(Designing) Beyond the Modern

(Designing) Beyond the Modern is the second volume in a trilogy by Eduardo Staszowski and Virginia Tassinari, following Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (2020). This book is a provocation: how can we begin to move beyond the modern when so much of how we think and make remains entangled in its logic? Among the forces that have both shaped and been shaped by the modern project, design occupies a central role. Rather than treating it as a neutral tool, this book approaches design as a practice deeply implicated in modernity's extractive, colonial, and anthropocentric foundations. The parenthesis in the title signals an ambivalence about whether "designing" can remain a relevant or viable practice. Without offering a conclusion, the book confronts the legacy of the Modern and calls for a caesura: a rupture, a pause, or an interval where a critical praxis, whether called design or not, might begin to take shape. Drawing on philosophy, decolonial thought, and design theory, it challenges the logics that continue to shape modern institutions and imaginaries. Through essays, fragments, and engagements with the work of Tomás Maldonado, along with a conversation with Arturo Escobar and a contribution from Aílton Krenak, this book traces tensions and potential shifts that emerge when thinking and acting beyond the Modern.

Eduardo Staszowski is Professor of Design Strategies at Parsons School of Design and Director of the Parsons DESIS Lab, USA. He is the co-editor of the Designing in Dark Times, Radical Thinkers in Design, and Beyond the Modern series, and Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (Bloomsbury, 2020). Virginia Tassinari is Assistant Professor in the Human-Centered Design Department, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft, the Netherlands, and a design researcher for the foresight and design studio Pantopicon, Belgium. She is the co-editor of the Beyond the Modern series and Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (Bloomsbury, 2020).

TABLE OF CONTENTS: PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION i. Moving Beyond ii. Critical Praxis iii. The Structure of the Book THE MODERN Many Faces of Modern Reframing the Modern Catastrophe Colonial Human DESIGNING Designing Today, Tomás Maldonado Commentary on Maldonado Design-as-Modern Dilemma Nihilism Dialectics Expertise Denaming and Renaming Idiocy Tomás Maldonado, Design and The Future of Modernity, Emanuele Quinz BEYOND THE MODERN Beyond A Conversation with, Arturo Escobar Language Exteriority Caesura Affirmative Critique Potentialities Ancestral Get Out of This Concrete Nightmare!, Aílton Krenak AFTERWORD Index