Design is the keyword for this month’s session of Correspondences. As a verb and a nominal, design can refer to the practices that humans employ to arrange, engineer, fashion, create, mitigate, forestall, and imagine their near and distant futures. But designs are also artifacts—the prototypes, master plans, algorithms, and styles that frequently occupy social lives independent of their assigned functions. Designed worlds and worlds of design are thick with aspirational order, promises of technological solutions to pending crises, and the allure of expertise. Yet the products of design, from smart cities and service delivery networks to computer operating systems and clothing brands, seem to always invite contingencies, failures, disruptions, and hackings. Designers promise solutions to problems. Yet, as many anthropologists have recently observed, it is failure—immanent to every design—that makes this theme so fertile for ethnographic exploration (e.g., Bissell 2011; de Boeck and Plissart 2006; Larkin 2004, 2008; Mains 2012).

Design is, at least in part, about the future, and anthropology has always been interested in how humans mediate, govern, resist, and hack their futures. As Arjun Appadurai (2013, 285) has argued, however, we have yet to aggregate these interests into “a general point of view about humans as future makers and futures as cultural facts.” Could design as a theme of critical ethnographic engagement link specific practices such as canoe making in Gawa (Munn 1977), DIY punk style in Indonesia (Luvaas 2012, 2013), autoconstruction in Luanda (Gastrow 2015), and hydraulic engineering in Mumbai (Anand 2011) to a general discussion of humans as futuremakers? While design as a practice seems to disavow history, it can also reveal much about the past (see Bissell 2011). What are we, as anthropologists, to make of the ruins and afterlives of unrealized and abandoned designs that inhabit the present alongside dreams for a better future? Finally, how might specific ethnographic engagements with practices of futuremaking disrupt notions of design as a specialist, technocentric activity? This session invites four scholars to reflect on these and other questions related to design as an emerging theme in anthropology that also—as Bissell reminds us in his opening Provocation—furthers our enduring concern with humans as worldmakers.