Over the past several decades, the practice of design has benefited from tremendous growth in interest, study, and application. The principles, practices, and methods of design, often summed up simply as “design thinking,” have been adopted by an increasingly wide range of academic domains and professional applications. Despite design’s growth, analysis of design culture – the things we think, say, and do – reveals a converging philosophical agreement.

While this converging philosophical trajectory may appear to be a positive transcendence towards creating a stable, agreed upon body of knowledge, the results are concerning. The design hegemony has not only disenfranchised members of the design community (Bethune, 2022), but has led to stale aesthetic and experiential paradigms – product categories that remain unchanged while speaking only to the small group of creators in power. What are we missing when the systems we use are designed by a privileged, largely homogenous majority? What is the impact to culture and personal experience with technology? What is the impact to our experience with each other?