Introduction

How and by whom are our postdigital futures designed? Can educational futures be designed at all, given their inherent uncertainty? How do we anticipate design to reconfigure our social worlds?

Designing technology is always already about creating affective and deeply political sociotechnical future relations (Light and Akama 2014). In this sense, ‘design’ has many meanings. It can be seen as a professional practice, but also, for instance, as a knowledge practice, an ontological practice (Escobar 2018), an entrenched practice that reproduces exclusions (MacKenzie et al. 2021), a collective practice opening up new futures that call authority into question (Costanza-Chock 2020; Networked Learning Editorial Collective et al. 2021), a speculative practice (Goodyear 2021), and a practice of creative (re-)appropriation and redesign through use (Lachney et al. 2021). It can also be seen as a practice of ‘weaving worlds’ with others where ‘weaving is a matter of connection, co-becoming and constant transformation, not of independence, submission, or closure’ (Tickner and Querejazu 2021: 396). Design, thus, is not limited to engineering approaches to ‘design thinking’ (Macgilchrist et al. 2023).

With ‘postdigital’, we position this Special Issue, Designing Postdigital Futures, ‘after’ the hype promising digital solutions. Instead, the contributions critique the assumptions built into much writing about the digital and about ‘future skills’. Instead, they investigate the ‘muddiness’ of practice (Jandrić et al. 2019; Knox 2019). This Special Issue was curated with the aim of opening up conversations around design and educational futures (where ‘education’ is understood in a broad sense, beyond formal educational institutions, covering all spheres of life as well as access to education).

With ‘design practice’ and ‘futures making’ taking an increasingly central role in today’s discussions about education and technology, there is an urgent need to explore the sociotechnical imaginaries, design proposals, and lived experiences around these issues. This Special Issue emerged from the need for conceptual and empirical work in this area. We invited conceptual work that engages with, e.g., the inherent contradiction embedded in this field when education is understood as intentionally designed (curricula, EdTech products, AI systems, educational interventions, and participatory formats), and yet also indeterminate (learning, growing, Bildung, and subjectivation). We invited empirically grounded work tackling the political struggles over which futures are feasible or desirable. Entirely different priorities for designing educational futures emanate from, e.g., alt-right, left, progressive, ecological, pragmatic, or efficiency-oriented positions. And we invited reflections on ethics, power, affect, resistance, community, change, and politics at the nexus of design, technology, and educational futures.

This Editorial provides an overview of salient cross-cutting issues in the 20 contributions selected for the Special Issue. In the following, we foreground the dominant politics of futures-making that they analyse, the varying concepts of design mobilised in the papers, the presence of the past that the authors identify in designing for the future, and how alternative postdigital futures are being envisioned and shaped by weaving worlds collectively.

The Politics of Futures-Making

The Special Issue opens with a short piece asking: ‘Which designs? Whose futures?’ (Macgilchrist et al. 2023); a question reappearing throughout the contributions. If we look at the ‘dominant’, ‘mainstream’, or ‘majority’ narratives and practices around education and technology, who (or what) claims the right to design the future of education? Even if professional designers aim to create better worlds, we need, as Katta Spiel (2023) argues, to ask for whom this is better. Educational futures are intimately enfolded with the ways in which the future of society and the future of the planet may unfold. We use the word ‘may’ in the preceding sentence because the future will always exceed any intentional design. Design can be powerful, but even though futures are shaped by ‘imagination, anticipation and aspiration’ (Appadurai 2013: 286), designs are precarious and futures escape planning. As the papers in this Special Issue ponder the questions of which designs and whose futures dominate sociotechnical configurations, they draw our attention to the human and other-than-human actors currently shaping the majority politics and materialities of futures-making.

