Enfolding Design and STS: Events, Aesthetics and Topological Encounters

This volume presents an empirically rich and theoretically grounded exploration of the dynamic and emergent interplay between Design and Science and Technology Studies (STS).

Tracing the interwoven histories of both fields, Alex Wilkie and Mike Michael explore their evolving interrelations. Whether as a substantive topic, a source of methodological innovation, or a novel model of engagement with users and publics, Design has come to influence how research is conducted in STS. Conversely, STS now informs ongoing developments in Design’s research practices, providing a rich source of concepts, an analytically inspiring resource, and a means to empirical complexification.

Cutting across an array of conceptual, methodological and substantive registers, Enfolding Design and STS develops a new treatment of recent interdisciplinary engagements where knowledge production, interventionist methods and practices of making are brought together, re-thought and transformed at both theoretical and empirical levels. Along the way, the authors draw on a diverse set of case studies including examples of environmental, biomedical, computational and domestic processes, and a variety of theoretical framings such as post-Actor-Network Theory, assemblage theory, Whiteheadian process philosophy, and ontological aesthetics. Building on these discussions, this book offers a fresh topological perspective that, tentatively and heuristically, provides a conceptual vocabulary and a methodological toolkit for navigating the unfolding interdisciplinary mutualities of STS and Design.