Bruno Madureira Ferreira, Amina Pereno, and Massimo Di Felice
Climate change is one of the most significant and pressing issues of the present century. Intertwined with ongoing political, social, and economic crises—as well as the most recent public health crisis—it contributes to the emergence of a complex scenario of polycrisis, which calls into question our capacity to understand and to provide robust responses to these challenges.
Modern agency, grounded in a Promethean conception of action, has produced a vital disconnection between humans and the world, affecting the ways in which we organise, design, and make sense of our actions and our relations with the world. The concept of the Anthropocene has thus become a central axis for critical reflection on the opposition between the human and the natural. Another important factor, often neglected, concerns technology or, more precisely, our relationship with it.
If we are now able to dwell in the Anthropocene while grasping the complex nature of the polycrisis we face, it is largely because planetary-scale computation and the expansion of the internet have extended forms of connectivity beyond humans and mobile devices to encompass things, territories, and biodiversity as a whole. In this sense, the present article aims to offer a reflective contribution to the debate on the vital disconnection between humans and nature, with particular emphasis on design as a model for a post-Promethean mode of action.
Our argument begins by foregrounding the materiality inherent in discourses on the Anthropocene, emphasising the indispensable role of digital technologies as a sensory meta-infrastructure that continuously unveils—through the shared language of bits—the complexity of our condition of dwelling. Modern praxis, grounded in an anthropocentric and Promethean mode of agency, proves itself to be insufficient for navigating such complexity.
Planetary-scale computation operates as an existential technology, reconfiguring our ontological and epistemological relationship with the world. Beyond the boundaries of any single discipline, design emerges as a key field for articulating, reflecting upon, and formulating a post-Promethean mode of agency capable of contributing to the development of a new praxis that is both connected and connective among humans, technology, and nature.
Within this framework, design is understood as more than a mode of human operation; it is conceived as a condition of existence of both humans and that which exists in the world. Accordingly, we propose, as an interpretive key to comprehend design as a post-Promethean model of agency, the notions of communicative forms of dwelling and connective act. These notions describe an acentric mode of action that unfolds within and through networks of digitally connected ecosystems, grounded in sympoietic interactions among humans and non-humans (technology and nature).
Keywords: Design; Digital Era; Post-Promethean Agency; Climate Change; Polycrisis; Anthropocene; Planetary-Scale Computation; Digital Technologies; Existential Technologies; Connective Act.