The contributions’ critical analysis of dominant futures-making practices draws attention to the role of corporations and (bureaucratic) institutions, paying particular attention to the algorithms underpinning the systems being designed and used. First, corporate logics. When ‘risk’ and ‘success’ are rendered into features of predictive analytics systems, this is no longer done in ignorance of the potential detrimental outcomes. These systems are designed for commercial success, argue Zakharova and Jarke (2023), despite the systematic research findings on the reductive impact of these systems on educational priorities and accountability, as well as the compounding of inequalities on students facing structural barriers to formal education. Zakharova and Jarke’s analysis illustrates how the future orientation of educational technologies is materialised as ‘design features’ of these technologies. These design features, including aspects such as data categories, ‘always have politics’ (Zakharova and Jarke 2023).

Similarly, when the ‘design optimism’ rooted in start-up culture frames the way that state actors or civil society now (also) imagine hackathons, then, as Krämer and Trischler (2023) argue, a corporate solutionism is carried into almost all hackathon spaces. Planetary or social crises are turned into challenges that can be addressed by a particular kind of future-oriented, upbeat, designerly, entrepreneurial participant. Corporate practices also accompany datafication in education when data are exploited for the concentration of wealth in a small number of multinational corporations, writes Meston (2023). The echoes of oppressive colonial regimes reverberate in today’s militarised use of commercially successful predictive systems to ‘surveil, police and wage war on’ minoritised peoples, compounding the threats to communities living under the pressure of histories of oppression (Meston 2023).

A second structural critique threaded through the Special Issue is the role of institutions in shaping imaginations, aspirations, and concrete futures-making practices. In his interview with Juliane Jarke and Teresa Cerratto Pargman, Dan McQuillan argues that AI enables far-right or fascist practises associated with eugenics. These practices find their power when they are embedded in bureaucratic institutions (McQuillan et al. 2023). AI adds the capacity to accelerate and scale up the withdrawal of benefits, the downsizing of healthcare, and the removal of other structural measures for ensuring justice and dignity.

In other cases, state institutions, such as school systems, prioritise the question of who children should become rather than what children should learn. As noted by Gahoonia (2023), the Danish system asks this question: Who do we want our children to become? The institution thus foregrounds the politics of education and thus of educational technologies. The question provides material for researchers to explore how the state’s answers shape future subjectivities, affects, communication, information, knowledge, and situated political actions. Currently, as Gahoonia illustrates, the focus lies on supporting students to ‘become a self-determining individual that can participate actively and constructively in a democratic society’ (Gahoonia 2023). Each of these words currently carries a positive connotation (self-determining, participating, active, constructive, and democratic), yet each can also be deconstructed (hyperindividualism, participation-washing, the tyranny of participation, etc.).

These articles note how futures are shaped by corporations and (bureaucratic) institutions. Yet they simultaneously note the role of the underlying algorithms in unjustly designed futures. Each article hints at how the algorithms and statistics themselves—from predictive analytics to the algorithms undergirding social media platforms, Internet browsers, and search engines—are deeply implicated in the suppression of minoritised opinions, political agitation, and community activism that could change public education. This leads both Meston (2023) and McQuillan et al. (2023) to consider bleak futures in which we need to find and create spaces or practices for education outwith formal institutions. These futures are deemed ‘bleak’, because these scholars relinquish the possibility of reforming or revolutionising state education.

Onto-epistemologically, these articles orient to posthuman understandings of agency that we (the authors of this editorial) share. More subtly, however, the articles remind us that no matter how distributed agency is, humans have responsibility for design decisions (Suchman 2007: 270). As Donna Haraway has said, reflecting on posthuman entanglements and technoculture responsiveness: ‘Well, it is the people who are ethical, not these nonhuman entities.’ (Haraway 2000: 134). Involved in any corporate logic are shareholders, designers, accountants, and managers. Bureaucratic institutions are staffed by team leaders, administrators, welfare officers, police officers, and civil servants. Behind algorithms are software engineers, managers, and salespeople. Their actions, tangled up with the technologies, are political designs shaping futures, even if they are not always recognised as such by the people doing their daily jobs. These actions make worlds in which people survive, thrive, or are rendered disposable.

