Epistemic Consolidation, Methodological Expansion and Post-Anthropocentric Reorientation – Design Research in 2025 (A Review)

The year 2025 unfolded against a backdrop of pronounced global turbulence. Geopolitical tensions, economic volatility and accelerating ecological crises created conditions of uncertainty that reverberated across societies worldwide. In this context, design research confronted not only the immediate demands of “innovative competence”, but also the ethical and (eco-)social implications of its interventions. The field’s attention to systemic thinking and post-anthropocentric frameworks can be read as a direct response to these turbulent global conditions, positioning design research as both a critical lens and a generative practice capable of navigating uncertainty.

In 2025, design research increasingly articulated itself as a mature field of inquiry characterized less by disciplinary boundary-making than by sustained epistemic reflection. Across conferences, symposia, scholarly publications, and exhibitions, the field demonstrated a heightened awareness of its own methodological conditions, normative assumptions and socio-technical entanglements. Rather than introducing fundamentally new agendas, the year was marked by a consolidation of ongoing debates—particularly around post-anthropocentric perspectives, material epistemologies, and of course: the role of artificial intelligence in design research.

Major international conferences functioned less as venues for showcasing outcomes and more as arenas in which the (e.g. epistemic, methodological) foundations of design research were explicitly negotiated. The International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) 2025 conference, held in Taiwan, exemplified this tendency. The conference foregrounded design research beyond classical human-centered frameworks, emphasizing relational, ecological, and situated approaches to design knowledge. Contributions addressed indigenous epistemologies, multispecies perspectives, and systemic forms of agency, reinforcing the view of design as a practice embedded in complex socio-ecological assemblages rather than as a problem-solving activity focused on discrete users or artifacts.

The ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2025) continued to expand the scope of interaction design research by critically engaging with artificial intelligence, automation, and algorithmic mediation. Research Through Design (RtD) remained a dominant methodological framework, yet it was increasingly complemented by critical, speculative, and reflective approaches. Rather than positioning AI merely as a tool, many contributions framed it as a condition that reshapes authorship, responsibility, and epistemic authority within design processes.

A particularly significant intervention into the design research discourse was provided by the NERD Conference: NERD – 7th Heaven in Berlin. As a conference explicitly dedicated to design research as an epistemic practice, NERD continued to challenge conventional academic formats and evaluative criteria. The 2025 edition explored themes of belief, speculation, and projection, examining how design research constructs and legitimizes knowledge through narratives, fictions and performative acts. By foregrounding affective and speculative dimensions of research, NERD questioned dominant notions of rigor and evidence, thereby contributing to an ongoing redefinition of what counts as valid knowledge within the field.

Already in summer, the MATERIALDESIGN Design Research Symposium in Offenbach highlighted the growing importance of material-centered research. Talks and discussions conceptualized materials as epistemic actors rather than passive resources, emphasizing how material experimentation produces situated forms of knowledge. This perspective aligns with broader sustainability-oriented research agendas, in which material practices are understood as deeply entangled with ecological and social systems.

Scholarly publishing in design research during 2025 further reflected the field’s reflexive orientation. The DESIGNABILITIES journal series continued to advance critical perspectives on design agency, structural constraints and questions of equity. These thematic issues moved beyond instrumental accounts of design practice, instead situating design research within broader political and cultural contexts.

Building on the conceptual and methodological ambitions of the preceding NERD volumes, NERD III, published in summer, consolidates the series’ ongoing commitment to experimental and reflexive design research. It assembles a diverse array of contributions that traverse conventional disciplinary boundaries, ranging from practice-led investigations to speculative and theoretical inquiries. Central to the volume is the notion of experimental epistemologies, framing design both as a method for knowledge production and as an ontological lens through which the act of designing itself becomes a form of inquiry. By foregrounding these experimental approaches, it not only documents experimental practices but also critically interrogates the criteria by which design research is evaluated within academic and professional contexts.

