# Essential Readings for Researching the Philosophy of Design in the Age of AI (A Guide by Current)

- Author: Shuichiro Ogawa (Design Researcher / Design Consultant), https://jamjet-iqbal.com/
- Published: 2026-10-23; updated: 2026-10-23
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- Keywords: philosophy-of-design, reading-list, design-theory, design-methods-movement, philosophy-of-technology, postphenomenology, ontological-design, design-justice, human-ai-interaction, generative-ai, literature

> This note selects, current by current, the literature that a researcher starting work on the philosophy of design in the age of AI should read to understand the currents that came before, and it proposes a reading order. Each of the questions that AI is now reopening (who makes the judgment, what designers know, how designed things change the actions of their users, and whose world design makes) was raised in some earlier text. For each current, the note therefore pairs the texts that raised a question with recent work that applies the question to AI. Because the philosophy of design has no reading list fixed by editors or societies, the selection follows three criteria: a text first raised a question that later currents presuppose, overview texts cite it as foundational, and recent work on AI actually builds on it. During the selection, it became clear that design research and the philosophy of technology cite different classics. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the philosophy of technology cites Simon, Winner, Latour, Verbeek, Houkes and Vermaas, and Kroes, but not Schön, Cross, Buchanan, Rittel, Galle, Winograd, or Suchman. The note divides the literature into six currents: the attempt to make design scientific and the reaction to it (Simon, Cross, Rittel and Webber, Schön, Buchanan); the two paths that appeared when computers and design met in the 1980s (the hermeneutic critique by Winograd and Flores, and the formalization of design in Hiroyuki Yoshikawa's general design theory); the formation of the philosophy of design around 2000 (Love, Galle, the dual nature of technical artifacts by Kroes and Meijers, and the use plan theory of Houkes and Vermaas); the line in the philosophy of technology and STS holding that artifacts shape actions (Akrich's script, Latour's delegation, Verbeek's mediation and design ethics, and Ihde's human-technology relations); ontological designing, which holds that design makes worlds (Willis, Escobar); and the work asking whom design serves and what lies beyond human-centeredness (critical design, design justice, posthumanism). On the AI side, the note pairs these with Yang and colleagues on why human-AI interaction is difficult to design, Benjamin and colleagues on a post-phenomenology of machine learning uncertainty, van de Poel on embedding values in AI systems, Gal on the aesthetics of generative AI, Abdipour on authorship, and Vogel and Quadflieg and Heron and colleagues on how generative AI forecloses futures. The note ends with a reading order of 12 items that moves from short, accessible papers to books.

As generative AI enters design, old questions in the philosophy of design are returning in new forms.
These questions ask who makes the judgment, what designers know, how designed things change the actions of their users, and whose world design makes.
Each of these questions was raised in some text before AI.
A researcher who reads only recent work on AI will find it difficult to tell which current's question a given text inherits and where it says something new.

This note selects, current by current, the literature that a researcher starting work on the philosophy of design in the age of AI should read to understand the currents that came before.
In each section, the texts that raised a question are paired with recent work that applies the question to AI.
The definition, origins, and prospects of the field as a whole are summarized in [What Is the Philosophy of Design? (Academic Research)](https://jamjet-iqbal.com/en/notes/philosophy-of-design-literature/), so this note concentrates on what to read and in what order.
Works checked in full text are distinguished from works checked only through an abstract or a publisher's description, and the latter are marked "abstract" in the citation.
For books whose full text could not be obtained, the note describes them only as far as another text, read in full, presents them, and the citation names that other text.

## Who decided what is essential?

The philosophy of design has no list of essential readings fixed by a society or by editors.
In the introduction to their 2018 volume, Vermaas and Vial wrote that design is an emerging topic in philosophy and that work on it is not yet shaped by a common set of questions or by an academically entrenched discipline (Vermaas and Vial 2018, abstract).
Galle, in the introduction to the 2002 special issue, likewise wrote that the field is young and that a definition carved in granite would be neither feasible nor welcome (Galle 2002).
The word "essential" in this note is therefore not an editor's declaration but a judgment based on how texts are cited.