Concepts of Design in Relation to Futures

When we write ‘design decisions’ in the previous paragraph, we invoke the meaning of ‘design’. Importantly, in the articles in this Special Issue, design refers to very different levels and phenomena in education and educational discourse, thus opening up a broad horizon of meaning. As a verb, it describes the act of designing. As a noun, it refers to the product, artefact, intervention, or structure that is created in the process. Design in education and educational discourse ranges from tinkering with situated interventions (Bardone et al. 2023) through training for specialists in dynamic fields such as radiology (van Hees et al. 2023) to designing highly formalised processes such as ‘risk-management’ in learning management systems (Zakharova and Jarke 2023).

The paradoxical nature of design is one of the challenges of the educational profession. If educators are committed to the indeterminacy of the presence and unavailability of the future, then they cannot rely on purely technical concepts of design. In design, the tensions between technicism and emancipation, control and improvisation, is irreducible (Dishon 2023). Some contributions to this Special Issue emphasise the possibility of emancipation and empowerment through design (see Gachago et al. 2023; Wardak et al. 2023; Jergus and Schmidt 2023). Others are more sceptical and assume that empowerment lies beyond the limits of design (see Bardone et al. 2023; Zakharova and Jarke 2023; Gahoonia 2023; Heath et al. 2023).

The conceptual openness of ‘design’ is tackled most explicitly by Dishon (2023), who argues that the concept cannot be pinned down and should never be pinned down. He points to three persistent and irreducible tensions in which education and design are intertwined, namely, the tension between action and thought, between freedom and control, and between theory and practice. For Dishon, design shares some key features with educational endeavours: an aspiration to shape the future accompanied by an awareness of the limited power we have in achieving this due to the inherent indeterminacy of futures. Nevertheless, there are always attempts to reduce the inherent contingencies in both fields and pin them down to manageable, controllable, and standardised practices. Robbing design and education of their essential multiplicity and instability in this way, would, in Dishon’s words, result in their ‘death’.

Beyond affinities between design and education as modes of embracing indeterminacy, contributions across this Special Issue discuss design as an educational aim and epistemic practise. As a mode of thinking, design is understood as a competence that responds to the challenge of ‘support[ing] students across a variety of new, and often unfamiliar, contexts’ (Dishon 2023). And design also becomes a subject matter: The vision for a new school subject in Denmark, called Technology Comprehension, ‘was that young people ought to become not just consumers of technology, but creators of the digital technological society they live in’ (Gahoonia 2023).

Although design and its impact on education are assessed differently in these papers, the authors agree that designs for emerging futures of education should not rely on solutionist framings, but on collaborative, equity-oriented, and just perspectives that aim at care (see below). These could build on ‘humility, loving epistemology, and radical enthusiasm’, as suggested by Spiel (2023). The contributions’ multifaceted references to the postdigital and its diverse contextualization represent a contribution to an extended ‘postdigital dialogue’ (Jandrić et al. 2019). This kind of dialogue also eludes binary definitions and is thus characterised by similar tensions as the dialogue between design and education. Perhaps this tension is even inherent to human praxis more broadly.

Designing is never simply a case of understanding a current problem and designing a better future. This would assume that the present is given and that we understood the present. If, however, we see the present as indeterminate, then human practise is first and foremost a practise of understanding the present by co-constituting it. As Buchanan (1992) noted, the problem is neither given nor merely socially constructed, but problem and solution co-evolve. In this sense, intervening in the situation in which we find ourselves is a means of understanding the situation at hand (Bickhard 2008). Every intervention, whether in the form of the dissemination of a generic digital technology or the implementation of a specific educational measure not only changes the situation perceived as problematic but invariably also adds to the understanding of this very situation.

Based on the insight that the co-evolution of problems and solutions is not just an epistemic but an ontic issue in a world constantly reshaped by human intervention, such a perspective is closely related to a ‘postheroic’ understanding of design (cf. Jonas 1996), which recognises that there is no way to leave behind the “swampy lowlands” of uncertainty (Schön 1983)’ (Jonas 2007: 202). Or, to put it less emphatically, since every programme and thus every intervention is ‘a model of a model within a theory of a model of an abstraction of a part of the world or a universe of discourse’ (Lehman 1980: 1061), there can be no impartial standpoint. Designerly stances can, however, differ in terms of the scope of their ambitions and the generality of the models their work is based upon. In this sense, it makes a difference whether it is assumed that the world is uniform and thus accessible to generic solutions or whether the world is interpreted as particular, transient, and situationally bound.

