Summary
Ontological design is the idea that design shapes who we become as well as what we make. What we design goes on to shape how we see, act and relate. Anne-Marie Willis puts it as: “we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us”.
The term was used in Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores’s ‘Understanding Computers and Cognition’ (1986), drawing on the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and developed by Tony Fry and by Willis, whose 2006 paper ‘Ontological Designing’ sets it out at length. Arturo Escobar’s ‘Designs for the Pluriverse’ (2018) gives it a political turn: if design makes worlds, it matters whose.
Rationale
Willis says changing behaviour through appeals to reason “rarely works”; we say cultural habits “generally can’t be reasoned with”. On her account, the town planners, technologists and architects Part 2 mentions are designing dispositions too.