In the domain of design pedagogy, Designing Design Education Vol. 2 (AVedition, 2025) delivers a substantial corpus of conceptual and practical contributions addressing curriculum development, pedagogical experimentation and the integration of broad concerns into design education. By bringing together 75 concise “impulses,” the volume foregrounds experimentation at the intersection of teaching, research, and practice. It reflects ongoing debates about how design education can cultivate reflexivity, ethical awareness, and systemic thinking among emerging designers, while simultaneously responding to pressing societal challenges such as sustainability or digital transformation.

Equally significant is Updating Roland Barthes’ Mythologies: Positions from Design, Architecture, and Art (Mimesis International, 2025), edited by Hans Leo Höger. The interdisciplinary volume revisits Barthes’ foundational critique of everyday cultural signs and extends it into contemporary design contexts. Through a series of concise yet analytically rigorous essays, the book interrogates everyday artefacts, architectural practices, media systems, and digital phenomena as sites of meaning production. In doing so, it bridges cultural theory and design scholarship, providing frameworks for understanding how objects, spaces, and media convey, produce, and negotiate ideological and social meaning in contemporary society. The collection exemplifies a reflexive engagement with semiotics and design, demonstrating how “critical theory” can inform and expand design research methodologies.

A recent on is Nutzen statt Besitzen – Michael Erlhoff revisited. Revisiting earlier debates around use-value over ownership, the book situates questions of access, sharing, and sustainability within contemporary design. It interrogates the social, economic, and material dimensions of design practice, examining how alternative models of use and circulation challenge conventional assumptions about possession, resource management as well as environmental responsibility.

Around the turn of the year, OIMD’s Shaping Future Mobility. Volume 3: Transfer (Jovis) is set to appear, offering further contributions to ongoing debates in Mobility Design and the broader interdisciplinary field.

Thematic Trajectories: Beyond the Human, Beyond the Artifact

Several interrelated thematic trajectories defined design research discourse in 2025. Post-anthropocentric and more-than-human approaches gained further traction, reframing design as a practice that engages with ecological systems, non-human actors, and long-term planetary processes. These perspectives challenge anthropocentric assumptions embedded in earlier design paradigms and demand new methodological and ethical frameworks.

At the same time, artificial intelligence remains a central object of inquiry. Rather than focusing on efficiency or innovation, design research increasingly interrogates AI as a socio-technical infrastructure shaped by power relations and labor dynamics. This shift reflects a broader move from tool-oriented to critical and systemic analyses within the field.

Materiality remains a key site of epistemic engagement, not only in relation to sustainability and environmental responsibility. Material research is framed not as applied experimentation but as a mode of inquiry capable of revealing the often-invisible conditions of design, while at the same time undersocring the contribution of design research to knowledge production beyond textual or quantitative modes.

After all, 2025 witnessed an intensified commitment to plural and situated perspectives. Design research increasingly resists universalizing frameworks, instead foregrounding localized, culturally specific and epistemologically diverse approaches. This tendency reflects an ongoing reorientation of the field toward relational, and non-hierarchical models of knowledge production.

Design Research as Reflexive Practice

Exhibitions continued to function as important interfaces between design research and public discourse. Pirouette: Turning Points in Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York offered a historiographic perspective on moments of rupture and transformation within design practice, providing a reflective backdrop for contemporary research debates. Similarly, the Design Museum London’s exhibition More Than Human translated academic discussions on post-anthropocentric design into a public-facing format. The exhibition foregrounded interactions between human and non-human actors—ecological, technological, and material—thereby rendering visible alternative frameworks for understanding agency, ethics and responsibility in design. Beyond the substantive content directly emerging from current research topics, these (and other) exhibitions underscore the role of curatorial practice as a legitimate mode of design research dissemination. Curators engage with theoretical, methodological, and epistemic debates, transforming the exhibition space into a performative site where complex theoretical positions—otherwise confined to academic publications or conferences—can be materially and publicly articulated.

As the last year has shown, the field demonstrates increasing confidence in addressing complex socio-technical and ecological challenges without reducing them to solvable problems. Instead, design research continues to position itself as a reflexive practice—one that generates knowledge through situated experimentation, theoretical engagement, but also critical self-examination.