The paper explores a series of important phenomena that have concurred to a global crisis, and their influence in pushing the design field to a crisis of its own. By acknowledging the scale and significance of humans’ influence on the current state of the planet, and the ways in which design has contributed to aggravate the environmental and humanitarian crisis, this provocative essay critically examines the democratization of design knowledge and the use of decentralized, digital means of production as promising approaches to improving design education and practice moving forward into the 21st Century.