Three criteria were used for the selection.
First, a text first raised a question that later currents presuppose.
Second, overview texts (Galle's 2002 introduction, Cross 2001, and the entries of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) cite it as foundational.
Third, recent work on AI actually builds on it as a theoretical basis.
For example, when Benjamin and colleagues discussed machine learning through post-phenomenology, they built on Ihde's human-technology relations and Verbeek's account of mediation, and they placed Yang and colleagues and Dove and colleagues as prior work (Benjamin et al. 2021).

During the selection, it became clear that the classics cited in design research and the classics cited in the philosophy of technology form different sets.
The "Philosophy of Technology" entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (revised in July 2026) cites Simon, Winner, Latour, Verbeek, Houkes and Vermaas, and Kroes, but the names of Schön, Cross, Buchanan, Rittel, Galle, Winograd, and Suchman appear neither in its text nor in its bibliography (Franssen et al. 2026).
The "Artifact" entry of the same encyclopedia also cites Houkes and Vermaas, Kroes, and Parsons, but not Schön or Cross (Preston 2022).
Conversely, Cross 2001, an overview from the design research side, is organized around Simon and Schön and cites neither Latour nor Winner (Cross 2001).
A researcher who discusses AI after reading only one of these sets is likely to mistake a question already raised in the other line for a new one.
The six currents below were therefore assembled from both lines.

## Can design be made into a science? (1960s to 1990s)

The first texts to read concern the attempt to make design scientific and the reaction against it.
Now that AI can produce design proposals, the question of how far design judgment can be formalized has returned, so it is useful to know first how the question was originally posed and how it was rejected.

In a 2001 paper, Cross observed that concern with the relationship between design and science strengthened twice in the modern history of design (Cross 2001).
The first time was when modernism sought scientific design products in the 1920s, and the second was when the design methods movement sought a scientific design process in the 1960s.
According to Cross, the 1960s culminated in Simon's "sciences of the artificial".
Simon called for universities to develop "a science of design", that is, a body of intellectually tough, analytic, partly formalizable, partly empirical, teachable doctrine about the design process (Simon, as quoted in Cross 2001).
From the side of the philosophy of technology, Simon's *The Sciences of the Artificial* is one of the answers that distinguished technology radically from science, holding that the scientist is concerned with how things are and the engineer with how things ought to be (Franssen et al. 2026).
The same entry notes that Simon appended the condition "in order to function" to this "ought to be", leaving open whether determining functions as ends is part of technology, and that this view became a major source of the common picture of technology as a means to ends specified outside engineering (Franssen et al. 2026).

The 1970s brought a reaction.
Rittel and Webber argued that planning problems, unlike tame problems such as those of mathematics, are "wicked problems" that have no definitive formulation and that can be distinguished by at least ten properties (Rittel and Webber 1973).
Schön criticized Simon's "science of design" for being based on approaches to solving well-formed problems, argued that professional practice must deal with "messy, problematic situations", and proposed instead to search for an epistemology of practice that practitioners use in situations of uncertainty and value conflict (Schön 1983, as quoted in Cross 2001).
In the introduction to the book, Schön also wrote that inquiry into the epistemology of practice is needed and named the complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflicts of practice situations (Schön 1983).
Following this line, Cross built design as a discipline rather than a science on the axiom that designers have their own form of knowledge (Cross 2001).
Buchanan argued that design has no special subject matter of its own apart from what a designer conceives it to be, so that designers must discover or invent a subject matter from the problem itself, which makes design problems wicked; Buchanan called design a new liberal art of technological culture (Buchanan 1992).

As a text that applies the question of this current to AI, this note pairs it with the 2020 paper by Yang and colleagues.
Yang and colleagues synthesized prior research, their own design and research experience, and their observations when teaching, and they identified two sources of the distinctive difficulty of designing human-AI interaction (Yang et al. 2020).
These sources are uncertainty surrounding AI's capabilities and the complexity of AI's output, which spans from simple to adaptive and complex.
Yang and colleagues also called sketching and prototyping cornerstones of any design process, and they pointed out that methods and tools for designing AI have focused on the two ends of the process, understanding what AI is and evaluating the final design, while sketching and prototyping in between remain under-explored (Yang et al. 2020).
Schön's question, which tried to explain a practice that does not presuppose well-formed problems, takes a new form when the material is one whose capabilities cannot be known until they are tried.
The paper by Yang and colleagues leaves this question to its readers.

