Between Abstraction and Insufficiency: Some Reflections on Necropolitics and the Ethics of Design Philosophy

Abstract This essay is a critical meditation on what design can do in times unprecedented of global uncertainty. In particular, the article interrogates not only how design can respond to crisis but also how it is at the root of interconnected crises. What design can do cannot be disconnected from the political philosophical question of what design is in the COVID and post-COVID era. Drawing on critical discourses in design theory and the theoretical humanities, the essay conceptualizes the material and political complexity of designing through the lens of biopolitics and necropolitics, and then interrogates what an ethics of theorizing design means in an era when design is at the intersection of multiple crises.