An attempt to do a designerly leap beyond making

This paper is situated on the intersection of STS and design and aims to discuss a range of different sensibilities around the concept of “doing” STS. Here we are particularly interested in the potentials of exploring design not only as a making practice, but somewhere beyond. From within STS analytic-descriptive communities design tends to be either problematized as a less-reflective practise with a tendency to charge singular prescriptive futures, or hailed as offering creative and aestheticized forms of critique.
While such critical analyses are certainly valuable and necessary, in this paper we attempt to engage with a more diversified and contradictory analysis of “doing” STS through designerly making. Subsequently, we ask; what happens when design tries to move beyond the aesthetic of matters-of-facts, of objects, of ‘gegenstände’, as suggested by Latour? And what other conceptualisations might come into being when design is not only prescribed as an agent that imposes form upon materials?

The paper explores the capacities of design as alternative ways of doing and making, informed through the (in)sensibilities of caring, maintenance, mending and growing. Through a series of design research projects we exemplify how these different sensibilities may give us a hint of what happens when design makes a leap beyond the ideas of completed and finished objects. In this way, the paper seeks to complicate both critical and hopeful conceptualisations of design and instead suggests various productive, if also sometimes contradictory, nuances of design - to which STS research can open both its vocabulary and senses