Rich Pasts and Thick Presents for Designing Postdigital Futures

The relation between the past, present, and future has occupied many debates—in academic, activist, and everyday discourse alike. For many, the past features strongly in imaginations about the future. For example, Anna Tsing contemplates ‘the possibility of life in capitalist ruins’ (2015) and evokes an image of the past that has a long-lasting effect on the future. In this sense, as contributions in this Special Issue point out, the future is always based on and to some extent ‘haunted’ by (design) decisions of the past (Macgilchrist et al. 2023; Zakharova and Jarke 2023). Actions in the past shape, limit, or open up possibilities for different futures.

The contribution by Henry (2023), for instance, provides a historical account by reflecting on 20 years of information and communication technologies for development (ICTD). For the case of a participatory mobile phone-based learning intervention in the Kenyan healthcare context, Henry analyses historic future anticipations, in particular, the narrative around the ‘development gap’. With the boom-and-bust history of educational technology, it can be tempting to look back with anger, cynicism, and exasperation with our academic governance regimes or to just keep moving blindly ahead (Henry 2023). Henry asks us to do neither, but instead to be sensitive to our pasts.

This is a call that resonates with Marie K. Heath’s argument that we ‘need to understand technology through social and historical lenses in order to be a citizen today’ (Heath et al. 2023). Technologies are always future-oriented (in that they structure future social relations), but they are also always historical (in that their design and embedding follows historical social (power) relations, imaginaries, and practices). An unreflected and uncritical reliance on the past may simply reinforce systems and practices of oppression, discrimination, and harm.

Something that Dan McQuillan also reminds us of in his interview: historically established and powerful actors such as bureaucracies or institutions adopt artificial intelligence (AI) and gain ‘an instrument that intensifies some of the harmful and cruel things that already happen within those institutions to vulnerable people’ (McQuillan et al. 2023). Taking this lens allows us to trace AI along a long genealogy of oppression, racism, and fascism. Indeed, as McQuillan argues, today’s AI is rooted in the mathematics of Victorian era eugenics. It is hence not surprising that McQuillan and others advocate to break with the past because our previous strategies to respond to the marketisation of education are ‘no longer a viable resistance tactic’ (McQuillan et al. 2023).

With AI, the past is made present. In predictive systems based on machine learning, for instance, models are trained on historic data to make predictions about the future. Zakharova and Jarke (2023) analyse such predictive analytics in learning management systems. Here, risk thresholds for determining a student’s risk of failing a course trigger interventions that are historically grounded in discriminatory practices. Hence, with the rise of machine learning-based systems in education, the acknowledgement of our past for ‘predicting’ futures has become ever more important.

A different approach to acknowledge and respond to a harmful past is provided by Jelewska (2023), who introduces ‘postdigital collective memory’ as a design practice and approach for remembering a violent past. She reports on design workshops at Lake Elsensee-Rusałka in Poland, an artificial lake that was created during WWII through the forced labour of Jewish prisoners following the paradigm of ‘total design’ (Fry 2015). Tony Fry defines total design as a design practice of totalitarian regimes. In total design, ‘everything has its place within the whole’ (Fry 2015: 86) from uniforms to education, architecture, and ways of living to the redesign of nature and the lived environment to serve the purposes, goals, and ideals of a totalitarian regime.

Lake Elsensee-Rusałka was one such total design project that was meant to be transformed into a ‘landscape’ that would appeal to the German settlers; it represents the Nazis’ attempt to ‘violently remake “lands and peoples” into “spaces and races”’ (Jelewska 2023). Today, the lake is used for recreational purposes offering a variety of sports and leisure activities. Jelewska’s contribution presents and reflects on a design prototype—the Sensitive Data Lake—that facilitates memory practices in a postdigital world. It enables different histories (sic) and relations of different human and non-human actors to emerge and interfere. Postdigital design here becomes a process of activating knowledge about the past and creating a collective memory that transforms the contemporary residues of total design, ‘without physically interfering with the space, without erecting monuments or other forms of commemorating the past’ (Jelewska 2023).

