Ulises Navarro Aguiar

@ulissess

Senior Lecturer at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg.

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Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Jul 15

I just happen to be reading The Cultural Logic of Computation by the late David Golumbia, which speaks directly to this very point. With LLMs, the literalisation of the 'language' metaphor gets solidified even more.

"No doubt, at least some of these scientific theories will turn out to have a grain of truth to them, and no doubt others of them will fail. But what have proven to be of especially limited consequence, as this book shows, are theories that try to apply the universal representational capability of computation to the human world. The place where this is most visible is language, exactly because computers must partake of something like human language (called by computer scientists "natural language") in order to be used by human beings at all. Programming languages, as Derrida knew, are codes: they have one and only one correct interpretation (or, at the absolute limit, a determinate number of discrete interpretations). Human language practice almost never has a single correct interpretation. Languages are not codes; programming "languages" like Basic and FORTRAN and scripting "languages" like HTML and JavaScript do not serve the functions that human languages do. The use of the term language to describe them is a deliberate metaphor, one that is meant to help us interact with machines, but we must not let ourselves lose sight of its metaphorical status, and yet this forgetting has been at stake from the first application of the name (see Chapters 2 and 4)."

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Jun 30

Illich doesn't disagree regarding 'value' as a deeply problematic concept, though he seems to stop short of nihilism. Like Toby, I also want to find out to what extent I agree with you on this (maybe via a review essay on PF for a design studies outlet).

"We have lost the certainty that the world makes sense because things fit together, that the eye is made to grasp the sunlight, and is not just a biological camera which happens to register this optical effect. We have lost the sense that virtuous behavior is fitting and appropriate for human beings, and we have lost it in the course of the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries with the rise of the concept and the experience of value. Good is absolute: the light and the eye are simply made for each other, and this unquestioned good is deeply experienced. But once I say that the eye has value for me because it allows me to see or to orient myself in the world, I open a new door. Values can be positive but also negative, so the moment I speak, in philosophy, about values, I assume the existence of a zero point, from which values rise or decline in two directions. The replacement of the good by the idea of value begins in philosophy, and is then expressed in an ever-growing economic sphere within which my life becomes a pursuit of values rather than a pursuit of what is good for me, which can only be another person. What else could it be?"

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Jun 29

There's so much talk about "future making" these days. So Karl Palmås and I set out to briefly map how this notion has been used in futures research, tracing its cross-disciplinary roots and stakes across sociology, anthropology, design, and organization studies. doi.org/10.1016/j.fu...

Screenshot of the first page of an article entitled "From visioning to crafting futures? Surveying the expanding literature on future making."

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· May 27

Shockingly, self-regulation of the Swedish forest industry isn't working. Who would've thought? www.greenpeace.org/internationa...

"In Sweden, where our latest investigation has been carried out, protecting forests is not just crucial for climate and biodiversity reasons, it’s also key for Europe’s only recognised Indigenous People, the Sámi. However, insufficient governance and self-regulation of the Swedish forest industry has resulted in vital old forests being destroyed rather than protected, the report shows. What fuels this destruction is to a big extent the demand for throwaway products like cardboard and pulp, especially from the e-commerce sector."

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· May 6

Illich looking back on CIDOC as 'the inverse of a university.'

'By 1964 Borremans and a group of her collaborators incorporated
this library as Centro Intercultural de Documentación, CIDOC, in Cuernavaca. During the next 12 years about 18,000 people came to read and to study at the Center which Borremans directed. More than 300 titles were published by CIDOC. CIDOC was meant to be the inverse of a university: a library centered place for advanced learning where courses grew out of self-organized reading, and all readers were equally empowered to organize their own seminars. This did work for almost a decade, but then success undermined the Center's purpose. Increasingly university teachers from foreign countries came to organize their own credit courses. Rather than allow CIDOC to become one more University, in 1976 Valentina Borremans closed the Center that she had founded and directed.'

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Apr 20

Herbert Simon appraising Bruno Latour as "soft, to the point of mushiness" and his work as "a sort of generalized Marxism" is quite noteworthy (albeit not that surprising considering the former's computationalist views of knowledge and the social).

Quote from the article: 'In late April, with the committee meeting approaching, he wrote Carnegie Mellon psychologist Herbert Simon, who had shared a negative appraisal of Latour with Adolf Grünbaum and informed him that it would be “more politically correct” to convey those opinions to him directly. Simon, who had read only Laboratory Life, saw in Latour’s work “a sort of generalized Marxism” and a dangerous relativism about science. Bringing such a person to the IAS would confirm scientific stereotypes about social scientists: Latour was “soft, to the point of mushiness."'

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Apr 12

This is a helpful review of Jäger’s Hyperpolitics by @alirizataskale.bsky.social

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Feb 24

Golumbia on Mirowski

From crowing about big data and algorithmic governance to the “promises” of the blockchain and Bitcoin and more, the world of the digital is everywhere structured by these fictionalist equivocations over the meanings of central terms, equivocations that derive an enormous part of their power from the appearance that they refer to technological and so material and so metaphysical reality. Perhaps one way of cashing this out, and I offer it only as a very speculative summary of some of Mirowski’s work in this vein, is as a challenge to an unacknowledged Platonism in much of our talk about but also our work with the digital, an idealization that even as it claims to be all about the stuff of the world at the same time turns away from the world in a profound way. Mirowski’s work makes us do exactly the opposite, demanding we take seriously every aspect of the technologies our world actually does present to us, and no less the ways our words and concepts make up that world.

