ABSTRACT
As a mode of social change, innovation is expanding and evolving. Myriad efforts try to manoeuvre around the limits of human knowledge, and thus manage human-nonhuman relations from microbial to planetary scales, by seizing innovation as a problem space. Positioning innovation in relation to the emergence of designerly, cybernetic thinking, we argue that the newfound interest in innovation extends and reworks the modernist compulsion towards totalising control to better fit a world of complex feedbacks and no transcendental guarantees. What is at stake in the question of innovation is the question of how we orient thought and practice in relation to the distinction between the human and non-human and the values we use to do so. Open to innovation themselves, the values animating innovation need to be reworked to better fit the existential insecurity of the present. The resultant innovation – one that works with the nonhuman world in a messy recursive way, acknowledging that in the Anthropocene we cannot think ‘social change’ without simultaneously thinking the bio, the eco, the techno, and the geo – represents the real social change we need.