Such residues of total design are not just linked to the 'Third Reich', but to other totalitarian regimes. Postdigital collective memory, as proposed by Jelewska, may serve as a way to remember the past, not as ‘overcoming’ but as capacity to imagine different futures.

[M]emory is never just a servant of the past, a given. … It is a key to liberation from forms of oppression lodged in, and continued from, the past. Likewise, forgetting is not overcoming what has passed: the future, directional choice, demands remembrance. (Fry 2015: 12 in Jelewska 2023)

This resonates strongly with Meston’s (2023) contribution that considers the collective trauma derived from settler-colonial education and oppression practises in Australia. Meston first reminds the reader of the ‘enduring alliance’ of technology and powerful social actors as a means for oppression and subsequently recalls the complex and often harmful experiences of Indigenous Australians. Meston builds on this memory to reimagine an Indigenous Educational Design that nurtures disruptive digital capabilities, including racial literacy, and which is based on lived experiences and collective memory. In Meston’s vision, Indigenous communities will collectively shift away from Australian schools toward local community digital learning hubs. This (future) move is grounded in a deep appreciation for the (past) wisdom of Indigenous ways of being, knowing, learning, and designing.

In these articles, we find an emphasis on attending and giving voice to the histories, memories, and experiences—not only of those who currently hold positions of power—but of those who were (and potentially still are) paternalised and/or oppressed. To understand this claim with Haraway (2016: 125): we need to ‘reach into rich pasts to sustain thick presents to keep the story going for those who come after’. The past is always ‘ongoing’ (Haraway 2016: 133) and it is important to hold on to the tensions.

Shaping Alternative Postdigital Futures Through Weaving Worlds with Others

Moved by the design of postdigital educational futures, no matter how precarious these efforts may be, the majority of the articles in this Special Issue use design critique (Bardzell et al. 2018) to envisage and shape alternatives for the futures to which the authors aspire. Doing design critique with others in this Special Issue translates into ‘weaving worlds’ with others (Tickner and Querejazu 2021: 396). In particular, it means engaging with a more-than-human perspective of design, developing collaborative methods, applying co-design methodologies, and calling the education community to collective action to resist and refuse hyperbolic, hegemonic, and ‘cruel optimist’ (Macgilchrist 2019) discourses about the postdigital future(s) of education.

The articles in this Special Issue reflect a range of understandings of design critique, yet they share a common trait: no design critique is meaningful without community. Marie K. Heath and Daniel Krutka explicitly mention it when they argue that ‘critique needs community’ (Heath et al. 2023). This is one of the many valuable insights Heath and Krutka gained in the Civics of Technology project. Critique gains force in communities where we are open to connecting with others’ knowledge, models, and perspectives, as well as to reflecting on our own positionality (Holmes 2020).

Weaving worlds with others is not necessarily about others as humans. Tyrell and Shalavin (2023) invite us to pay attention to more-than-human and ecological design methodologies in education. They argue that design should question assumptions around student-centred design. Addressing a networked learning context, these authors ask: What constitutes digital air? The question brings them to develop the provocative concept of ‘learning foams’ that pushes us to rethink constituents in the socio-material entanglements that make up education.

Providing evidence of the role of the other in co-designing practises, Brown et al. (2023) mention the need to ‘mov[e] past collaborators simply having a “voice” through consultation and feedback to direct involvement in design processes’. Their examples include ‘higher education outreach interventions involving equity groups such as regional/remote, low socioeconomic, and Indigenous Australian students’ and ‘frameworks for supporting Māori ākonga (learners) that involve working together in mutually productive ways’ (Brown et al. 2023). However, Brown et al. (2023) also point out that practising co-design ‘is especially tricky in the individualistic and performative “audit cultures” of neoliberal higher education that do not prioritise collaborative practises and approaches’.

