Kevin Richard
Senior Designer & Strategist based in Switzerland with deep interests in topics at the intersection of design, UX, systems & complexity thinking, critical thinking, ethics, organisation, decision-making, sense-making, change-making, business, etc.
I define design as: “the activities/processes that create mediums for interactions, to catalyse changes.”
I define innovation as: “significant positive changes/impacts over time in the context we are acting in.”
Interested in "soft spaces", thinking in terms of enabling constraints, attractors, and scaffolding through design practice to go beyond users and/or business centricity.
Enabling conversations through the Design & Critical Thinking community as catalysts for shared collective understanding.
I define design as: “the activities/processes that create mediums for interactions, to catalyse changes.”
I define innovation as: “significant positive changes/impacts over time in the context we are acting in.”
Interested in "soft spaces", thinking in terms of enabling constraints, attractors, and scaffolding through design practice to go beyond users and/or business centricity.
Enabling conversations through the Design & Critical Thinking community as catalysts for shared collective understanding.
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The essay then proposes actionable counter-moves designers can build into decision artefacts: provenance and audit trails, due-process and appeal windows, interoperability and exit by default, and forkable public standards with visible edit histories. These tactics aim to keep interfaces from laundering enclosure and to make design governance legible, contestable, and correctable in practice. In doing so, the paper extends debates in design studies on the politics of artefacts toward concrete institutional and infrastructural choices.
The essay develops three theses: 1) liberal competition yields to bloc-based enclosure that secures chokepoints and allegiance; 2) a “friendly” technocratic aesthetic normalizes harm by bureaucratizing it; 3) platform-state fusion extends enclosure into orbital space (“astrocapitalism”), demanding stewardship metrics, interop, and public options. From these, I propose a trioptic stance—social, aesthetic, political—operationalized as upstream constraints: due-process charters, audit trails, appeal timelines, interoperability and exit by default, and refusal policies that are collectively owned.
Rather than claim that design can “save” the future, I argue for making current design governance legible, contestable, and correctable, aligning professional accountability with material limits and public interest. (Margolin, 2002).
The framework is a creative environment built from visual metaphors, allowing participants to share diverse perspectives in a rich, nuanced, yet playful and collaborative way. The use of emergent relationships inspired by situational game design gives participants agency over outcomes in a highly collaborative setting. MOSF serves as a platform for the complementarity of multiple perspectives, not for full agreement, which encourages the emergence of different outcomes and routes for sense-making appropriate to a changing context.