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The production of fictions within the design field are not disinterested speculations about distant futures, but intentional political actions in the present time. Fictions can entertain as much as cause social friction. This article discusses three sources of design fictions: a global information technology company; an art school in the UK; and a design institute in Brazil. By contrasting the three cases in light of the philosophical work of Á lvaro Vieira Pinto, this article deconstructs the ideology of the future-futurology-and proposes acting in the present-handiness-to sketch an ideology of liberation. Instead of supporting the status quo, such ideology could inspire collective action for change. The practices from the three aforementioned sources are discussed to lay the foundations for such ideology of liberation in design fictions.

This paper proposes an alternative perspective on the role of leadership in the context of collaborative practices in architecture, engineering and construction design. While most of current leadership literature is focused on outstanding individuals with abilities to influence others, the aim of this study is to focus on leadership as a set of emergent interactive practices. To this end, the paper presents a video-based interaction analysis of a collaborative design workshop for a medical imaging centre in the Netherlands. Findings suggest that leadership-as-practice emerged through specific patterns of domain knowledge ownership, frequency of interactions, actor responsiveness and cross-disciplinary knowledge brokering. The paper calls for further empirical studies in the domain of interaction-focused leadership practices.

Institutionalized design education aims at training the human body to become a design body, a subject capable of designing according to aesthetic canons. In colonized territories, the modern canon predominates over indigenous, vernacular and other forms of expression. Manichaeism, utilitarianism, universalism, methodologism and various modern values are inculcated in the design body as if it did not have any. The colonization of design bodies makes young designers believe that once they learn what good design is, they need to save others from bad design. This research reports on a series of democratic design experiments held in a Brazilian university that questioned these values while decolonizing the design body. Comparing the works of design produced in the experiment with some works of art from the Neoconcrete movement, we recognize a characteristic form of expression we call monster aesthetics: a positive affirmation of otherness and collectivity that challenges colonialists’ standards of beauty and goodness.

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