In 2021 Elisava Research asked me and Laura Benítez Valero to be guest editors of the 37th issue of the research journal Temes de Disseny. Laura and I decided to focus on the idea of invisible conflicts, the ones that exceed human scale and probably help us understand and redefine human existence and social justice in the 21st century. In the editorial we unpacked this idea, arguing that —far from being a neocolonial megalomaniac endeavour— "design at a planetary scale" is a necessary challenge for designers, artists and activists.

"In a world where cognitive stimuli overload actually pushes people’s attention toward a plethora of details and short-term reactions, the colossal proportions of quantification and prediction procedures are actually leading us to the opposite side of abstraction.

The responsible players for this drift towards abstraction are the processes of data production and storage on a massive scale, but also dynamic and scalable data processing that produces interpretive patterns that are invisible to 'users' (former citizens), not to mention other processes that are even more incompre- hensible – sometimes messy and even conflicting – such as calibration, synchronisation, translation between systems and protocols.

All of this forces us to redefine basic questions in radically new manners: How do you make a decision? How is a strategy – or a tactic – for action (individual and collective) defined? How can we rethink the relationship be- tween subjective worlds and the material planet? What does democracy mean? Indeed, how does the conflict manifest itself? How can design research provide tools for observing an unstable era of often invisible, planetary-scale problems? How do forms of resistance or counter-design arise if the conflict is scarcely visible?"

Excerpt from: Brusadin, Bani, and Laura Benítez Valero. 2021. “Invisible Conflicts: The Challenges of Design on a Planetary Scale”. Temes de Disseny 37: 8-17. https://doi.org/10.46467/TdD37.2021.8-17

Temes de Disseny #37. Invisible Conflicts: A New Terrain of Bodies, Infrastructures and Information

Full issue (open access): https://raco.cat/index.php/Temes/issue/view/29777