Do democracies afford? Design as experiential change

This paper aims to discuss how design-focused ways of knowing linked to making, crafting, and doing are engaging the political ways of acting traditionally linked to negotiating, managing, and planning. Focusing on design’s experiential nature, this paper explores some case studies set in the sensible layer of reality, where ethics and aesthetics intertwine: here, a call-to-the-senses, aimed at nurturing the establishment of morethan-human communities, reaches citizens. By f(r)ictioning traditional narratives, design contributes to combining plural ways of knowing at a proximity scale of practice, linking bottom-up practices to top-down guidelines. This seems to produce hybrid ways of knowing, triggering alternative approaches inspired by care, relationality, and communal future sense-making. In this sense, it seems that design is playing a catalyzing role in accelerating the generation of knowledge, challenging the politically unthinkable with the experientially desirable. In such a framework, democracy itself can be understood as something more than a mode of governance, opening new paths to experimentation as a process of never-ending becoming.