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Dec 21

Plataforma de redes (a)sociales — El Roto

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Dec 19

We are pleased to invite proposals to our 'lost futures in design professions' panel at the EASST2026 (@easst.bsky.social) 'More than now: Exploring resilient futures' conference in Krakow (8-11 September). The CfP is open until 28 February 2026. easst.net/conference/e...

Starting in the late noughties, cultural theorist Mark Fisher observed how the contemporary social condition is marked by the loss of a future. (Fisher, 2013) Tormented by the loss of political dreams that failed to materialize, he described a cultural state of being “haunted” by memories of a time when one could hope for a better, alternative future. Citing social philosopher Franco Berardi, Fisher argued his generation had been witness to a “slow cancellation of the future”.

More recently, sociologist and STS scholar Richard Tutton (2023) has pointed out that these accounts are presented by theorists concerned about alternative futures to neoliberalism. While valid in their own right, Tutton points out, they “offer little empirical evidence that such feelings are experienced by groups of people in their everyday lives”. (Tutton, 2023: 448) He thus calls for a more empirically-oriented studies of “futurelessness” – a term sourced from psychology, based on studies of young people who find that their personal future opportunities are foreclosed, implying that it is futile to plan for the future.

Heeding this call, this panel invites contributions that provide further empirical substantiation of whether or not a sense of “lost futures” or “futurelessness” is indeed experienced in particular professional settings. For Fisher, the loss of the future can be traced in popular culture – not least pop music – which seems to have lost the ability to grasp the present, and produce work that consciously seeks to articulate alternative futures. In this vein, this panel invites empirically informed work that focuses on how such a loss of futures is – or isn’t – expressed within the design professions, such as design, architecture, planning, or engineering.

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Dec 4

doi.org/10.1080/1754...

Freed from a service mode to existing design activities, DCS has no stake in advocating for design itself. Instead, rather than improve these activities, the major corpus of DCS work sets out to understand how the assemblages, actors, and objects of design cultures come about and what these mean. Exploring DCS as a practice separates it from most mainstream design, as it suggests a form of intervention in the world without any intention to improve it. The ambition to solve problems has haunted design definitions ever since Herbert Simon’s declaration that design involves “changing existing circumstances into preferred ones” (Simon Citation1978, 111). Abandoning solutionism needn’t mean abandoning design practice, though.

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Sep 11

When it comes to finance and democracy, an error has *definitely* occurred.

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Aug 27

Photograph by Rodrigo Moya: La Muchacha, Tren viejo México-Cuautla, 1966

Rodrigo Moya a bordo de un barco atunero en algún lugar del Pacífico, 1977

Photograph by Rodrigo Moya: Guerrilleros en la niebla, Sierra Falcón, Venezuala, 1966

Photograph by Rodrigo Moya: Che Guevara, La Habana, Cuba, 1964

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Aug 23

Ah close enough

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Aug 21

Positionings of Embedded Design gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/... "This publication gives a glimpse into the work done by 2025 and 2026 cohorts of the Embedded Design MFA program at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg."

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Jul 22

New from ephemera: 'Organizing for apocalypse' ephemerajournal.org/issue/organi...

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Apr 17

With much thanks to the editors @delaeconomia.bsky.social @philiproscoe.bsky.social and the anonymous reviewers, this piece co-written w/ Karl Palmås is freshly published. doi.org/10.1080/1753...

In other words, as hinted before, one way to explain the success of designerly approaches is that they do not hold on to the same pretense of calculability that the earlier approaches (strategic planning, capital budgeting, forecasting) have been scripted to adhere to. Here, though, it is worth noting that this notion of uncertainty, against which both scripts of predictability and speculation are set, has been widely naturalized in discourses about future making. Such a notion of uncertainty has taken broader importance in recent decades, as the currency of any notion of certainty in economic life has waned, if not entirely vanished. Yet, the very notion of an accelerated uncertainty that has propelled the ascendancy of design as a practice that thrives in ambiguity in dealing with ‘wicked problems’ is itself based on a particular temporal ontology in which we are at every moment always breaking from the past – an antigenealogical tendency that is at the heart of the project of modernity, as Sloterdijk (2016) has shown. Here, as Savage (2021, 95) argues, the predictability of long-term processes, such as climate breakdown or rising inequality, is conveniently repressed in favor of a ‘giddy search for novelty’ that fails to recognize the ‘weight of the past.’ The idea of a radically uncertain future becomes a convenient narrative, even a truism, rendering it a fictional expectation in and of itself, which has set an opaque veil over longue durée continuities. Indeed, contemporary future making is imbued with this very modern inclination to continuously sever ties with the past, with design contributing to its obsession with newness. Perhaps a way to deploy more critical terms of engagement to counter this tendency is to move from the idea of making futures to the idea of inheriting futures in need of redirection (Bonnet, Landivar, and Monnin 2021; see also Fry 2009).

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Apr 1

CfP: Peace, Dialogue, Coexistence. Designing for living together / Participatory Design Conference 2026 / Milan www.pdc2026.polimi.it/wp-content/u...

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Nov 11

The always has been astronaut meme. The astronaut closest to Earth is labeled "Social Scientists" and is saying "So research methods are performative?" The astronaut behind is labeled "Design Researchers" and is saying "Always have been."

Ulises Navarro Aguiar@ulissess· Jan 24

New paper out: “What is Design Worth?” Narrating the Assetization of Design. In which I critically examine recent talk and efforts to measure and promote the value of design in organizations, focusing on the case of McKinsey. Part of a theme issue in Valuation Studies. doi.org/10.3384/VS.2...