
Ownership has also fundamentally changed when it comes to digital things. While it is easy to purchase devices, reading the end user licenses and terms of service for the relevant software and services required for them to actually function reveal that they are in fact just that: licenses to use software, but not something that a person who purchased the device actually owns (and with corresponding restrictions on modification of that software, and threats of varying severity regarding what will happen if a user ignores that prohibition). Moreover, accepting these terms is not optional if one would like to use the device.
Digital things are typically not truly owned, yet they are in another important sense one’s own in that they are often incredibly personal. It is very early in the setup process of any kind of connected digital thing that the personalization begins, typically through a user account (perhaps one that is common across an entire ecosystem of interconnected devices and services) and localization. It is thus very difficult to ever encounter a basic or neutral version of something, because it is always customized. Even devices in a showroom have been set up for that particular context. The personalization and even personal relation between digital thing and user continue through use and are particularly pronounced in the case of things that work with some form of machine learning to process the data that is produced through use to deliver personalized content, insights, or nudges (‘time to stretch your legs a bit?’).
Connection is fundamental to what contemporary digital things are and the capabilities they have. This is something that can be brought to the foreground whenever a computer or phone loses a network connection, or a ‘smart’ device cannot connect to the app that controls it. More specifically, in addition to general Internet connectivity, digital things are typically connected to other devices and services within platforms. In addition to providing the functionality that is typically in focus for end users, these platforms channel multi-sided interactions among their business customers and end users. Platform companies also tune these interactions according to their own interests, ultimately with predictably poor outcomes for all sides in a process of degradation that Internet pioneer Cory Doctorow has termed enshittification (Doctorow, 2024).
Given the character of digital things as fluid assemblages, it follows that their design is not of finished, stand-alone products but rather design of frameworks, rules, and connections among things in ecosystems. Platformed relations are the materials of design when working with fluid assemblages and their multi-intentional relations (Wiltse, 2020b). Platformed relations are a new form of technological mediation in which digitally connected things provide value for end users through use but also contribute to generating other forms of value for other stakeholders in the system because of the data that is produced through and about that use. Digital things relate to people who use them (on the basis of their representation as data objects) and relate to a variety of other actors and entities through platform ecosystems. These relations are central in defining what things are and what they do – both in terms of action possibilities available to end users and the other functions that they perform to generate other kinds of value for other platform actors. Design of digital things involves defining and tuning platformed relations. Importantly, it should also involve developing mechanisms that enable people who use them to have the agency to configure these relations as part of ongoing processes of engaging with digital things and systems and putting them to intentional, creative use.
In data-driven platform ecosystems, the role of things as end-user touchpoints, from a business perspective, is to produce data about current activity to influence future behaviour on behalf of those able to pay for that influence. This is the central mechanism in what Zuboff terms the behavioural futures markets of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) that now target even the subconscious (Cohen, 2020). The platform society (Van Dijck et al., 2018) is one in which there is a massive concentration of power, and where that power is mediated by design. As Törnberg and Uitermark put it, building on their scholarship on platforms and digital modernity: The authoritarianism of digital modernity does not wear the mask of faceless bureaucracy. It operates through faceless collectivity. Its commands arrive not as decrees but as design choices. Its tyrannies are those of the nudge, the notification, the algorithm (Törnberg and Uitermark, 2025b).
If design choices mediate the central operations of authoritarian power, then this is a position that requires some very sober reflection on the part of design. There are key areas where research and intervention are needed here related to basic digital design challenges and to capabilities for developing alternative propositions.
Many, if not all, of these larger issues related to power in sociotechnical and socioeconomic systems might seem to be well outside the scope of anything that design or (design) research might have the capacity to engage with. However, design inquiry and intervention could in fact be a powerful mode of engaging with these pressing issues related to overall technological development and processes of digitalization. This would require development of theories, methods, and practices that are able to handle data-driven systems and their new forms of multi-intentional relations (Wiltse, 2020b), artificial intelligence, and more-than-human agencies.
