van der Tuin, I.

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Editorial: Design by DoingIris van der TuinThe popular literature about design, quite widely available on the WorldWide Web, features a useful distinction between ‘doing by design’ and‘design by doing’. The first slogan points at practices of followingstep-by-step manuals or taking tick-box approaches, the second atworking toward solutions in more messy ways. Whereas linear manualsor top-down approaches can be adjusted to local situations, the localsituation itself is often a ‘meshwork’ in which conservative and innovativeforces inter- and intra-act. Philosopher and artist Manuel DeLanda, whoworks in the field of architecture and design, differentiates between‘self-organized meshworks of diverse elements’ and ‘hierarchies of uniformelements’ which ‘not only coexist and intermingle, [but also] constantlygive rise to one another’ (DeLanda 1997: 32; emphasis in original).The slogan ‘design by doing’, read through DeLanda, incorporates both,the necessity to be critical of top-down linearity, and the celebrationof the potential playfulness of bottom-up and lateral movements in thedesign process. Top-down linearity refers to technologies and techniquesthat exclude and oppress bodies that do not fit hegemonic forms andmolds. DIY cultures of design, and forms of ‘critical making’, respond tosuch exclusion and oppression while also, and at the same time,remaining open to new opportunities and unexpected solutions.This guest edited issue of Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies –Technologies – Power, titled ‘The Somatechnics of Critical Design’,reflects on, and contributes to, the critical and creative study of design.In my reading, the issue, edited by theorist Stacey Moran, associatedirector of the Center for Philosophical Technologies and co-director ofthe programme ‘Design + Society in the Netherlands’, both at ArizonaState University, contributes to the tradition of academic engagementSomatechnics 10.3 (2020): v–viiDOI: 10.3366/soma.2020.0322© Edinburgh University Presswww.euppublishing.com/somawith ‘design by doing’ for non-normative bodies and minoritisedcommunities in particular. The issue includes feminist, queer, andtrans; critical-disability; and critical-race and decolonial perspectiveson the designed environment on the scales of land, city, neighborhood,and body. In addition to that, the issue adds to the hands-on mentalityand creative methods of critical makers by, not only reflecting on,but also participating in, for instance, zine making and photography.As such, the guest edited issue expands the scope of interdisciplinary,interprofessional, and community-based somatechnics research andtheorizing.***There are two announcements that we would like to make as theSomatechnics editorial collective. First, this issue was delayed by theimpacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic on the higher educationsector. For this delay, we would like to apologise. Second, we would liketo announce that, as an editorial collective, we have published an articlein the journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, reflecting on theconceptual, institutional, and intersubjective intersection of somatech-nics and transgender scholarship. We write:Somatechnics and trans-gender studies are about the dialoguing acrosshuman-human, human-nonhuman, natural-cultural divides that areinternal or external to us, and that may be enabling or oppressive, invarious milieus and environments. Such dialogue seeks to radically upsetthe long-treasured dichotomies of organic and technological, then andnow, us and them, by occupying a space of imbrication, entanglement, andmutuality. (Janzen et al. 2020: 380)This issue of Somatechnics on design, as well as our recent andforthcoming issues on data and gender (9.2), education and pedagogies(10.1), and sports (11.2–3) are part of an exercise to broaden the scopeof the journal, reaching out into new themes and providing a platformfor the integration of somatechnics research and theorizing into a varietyof academic, professional, and activist communities, while keeping inclose contact with those communities that have already found their waysto the journal (see our issues on trans film studies [9.1], HIV scholarship[10.2], and medical masculinities [11.1]). We hope that Somatechnics as ajournal continues to benefit from, and contribute to, the generativeexchanges between somatechnics and trans* scholarship. We also hopeto offer, what we called, ‘trans-substantial dialogues’ in various otherfields of research, engaging in forms of “pushing [existing] argumentsbeyond their original problematics (both in context and communities)Somatechnicsviand insisting on an even deeper intersectional analysis that is responsiveto anticolonial, antiracist, and critical dis/ability movements” (Janzenet al. 2020: 376).ReferencesDeLanda, Manuel (1997), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, New York: Zone Books.Janzen, Caitlin, Holly Randell-Moon, Iris van der Tuin and Melisse Vroegindeweij (2020),‘On the Intersection of Somatechnics and Transgender Studies’, TSQ: TransgenderStudies Quarterly, 7:3, pp. 374–382.Editorialvii

Editorial: Design by Doing

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