Cross predicted that concerns with design and science return in a cycle of about 40 years and would reemerge in the 2000s (Cross 2001).
Whether the debate about generative AI amounts to a third wave is a question to examine after reading the texts of this section.

**Readings**

- Cross 2001: the two waves, the opposition between Simon and Schön, and the axiom of design as a discipline. This serves as the map of the section.
- Rittel and Webber 1973: the ten properties of wicked problems. The starting point for later debates on the form of design problems.
- Buchanan 1992: the claim that design has no special subject matter.
- Simon 1969: the source of the "science of design". The full text was not obtained this time; the note relies on how Cross 2001 and Franssen et al. 2026 present it.
- Schön 1983: the source of reflective practice. Only the opening (the introduction and Chapter 1) made public by the publisher was read this time; the rest relies on how Cross 2001 presents it.
- On the AI side: Yang et al. 2020.

## When computers met design, two paths appeared (1980s)

A part of the prehistory of the philosophy of design in the age of AI that is easily overlooked is the literature from the 1980s, when computers and design first met.
Two paths pointing in opposite directions appeared at that time.

The first path formalized design so that it could be built into intelligent CAD.
The 1986 report by Tomiyama and Yoshikawa, which extended Hiroyuki Yoshikawa's general design theory, opens by noting that next-generation CAD systems are expected to have intelligence and that research on knowledge-based CAD is active, yet no theory gives a guiding principle for implementing such systems (Tomiyama and Yoshikawa 1986).
The authors presented general design theory, based on axiomatic set theory, as a theory for formalizing design processes and design knowledge; they defined an ideal state with three axioms and then extended the theory toward real problems (Tomiyama and Yoshikawa 1986).
The introduction criticizes earlier design methodology for discussing how to design only phenomenologically and for not giving sufficient explanations of basic problems such as what design is (Tomiyama and Yoshikawa 1986).
The report can be read as an attempt to push the "partly formalizable" science of design that Simon called for, with the aim of building it into machines.
In a 1995 critical review, Reich concluded that the assumptions of general design theory are too restrictive to apply directly to design and proposed treating the theory as a model rather than as an accurate reflection of design, so that its guidelines become hypotheses to be tested empirically (Reich 1995, abstract).

The second path criticized the assumptions of AI itself and laid a new foundation for design.
The full text of the 1986 book by Winograd and Flores, *Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design*, could not be obtained this time, so the note follows Maurer's 1991 reading of it.
According to Maurer, Winograd and Flores rejected the rationalistic tradition on which artificial intelligence relies to build models of the mind (the view that things exist independently of interpretation and that thinking is the manipulation of their representations) (Maurer 1991).
They rethought computer design through Heidegger's notions of thrownness, readiness-to-hand, and breakdown, in which background assumptions come to the fore when a tool fails (Maurer 1991).
In Maurer's account, this position implies that a computer, like a human being, is not an autonomous agent; like a text, it can only act as a medium for understanding among people, and what the computer conveys to another person are the commitments and understandings of its designer (Maurer 1991).
From there, Winograd and Flores argued for a new foundation for computer science based on the nature of human conversation (Maurer 1991).

Maurer wrote that the book received mixed reviews in the field of artificial intelligence, most of them unfavorable and some downright hostile; while sympathetic to the project, Maurer criticized the authors for reintroducing rationalist assumptions through Heidegger and Habermas (Maurer 1991).

Read side by side, these two paths show that the opposition in the current debate on generative AI had already appeared once in the 1980s.
On one side are those who formalize design knowledge and hand it to machines; on the other are those who hold that machines can at most be a medium for human understanding.
On the AI side, Sinclair and Buwert examined the challenge that the empathic behavior displayed by large language models poses for design, using the concepts of alterity in Buber and Levinas (Sinclair and Buwert 2026, abstract).
The position summarized by Maurer, that a computer is a medium rather than an autonomous agent, provides an axis of comparison for reading that paper.

