Welcome to Other Worlds, a shapeshifting magazine for design research, criticism and transitions. Other Worlds (OW) aims at making the social, political, cultural and technical complexities surrounding design practices legible and, thus, transformable.

We value design cultures, but we approach them without devotion. Instead of celebrating the power of design, we look at the power structures that design reproduces, willingly or not. For us, more than a solution, design itself is a problem and a challenge.

We acknowledge design’s intrinsic interdisciplinarity, but we recognize that such quality is not neutral: design cultures have produced reductions and erasures. This is why at Other Worlds we humbly relate to other fields of knowledge, respecting their histories and milieus.

Presently, design is not even a buzzword anymore. That might be a good thing. Opposing a generic understanding of design, Other Worlds engages instead with generalism, the emancipatory principle according to which the organization of life shouldn’t be the domain of designerly elites alone. Claiming autonomy is not enough: autonomy is a process that requires cultivation and maintenance.

Other Worlds’ main areas of focus are: 1) Politics, Community and Technology; 2) Ecology, Fiction and Pedagogy; and 3) Decolonization and Practices of the Global South.

Other Worlds hosts articles, interviews, short essays and all the cultural production that doesn’t fit neither the fast-paced, volatile design media promotional machine nor the necessarily slow and lengthy process of scholarly publishing. In this way, we hope to able to address urgent issues, without sacrificing rigor and depth.