Digital design research
There are a number of non-trivial challenges that call for substantial research in the domain of the digital. For one, there are fundamental problems of design aesthetics and how to appropriately express and enable engagement with complexity. Earlier design strategies based on hiding complexity to enable effective use of simple interfaces have reached a breaking point, as aesthetic simplicity is now typically obfuscating what things really are and do more than revealing their true character and behaviour (Hauser et al., 2021). There is thus a need for basic research and design exploration in
Related to this is a need to seriously consider what becomes of
Human-centred design has tried – very successfully – to develop methods and approaches for making things engaging, effective, and pleasurable to use. Often, things are even meant to ‘get out of the way’ and withdraw from active attention so that the people using them can focus on the activity at hand. Yet supporting people in engaging with the behind-the-scenes functions of things generally requires adding friction, delay, complexity, and challenge. This would be true even in the case of platforms that are designed with the best intentions of being transparent and respectful of users’ informed choices regarding their generation of value within the platform ecosystem. And, needless to say: major platform owners generally do not have the best intentions when it comes to user awareness and agency.
Participatory and co-design have historically aimed to enable those who will use or otherwise be affected by a new designed thing or system to be part of its design. Although methods developed for involving intended users are now widely taught and used in commercial design contexts, they are now (at least in those contexts) more typically about ensuring market success than empowering people to exercise agency over the shape of their personal or professional lives. In fact, in work contexts, where participatory design had its roots (Bjerknes and Bratteteig, 1995; Ehn, 1988), there is instead an increasing and in many domains extraordinary level of algorithmic management (Noponen et al., 2024) in which automated surveillance and behaviour modification occur through the tools and environments of work itself.
Designing effectively within the contemporary digital ecosystem means designing with and for ongoing, power-laden relations across multiple levels of scale, and things that relate to and often use those who use them (Wiltse, 2020a). Research is needed to develop the conceptual and methodological foundations that can support effective and ethical design practice in this space. And when it comes to the at least relatively more free spaces of academic research, perhaps one of the most powerful avenues for intervention is in design-led development of alternatives.
Design for (alternative) platformed relations and desirable futures
There is a need for radically different ideas for how (digital) things could be, informed by basic research that could spur responsible innovation and inform appropriate regulation – not least by challenging ideas that the status quo currently on offer is the only possibility. This requires at least partially new design ideals, programs, and methods.
Fortunately, there is much to work with. In terms of theory, various perspectives on ecological entanglement can inform development of sensitivities and practices of relational design (the theme of the Nordes 2025 conference) that are appropriate for caring for collective interdependence rather than extraction and dominance (e.g. Barad, 2007; Fuchsberger and Frauenberger, 2023; Light et al., 2024; Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015; Wall Kimmerer, 2013). Decolonizing design, design justice, and working with Indigenous epistemologies and practices are also vital efforts now well underway (e.g. Costanza-Chock, 2020; Millan et al., 2024; Tarkhanian, 2025; Tlostanova, 2017). There is resonance here with current exploitative data economy practices that call for creative resistance (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; The Tierra Común Network, 2023) and contestation (Collins et al., 2024). Inspiration might also be drawn from reflections on how to resist the attention economy (Odell, 2019), rewild the Internet (Farrell and Berjon, 2024), or work with medium design (Easterling, 2021). Perhaps design directions could be developed in alliance with platform cooperatives (Scholz, 2023) or data cooperatives (Fink, 2024), or in calls for digital sovereignty (Rikap et al., 2024) and a public stack (waag futurelab, nd), or design for autonomía(s) (Escobar, 2017; Gil-Salas, 2025). The rich bodies of work dealing with design participation and design futures (e.g. Ehn et al., 2014; Hyysalo, 2025; Smith et al., 2016; Yelavich and Adams, 2014) can inform approaches to developing mechanisms of democratic governance of digital things and systems. Perhaps most of all, design can leverage its capacity for imagination, creativity, and concrete propositions for intentional change (Nelson and Stolterman, 2012) in service of alternative futures worth wanting (Vallor, 2016).