**Readings**

- Maurer 1991: a reading and critique of the book by Winograd and Flores. It is short and can be read before the book itself.
- Winograd and Flores 1986: the book that criticized AI from hermeneutics and laid a new foundation for design. The full text was not obtained this time; the note relies on how Maurer 1991 presents it.
- Tomiyama and Yoshikawa 1986: the axioms of general design theory and its aim of formalization for intelligent CAD.
- Reich 1995: a critique of general design theory (abstract).
- On the AI side: Sinclair and Buwert 2026 (abstract).

## When the philosophy of design became a field (around 2000)

The third set of texts dates from the period when the philosophy of design announced itself as a field.
The questions here are what design is and what a designed artifact is.

Love distinguished the "Philosophy of Design", a field on a par with the philosophy of science or of technology, from "design philosophy", which has been associated with the philosophical study of design method (Love 2000).
In the introduction to the 2002 special issue, Galle found that the papers in the issue share a way of obtaining insights, by rational reflection rather than empirical observation, and characterized the philosophy of design as the pursuit of insights about design by philosophical means (Galle 2002).
In the same introduction, Galle wrote that most authors in the field, trained in only one of philosophy and design, are in a sense "half amateurs" (Galle 2002).

Of the questions from this period, the dual nature of technical artifacts bears most directly on the age of AI.
In their 2002 research program paper, Kroes and Meijers wrote that people conceptualize the world both as physical objects interacting through causal connections and as agents who intentionally represent the world and act in it, and they argued that technical artifacts span both conceptualizations (Kroes and Meijers 2002).
The concept of function never appears in physical descriptions of the world; it belongs to the intentional conceptualization.
Because artifacts can perform their function well or badly, attributions of function involve normative judgments (Kroes and Meijers 2002).
Technical artifacts therefore cannot be described exhaustively within the physical conceptualization, which has no place for their functional features, nor within the intentional conceptualization, since their functionality must be realized in an adequate physical structure (Kroes and Meijers 2002).
The authors wrote that relating the two descriptions is exactly what happens in the design of artifacts (Kroes and Meijers 2002).

Houkes and Vermaas's *Technical Functions* (2010) carried this debate on dual nature toward the question of whose intentions determine function.
The full text was not obtained this time, so the note follows the account in the "Artifact" entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Houkes and Vermaas hold that the use plan formulated by designers establishes the function of an artifact in the first instance (Preston 2022).
The use plan, however, must be supported by a justification that the plan will realize the function, and this requires knowledge of the causal roles of the artifact's physical capacities, so the physical structure constrains the intentions articulated in the use plan (Preston 2022).
The authors further require a historical element, the communication of the use plan from designer to user and from user to user (Preston 2022).

On the AI side, two texts are paired with this section.
In a 2025 essay, Gal argued that generative AI does not dramatically change the field of aesthetics but rather exposes the continuity of aesthetic discourse (Gal 2025).
The continuing themes that Gal lists are the illusion of an image's or object's ontological stability, function and user control, the natural and the artificial, authenticity and forgery, the handmade and the mass-produced, the readymade, and ekphrasis (Gal 2025).
Drawing on Gibson's notion of affordance, Gal argued that, just as stairs come to be used as benches or gathering spots, uses that emerge after production are as authentic as the uses planned in design (Gal 2025).
Placing this argument beside the theory of Houkes and Vermaas, which establishes function first from the designer's use plan, shows where the two accounts part.
In a 2026 paper, Abdipour argued that in design with generative AI, authorship is redistributed between people and systems through negotiation; Abdipour called the competences required to navigate co-adaptive AI systems "interactional literacy" and reframed Walter Benjamin's concept of aura through three models: prompt aura, interactional aura, and algorithmic signature (Abdipour 2026).

**Readings**

- Galle 2002: the introduction to the special issue, with a list of the field's themes and its method of reflection.
- Love 2000: the distinction between the "Philosophy of Design" and "design philosophy".
- Kroes and Meijers 2002: the research program on the dual nature of technical artifacts. Available in open access.
- Houkes and Vermaas 2010: the use plan theory. The full text was not obtained this time; the note relies on how Preston 2022 presents it.
- Vermaas and Vial 2018: the introduction to an edited volume (abstract), useful for confirming that the field has not yet settled.
- Galle 2017: a review article on Parsons's *Philosophy of Design*. Galle defended the notion of a stable essence of the concept of design and critically analyzed Parsons's definition (Galle 2017, abstract).
- On the AI side: Gal 2025 and Abdipour 2026.

