Future Perfect: Design between Experiment and Political Technology

Design has always had more of a 'sense of possibility' (Musil) than of reality. As a modern concept, it hardened during the Renaissance alongside its relative, the 'future.' Today, design in science and engineering prefers synthesis over analysis, futurizing over historicizing, and computing over fantasizing. Applied to behavior, affect, and the self, computational design instantiates political technologies at the center of liberal markets and political governance. 

However, design as an individual artistic experiment or Entwurf also promises refusal, resistance, counterfactuals, and alternative 'distributions of the sensible' (Rancière). The paper reflects design's ambivalence between artistic experiment and political technology by mobilizing European theories of knowledge and techniques.