This sentiment is also echoed by Sperling et al. (2023), who identify a limited unfolding of co-design processes in practice. Even though teachers and students were actively involved in the design decisions of the learning management system (LMS), the co-design process did not lead to extensive adoption of the LMS, nor did it sufficiently address the ethical issues related to the unrestricted collection of student data. Pointing to the ‘intricate complexities and challenges associated with co-designing digital technologies in education’, we learn that narratives about the future benefits of AI/Learning Analytics systems in education remain disconnected from the realities of the complex K-12 classrooms and that teachers’ involvement in the co-design process is not a guarantee for appropriating tools in their practise in meaningful and helpful ways (Sperling et al. 2023).

If co-design strategies are not enough for the meaningful use of learning platforms in education and the democratisation of technology, where shall we turn our attention? This is the question that Swist et al. (2023) implicitly approach in their contribution. These authors argue for the creation of new collaborative methods to engage with the multi-faceted problems of emerging technologies. They reflect on combining collectives, experimentation, and knowledge production to explore possibilities for democratisation in EdTech. Proposing prototype thinking as a site of an ‘emergent thought collective’, they speak of creating prototypes with others as creative ways to problematise ‘inquiry about the future’. The authors also speak of engaging with others’ modes of thinking in an attempt to ‘mobilise the potential of a collective approach to, among other things, democratic discussion, community building, and networked learning’ (Swist et al. 2023; see also Spiel 2023).

Building on the idea of collectively acting on issues that matter, McQuillan et al. (2023) call on the public to resist and refuse discourses about the inevitability of artificial intelligence in society, particularly in places like higher education. McQuillan mentions collective mobilisation, collective action, and people’s councils as organised means to question emerging socio-technical imaginaries about the future of education and to potentially change the status quo in this sector. In this vein, Wardak et al. (2023) add that there is a need in education ‘to encourage a multiplicity of views and a more democratic approach to design that requires breaking down hierarchies and decentralising decision-making’ (Wardak et al. 2023). Such a need, these authors argue, is also connected with having spaces to collectively debate and discuss the uncertainties inherently involved when designing the future of education as matters of concern.

The design of postdigital futures for education is also discussed in terms of matters of (collective) concern in further articles, e.g., Jergus and Schmidt’s (2023) focus on unpacking ‘how political and pedagogical programmes are intertwined in the process of designing a sustainable future, using the climate change protest movement Fridays for Future (FFF) as an empirical example’. By conceptualising futures as a ‘possibility to come’, this piece adds to current conversations about educational design by underscoring how design as a practice of worlding and futures-making need not remain locked in traditional (colonial) educational frames.

Throughout the Special Issue, this key notion thus appears in various formats: critique needs community and is best cultivated in collective places for debating, contesting, and co-designing for alternative postdigital futures in education.

Concluding Thoughts

Overall, the contributions draw on a rich tapestry of theoretical work, from design theory, educational theory, social computing, human–computer interaction, Indigenous theory, decolonial thought, (feminist) science and technology studies, new materialist approaches, critical data/algorithm studies, and memory studies. The conceptual work stirs imaginations. Empirical insights are grounded in reflexive case studies, in-depth analyses, and systematic comparisons. Many contributions identify collaboration and participation as key to designing more equitable (postdigital) futures. Yet collaboration per se is not enough. It matters how community, co-design, collectivity, and participation are lived. If designing technology is also designing sociotechnical relations, then it is essential to open the design process to include those who will use the EdTech and/or are likely to be (negatively) affected by it.

Design and futures-making are two issues that will continue to draw attention in educational research and practice in the coming years. This Special Issue aims to shed light on the nexus of design, futures-making, education, and technology. The contributions look beyond approaches to design thinking that assume education can be engineered, and that outcomes will match intentions. Instead, the contributions provide pathways to consider—and thus perhaps also to change—who is given (or who takes) the power to imagine futures, whose pasts are mobilised, what to anticipate, what to aspire to, how to design, and who will make the decisions. A key question across the field remains: Who will profit and who will carry the burden of these designs for the future?