## Artifacts shape human action (philosophy of technology and STS, 1980s to 2000s)

The fourth current asks how designed artifacts shape the actions and morality of the people who use them.
This line grew outside design research, in the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies (STS), and, as noted above, it often does not appear in overviews from the design research side.
Yet now that AI systems enter human judgment, two of the AI texts paired in this note (Benjamin and colleagues, and van de Poel) build on this line.

In a 1992 chapter, Akrich wrote that designers of a new object make hypotheses about the world into which it will be inserted, define actors with specific tastes, competences, motives, and political prejudices, and assume that morality, technology, and the economy will evolve in particular ways (Akrich 1992).
Akrich called the end product of inscribing this vision of the world in the technical content of the object a "script", and argued that, like a film script, technical objects define a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act (Akrich 1992).
Users, however, may not play the roles the designer envisaged, or may define quite different roles of their own (Akrich 1992).
In the glossary of the same book, Akrich and Latour called the analyst's work of reading and writing out such inscriptions "de-scription", the opposite movement of inscription by the designer (Akrich and Latour 1992).

In a chapter of the same book, Latour started from the example of the hinge, to which the work of reversibly solving the wall-hole dilemma has been shifted, and called this transfer of work that humans would otherwise do to a nonhuman "delegation" (Latour 1992).
In the example of a car whose alarm keeps sounding until the driver fastens the seat belt, Latour asked whether the morality of obeying the law lies in the human driver or in the artifact that forces obedience, and argued that the "missing masses" overlooked by sociology are the nonhumans that make up our morality (Latour 1992).
The overview from the philosophy of technology names Winner as the representative of work on the relationship between technology and politics (Franssen et al. 2026).

In a 2006 paper, Verbeek carried the idea of the script toward the normative side.
Verbeek argued that because technologies mediate human perception and action, designers materialize morality in technologies and thus do ethics by other means, and proposed mediation analysis to anticipate technological mediation at the design stage (Verbeek 2006).
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy names this post-phenomenology as one of the two roots of design ethics and summarizes its task as anticipating technological mediations and thinking about and designing for desirable mediations (Franssen et al. 2026).
According to Benjamin and colleagues, Ihde, whose work is the starting point of post-phenomenology, proposed four types of human-technology relations (Ihde 1990, as presented in Benjamin et al. 2021).
In embodiment relations, technologies become part of bodily-perceptual experience, as glasses do, and in hermeneutic relations, technologies make the world legible in a specific way, as a map or a thermometer does.
In alterity relations, technologies such as an ATM or a robot are treated as a quasi-other; and in background relations, technologies such as central heating merge with the background of experience while giving it texture.

On the AI side, this section pairs the 2021 paper by Benjamin and colleagues with the 2020 paper by van de Poel.
Benjamin and colleagues treated machine learning uncertainty as a design material, read four design research cases through a post-phenomenological lens, and proposed three concepts (Benjamin et al. 2021).
The first is "thingly uncertainty", the capacity of ML-driven artifacts to be uncertain about the world and thereby to generate and adapt to a wide continuum of relations to other things, their datafied environment, and people.
The other two are "pattern leakage", the way ML models alter the world they seek to represent, and "futures creep", the subtle transformation of the present by ML predictions (Benjamin et al. 2021).
Benjamin and colleagues adopted Verbeek's view that design is doing philosophy "by other means" (Benjamin et al. 2021).

Van de Poel asked when an AI system can be said to embody values such as fairness and accountability, and proposed an account that understands embodied values as the result of design activities intended to embed those values in the system (van de Poel 2020).
Van de Poel treats AI systems as a special kind of sociotechnical system that, in addition to the technical artifacts, human agents, and institutions of traditional sociotechnical systems, contains artificial agents and technical norms that regulate interactions between artificial agents and other elements of the system (van de Poel 2020).