The current sociotechnical ecosystem – including AI as a current major focal point – is characterized by enormous concentration of power (Brennan et al., 2025; Zuboff, 2019), rent-seeking (O’Reilly, 2024; Sadowski, 2020), and financialized hype (Törnberg, 2025) that tends to produce profit for shareholders while exploiting others. The current hype around AI is further concentrating power and serving big tech while generally not delivering claimed benefits or significant value and often causing harm or simply degrading quality of life for the most marginalized (Brennan et al., 2025). The rapid acceleration of AI deployment and use is also driving an almost incomprehensibly massive carbon footprint (O’Donnell and Crownhart, 2025) that is actively fuelling climate degradation and jeopardizing local electricity infrastructures (Brennan et al., 2025). As philosopher of technology Shannon Vallor argues, AI technologies reflect and embed the values of the wealthy minority that develops them – not the values of society more broadly, or those that might be able to turn away from reproducing existing patterns of planetary destruction and instead open new paths toward sustainable futures (Vallor, 2024). While there are certainly useful applications of machine learning technology in well-scoped problem spaces, acceptance of the proclaimed benefits of more general-purpose generative AI seem to rely on a sort of mass societal delusion, as tech journalist Charlie Warzel argues (Warzel, 2025). Significantly, current trajectories of development are overwhelmingly driven by big tech, which has proven to be highly resistant to effective regulation. A reasonable and important definition of what would count as public-interest AI (Züger and Asghari, 2023) implies that such a thing is, so far, effectively non-existent.
If the current sociotechnical ecosystem is dysfunctional at its core, then it is at the core where innovation and intervention are most needed. This means that it will not be effective, or only to a limited extent, to work (or even play, imagine, and fabulate) within the logic of systems built on problematic foundational operations. This does not necessarily mean building entirely new systems, as that ambition would likely not survive a reality check. And yet, it is important to intervene in ways that address central matters of concern and modes of value generation and its distribution. What would it mean, for instance, to design to affirmatively support autonomy, agency, and community governance in connected systems? Gil Salas (2025) calls this design for autonomía(s), building on Latin American intellectual and activist traditions. This would be a kind of design practice that would require at least partially new kinds of conceptual frameworks, sensitivities, methodological approaches, and material practices, not least when it comes to rendering complexity accessible for informed engagement during acts of intertwined design and use.
In addition to the significant specific challenges of designing for platformed relations are the general conditions of crisis in which design exists and is called to act (Fry and Nocek, 2021). There is a need and opportunity for design to break away from the dominant trajectories of Western industrial capitalism that have brought it into the unsustainable present and instead explore alternative trajectories oriented toward justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020; Neidhardt et al., 2022) and the pluriverse (Escobar, 2017) and redirected away from coloniality (Torretta et al., 2024). Then there is the need to grapple with accelerating climate collapse and how design, as the practice of shaping the artificial, can both open up and close down possible futures (Fry et al., 2015). This also means recognizing the ontological character of designing (Willis, 2006) and the fact that designed things and sociotechnical systems shape the forms of life (Winner, 1986) of those who live with them.
Conclusion: Design as a practice of hope
Contemporary design takes place within and is shaped by data-driven platform ecosystems that are characterized by enormous concentrations of power and perverse economic incentives that are generally hostile to human wellbeing, Earth ecosystems, and democratic governance. Yet the fact that these systems are artificial also means that they can, by definition, be otherwise (Dilnot, 2014). And design provides a powerful mode of engaging with a complex world and its wicked problems to bring about intentional change – moving beyond critique to affirmative proposition of alternatives. As design theorists Nelson and Stolterman state: we are pulled into design because it allows us to initiate intentional action out of strength, hope, passion, desire, and love. It is a form of action that generates more energy than it consumes. It is innovative inquiry that creates more resources – of greater variety and potential – than are used. In this way, design action is distinct from problem-based reaction, which is triggered by need, fear, weakness, hate, and pain (Nelson and Stolterman, 2012: 20).
There are many exciting opportunities for design and (design) research to go to work. The power of design inquiry and action lies in its ability to make concrete propositions even within spaces of staggering complexity, contradiction, competing interests, value tensions, and general messiness. Especially in the current overall sociotechnical landscape and within spaces that are more on the periphery of industry and thus not as subject to its economic imperatives, one of the most vital tasks design inquiry can perform is to maintain and expand a space of possibility that can demonstrate concretely that alternatives are possible. This involves developing modes of sense-making, articulation, expression, and engagement that have the capacity to frame and squarely address core matters of concern and what is at stake.
Critically engaged inquiry and action in service of affirmative propositions is urgently needed. It might be called design as a practice of hope.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Constructive comments on earlier drafts from Anna Croon, Sampsa Hyysalo, and Tomás Dorta helped to significantly improve the text. Any remaining shortcomings are my own.
Author contributions
I am the sole author of the paper.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.