Abstract
To interrogate design is to interrogate the human. If design is a human’s existential mediation agent, the epistemology that underpins the form of designing reduced to modern, reproductive and functionalist traditions, whose effects on material reality always converge to the destruction of other forms of life on Earth, is the same epistemology with which the historical, symbolic and cultural processes of the notion of the human have been constituted. Taking the anthropocentric relation between design and the human as the object of study, the aim of this dissertation is to corroborate the discussion on the symbolic and material emancipation of the act of designing from the act of being human as the universal measure of life. In this research, design was approached methodologically through posthuman philosophy in order to claim an ontological reorientation that allows it to be incorporated as a semiotic, materialistic and ethical praxis of revelation capable of, like art and other forms of expression, conceiving emergent processes of creation of the hitherto unimaginable and impossible, emancipating itself from human epistemology and, therefore, from the monolinear and fixed reproduction of its effects on material and symbolic reality. The result is a critical theoretical perspective on the notion of design for the end of the Anthropocene, embodied in a participatory project carried out with three people and consisting of the following stages: co-creation for the conception of text-based imagery using artificial intelligence tools; fabrication for the elaboration of silicone moulds using digital design and fabrication tools; and materialisation, applying biomaterial pastes to the moulds, for the production of three design artefacts as exhibition boards whose semiotic intensity seeks to emancipate the viewer’s interpretation from the meanings of the anthropocentric symbolic field. A design of and for the end of the anthropocene is to put into perspective an act of radical compassion for all forms of life and existence; it is a form of activism of artistic and collective manifestation in which, from the suppression of the designer’s ego, or from the privilege of access to decision-making towards power, emerges the transformative semiotic intensity - where there are no symbols or order, but a dizzying chaos of senses, sensations and feelings to create and express other forms of subjectivity and relationality - that opens up the world to new becomings through ecstasy.Keywords: Design, Critical Studies in Design, Posthumanism, Technology, Post-anthropocentrism.