Akrich's script and Latour's delegation were discussed as something that designers inscribe in objects.
When learning models take over part of the inscription, who can be said to have inscribed what is a question left to readers of these two texts.

**Readings**

- Akrich 1992: the source of the script and de-scription. The volume edited by Bijker and Law is available in open access.
- Latour 1992: delegation and the morality in artifacts. In the same volume.
- Verbeek 2006: technological mediation and the ethics that designers do "by other means".
- Ihde 1990: the four human-technology relations. The full text was not obtained this time; the note relies on how Benjamin et al. 2021 present it.
- Winner 1980: the classic on the politics of artifacts. The full text was not obtained this time; the note gives only its position in Franssen et al. 2026.
- Franssen et al. 2026: an overview of the philosophy of technology, with sections on design methodology and design ethics.
- On the AI side: Benjamin et al. 2021 and van de Poel 2020.

## Design makes worlds, and those worlds make people (ontological designing)

The fifth current is **ontological designing**, which understands design as an activity that shapes how people are and the worlds they live in.
While the previous line asks how one artifact shapes the actions of one user, this current holds that the accumulation of design makes the world itself and the ways of being of the people who live in it.

The full text of the original source, Willis 2006, could not be obtained, so the note follows the quotations in Rego's 2023 paper.
In Rego's account, the idea is rooted in Heidegger's thinking of being (Rego 2023).
Willis wrote that ontological designing implies an understanding of design, as practice and as object, that differs radically from the usual one, and also a different understanding of who and what we are in the modern world (Willis 2006, as quoted in Rego 2023).
Rego also noted that Fry called ontological designing a political design practice that acknowledges the agency of design (Rego 2023).
In a 2018 book, Escobar argued for redirecting design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth; pointing out that much design serves capitalist ends, Escobar presented an "autonomous design" rooted in collaboration and place (Escobar 2018, abstract).

On the AI side, this section is paired with work arguing that generative AI narrows the worlds that design opens.
Vogel and Quadflieg argued that the instrumental view of generative AI as accelerating design workflows obscures an epistemic shift, in which exploratory, ambiguous, and material ways of searching for form are externalized to probabilistic processing (Vogel and Quadflieg 2026).
According to the authors, through a "double foreclosure" that favors ways of knowing already abundant in digital records, generative AI presents a dominant view from a particular place as a standard neutral for everyone and structurally forecloses other design futures (Vogel and Quadflieg 2026).

Heron and colleagues argued that generative AI is convergence-driven and nuance-averse and that, by preferentially reproducing what is statistically probable and culturally dominant, it accelerates the foreclosure of possible worlds (Heron et al. 2026).
In their view, the idiosyncrasy, rupture, serendipity, and plurality on which design relies are the very qualities that the probabilistic logic of generative systems systematically erodes (Heron et al. 2026).
Through a lens of glitch feminism, Heron and colleagues proposed error, derangement, and the uncomputable as strategies of resistance (Heron et al. 2026).

Drawing on findings from engineering design research, Bordas and colleagues distinguished types of generativeness and showed that generative AI has two levels: the generation of new artifacts and the generation of the generative models themselves (Bordas et al. 2024, abstract).
Among the texts collected this time, none discussed what happens when the idea of ontological designing, that design makes worlds that in turn make people, is extended to the level at which models are generated.

**Readings**

- Rego 2023: an account of the definition and origins of ontological designing, quoting Willis 2006 with page numbers.
- Willis 2006: the source of ontological designing. The full text was not obtained this time; the note relies on the quotations in Rego 2023.
- Escobar 2018: design for the pluriverse (abstract).
- On the AI side: Vogel and Quadflieg 2026, Heron et al. 2026, and Bordas et al. 2024 (abstract).

## Whom does design serve, and can human-centeredness still hold? (2010s onward)

The sixth current asks what design brings to whom and questions the premise of human-centered design itself.
Except for Heron and colleagues, the texts of this section were checked through abstracts, so their claims are stated within the scope of the abstracts.

Bardzell and Bardzell positioned critical design as a research through design methodology that foregrounds the ethics of design practice, reveals potentially hidden agendas and values, and explores alternative design values (Bardzell and Bardzell 2013, abstract).
Costanza-Chock described design justice as an approach to design led by marginalized communities and examined how universalist design principles and practices erase people who are intersectionally disadvantaged (Costanza-Chock 2020, abstract).
Forlano wrote that design has been dominated by human-centered and user-centered ideas since at least the mid-1980s, but that changes in technology and the environment push designers to attend to complex sociotechnical systems, and surveyed the debates of posthumanism (Forlano 2017, abstract).
Giaccardi and Redström asked whether human-centered and user-centered design have reached their limits with respect to data technologies such as the IoT and machine learning (Giaccardi and Redström 2020, abstract).

On the AI side, this section is paired with the paper by Schneider and Csűrös.
Through the lens of the material turn, the authors treated generative AI as an active participant in co-creation rather than a mere tool.
Drawing on ontological design, postphenomenology, cognitive science, and material engagement theory, they reinterpreted creativity as an emergent phenomenon within sociomaterial networks and argued that the designer's role shifts from control to orchestration (Schneider and Csűrös 2025, abstract).
Heron and colleagues, discussed in the previous section, also wrote that the training data of generative AI reflects a profound anthropocentrism that extinguishes plurality (Heron et al. 2026).
Within the debate that seeks to move beyond human-centeredness, one position welcomes generative AI as a nonhuman co-creator, and another sees it as a technology that reproduces anthropocentrism.

**Readings**

- Bardzell and Bardzell 2013: an account of the concept of critical design (abstract).
- Costanza-Chock 2020: design justice (abstract).
- Forlano 2017: posthumanism and design (abstract).
- Giaccardi and Redström 2020: data technologies and more-than-human design (abstract).
- On the AI side: Schneider and Csűrös 2025 (abstract) and Heron et al. 2026.

## Where does the philosophy of design in the age of AI stand now?

After the currents above, the next texts show where the philosophy of design in the age of AI itself currently stands.

The track "Design Research During and After Artificial Intelligence" at the 2026 conference of the Design Research Society (DRS) received 90 submissions, of which 43 went to review and 11 were accepted (Lee-Smith et al. 2026).
The editors wrote that the stage at which AI could be treated as a phenomenon external to design may already have passed, and that the "after" in the track's title remains unfulfilled and stands as a provocation (Lee-Smith et al. 2026).
Verganti and colleagues called the decision-making side of innovation, which creates ideas and solves problems, "design", asked what happens when the judgments that people have made are taken over by machines, and proposed a framework for understanding design and innovation in the age of AI (Verganti et al. 2020, abstract).

The question raised since Cross, whether design has its own form of knowledge, is also under dispute now.
Digby argued that the dichotomies of design epistemology, such as science versus art and rational versus intuitive, are false, and that critical rationalism can explain the characteristics of design without a separate epistemology (Digby 2026, abstract).
The publisher's description of the volume edited by Secomandi and Verbeek in 2026 argues that the field has already moved far from the traditional interpretation of the "philosophy of design", in which philosophers discuss design at a distance from its practice.
The description raises the possibility of reinterpreting design philosophy as "doing philosophy in a designerly way" (Secomandi and Verbeek 2026, abstract).
This phrasing can be read beside Verbeek's claim that designers do ethics "by other means" and beside the view, adopted by Benjamin and colleagues, that design is doing philosophy "by other means".
The claims and arguments of the two texts by Digby and by Secomandi and Verbeek are examined from their full texts in [Does Design Need Its Own Epistemology, and Can Philosophy Be Done by Design? (Reading Two 2026 Texts)](https://jamjet-iqbal.com/en/notes/designerly-epistemology-debate-literature/).

**Readings**

- Lee-Smith et al. 2026: the introduction to the AI track at DRS 2026, for checking what is being discussed and how much.
- Verganti et al. 2020: a framework for design and innovation when judgments are taken over by machines (abstract).
- Digby 2026: the claim that design does not need its own epistemology (abstract).
- Secomandi and Verbeek 2026: the shift toward "doing philosophy in a designerly way" (abstract).

## In what order to read

The first 12 items are ordered to start with short papers that are easy to obtain in open access or as copies, leaving books for later.
The order moves from older to newer currents, and an AI text paired with a current is inserted after that current has been read.

1. Cross 2001: the first map, covering the two waves, Simon and Schön, and design as a discipline.
2. Rittel and Webber 1973: wicked problems, a term that much later literature presupposes.
3. Buchanan 1992: the claim that design has no special subject matter.
4. Yang et al. 2020: what becomes difficult when the questions so far are applied to AI.
5. Maurer 1991: an entry point to Winograd and Flores, to be followed by the book itself.
6. Tomiyama and Yoshikawa 1986: the formalization of design as the other path.
7. Galle 2002: the list of the field's themes.
8. Kroes and Meijers 2002: the dual nature of technical artifacts.
9. Akrich 1992 and Latour 1992: script and delegation, readable one after the other in the same volume.
10. Verbeek 2006: mediation and design ethics.
11. Benjamin et al. 2021: an example of applying post-phenomenology to machine learning.
12. Vogel and Quadflieg 2026 and Heron et al. 2026: the critique that generative AI narrows the worlds that design opens.

After these 12 items, a reader can move to the books whose full text could not be read, or could be read only in part, this time (Simon 1969, Schön 1983, Winograd and Flores 1986, Houkes and Vermaas 2010, Ihde 1990, and Escobar 2018).
Because this note presents each of these books only through other texts, they are worth checking again in the original.

## What could not be confirmed this time

The following books and papers are named in the literature on the philosophy of design, but this time neither their full text nor an abstract usable for the note's claims was obtained, so they were not placed in the currents above.
They are Suchman's book on situated action (second edition, 2007), Krippendorff's book on the semantic turn (2006), Redström's book on making design theory (2017), Dorst's paper on the core of design thinking (2011), and Cross's first paper on designerly ways of knowing (1982).
Suchman's book, which discusses human-computer interaction, may occupy a position that connects the second and fourth currents, but this was not confirmed from the full text this time.
The path by which Dreyfus's critique of AI entered design theory was found in this collection only in the abstract of a book chapter, so it was left out of the note.
Apart from general design theory, the philosophy of design outside the English-speaking world was not within the scope of this collection.

## Related notes

- [What Is the Philosophy of Design? (Academic Research)](https://jamjet-iqbal.com/en/notes/philosophy-of-design-literature/): what the philosophy of design is (its definition, origins, currents, and prospects as a whole)
- [Does Design Need Its Own Epistemology, and Can Philosophy Be Done by Design? (Reading Two 2026 Texts)](https://jamjet-iqbal.com/en/notes/designerly-epistemology-debate-literature/): whether design needs its own epistemology and whether philosophy can be done by design (reading Digby 2026 and Secomandi and Verbeek 2026 in full)
- [The Epistemological Premises and Methodological Foundations of Design: A Literature Map of Wicked Problems, Abduction, and Set-Based Exploration](https://jamjet-iqbal.com/en/notes/design-epistemology-methodology-foundations/): the epistemological premises and methodological foundations of design
- [The Genealogy of Design Research in Japan: Three Origins, and the University That Passed the Presidency Around](https://jamjet-iqbal.com/en/notes/japan-design-research-genealogy-literature/): the genealogy of design research in Japan
- [AI in the Design Industry: An Academic Review (2026)](https://jamjet-iqbal.com/en/notes/ai-in-design-literature/): academic research on AI in design

## Unverified items

No unverified statement remains among the main claims.
Works checked only through an abstract or a publisher's description are marked "abstract" in the citation, and only what the abstract states is reported.
For the books and papers whose full text could not be obtained (Simon 1969, Schön 1983 from Chapter 2 onward, Winograd and Flores 1986, Houkes and Vermaas 2010, Ihde 1990, Willis 2006, and Winner 1980), the note reports only how other texts read in full (Cross 2001, Franssen et al. 2026, Maurer 1991, Preston 2022, Benjamin et al. 2021, and Rego 2023) present them.
Yang et al. 2020 and van de Poel 2020 were checked by opening the publishers' full-text pages in a browser and examining the relevant passages, but the text could not be saved.
Benjamin et al. 2021 was read in its arXiv version, and differences from the ACM version were not checked.

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