Figuring Worlds
Can a world be figured without first being imagined? Haraway would say no.[1] Figuring worlds doesn’t start with a pencil, nor with the dialogue between eye, mind, and hand. Nor does it begin by capturing presence, or the living energy of what we see.[2] Before any of that, we must ask: Can what we’re seeing be changed? Whether the answer is yes or no, it can still be imagined.
That’s why, when I think about design, I gravitate toward the pictorial—as a way of unshackling it from its function. I’m not interested in solutions. I’m drawn to problems.
The pictorial, for me, is about staying with the problem. A form of thinking that unsettles more than it resolves. That generates questions instead of answers.
My approach to design isn’t about solving conflicts, but provoking them—and getting entangled in the process. Against the grain of dominant technological standards, I’d rather figure worlds the way one paints with half-closed eyes. I learned this back in art school, when Mauri, my drawing professor, would ask us to squint and look through our lashes. Blurring the view to work from the shadows—imagining other worlds buried under the praise of brightness. Tanizaki once asked how Japanese culture might have designed toilets, architecture, paper, ink, or gold if it hadn’t been aesthetically and technologically colonized by the West.[3]
There’s something in all of this that nudges me toward painting. And it’s in this gesture of leaning—in this tilt—that I’ve drawn the first line from which to move. Without ever arriving. It’s not about reaching a destination, but lingering in the in-between: that liminal space between design and the pictorial. A place where I can create without chasing function, without needing to deliver answers.
Here, design stops being a tool and becomes a gesture: a surface that hints, that thinks, that disturbs. As Paul Klee once said,[4] it’s not about making the invisible visible, but about making the visible itself. No expectations. No score to settle.
In La Pluie (projet pour un texte) (The Rain – Project for a Text, 1969), Marcel Broodthaers displaces the poetic act from writing to the impossible gesture of writing in the rain.[5] What should have been a poem becomes a choreography of failure.
Some speculative designers[6] use fiction to imagine future worlds. I prefer to think about present ones—the ones that fork into the shadows and resist the glare.
When Haraway talks about “figuring worlds,” she does so from a relational ontology:[7] we are meshwork, not essence. We are connections, not identities. So to figure worlds through design means letting go of the designer as problem-solver, and embracing the designer as medium—someone who senses what is yet to take shape, but is already asking for form. And sometimes that form arrives crooked, or becomes distorted along the way. It’s an anatomy with no destination.
A perfect example is Holy Motors by Leos Carax, where the protagonist continuously transforms into absurd, grotesque, or poetic characters—with no clear purpose and no functional logic. He’s an actor without an audience, a performer without a fixed script. He drifts through the city like a medium, inhabiting the spaces between representation and direct experience. He doesn’t fix anything. He simply embodies possible worlds through deformation, strangeness, and discontinuity.[8]
Freud was wrong when he said anatomy is destiny.[9] Today we know destiny isn’t written in flesh, but in the way language cuts through us. And in design, visual language imposes its own laws: the flat, the legible, the functional. But if we reverse that logic, design can take us to the edge—where form begins to unravel and language no longer quite fits. I don’t always understand what I’m doing there, but it’s precisely this dissonance that keeps me going.
It’s in that uneasy space that drawing finds its place. “Blue, blue, electric blue,” as Bowie sings.[10] Figuring worlds also means letting space, the mind, and the line be stained with those uncertain colors we’re still learning how to read.
Dazzle blinds. Sometimes it keeps us from seeing. That’s why I try drawing with my eyes closed. I try tuning in to the vibration of color. I try letting the lines twist, bend, and tangle. Because sometimes, the less you see, the more you feel you know exactly where you are.
In the end, this isn’t about clarifying anything. It’s about looking differently at what’s already there. Drawing, at its core, feels a lot like looking for your keys knowing full well they’re probably in the one spot you haven’t checked. And as Woody Allen once put it: Eighty percent of success is just showing up.[11]
Footnotes
[1] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016.
[2] John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Penguin Books, 1972. Berger argues that drawing is a way of knowing the world, not just representing it.
[3] Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (1933). In this essay, Tanizaki reflects on traditional Japanese aesthetics, where shadow, subtlety, and wear shape a visual culture that values opacity over brilliance.
[4] Paul Klee, Creative Confession (1920).
[5] Marcel Broodthaers, La Pluie (projet pour un texte) (1969). In this piece, Broodthaers attempts to write under the rain, turning language into an impossible gesture and highlighting its material limits.
[6] Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, MIT Press, 2013.
[7] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, op. cit.
[8] Holy Motors, dir. Leos Carax, 2012. A visual metaphor for purposeless creation, the protagonist moves through fragmented identities without any narrative closure.
[9] Sigmund Freud, widely cited in discussions on psychoanalysis and biological determinism.
[10] David Bowie, Sound and Vision, from the album Low (1977). The line “blue, blue, electric blue, that’s the colour of my room where I will live” suggests an emotionally ambiguous space—a metaphor for the creative process as dwelling in uncertainty.
[11] Woody Allen, Seventy Percent of Success Is Showing Up, quoted in numerous interviews and publications since the 1980s. The line reflects his trademark irony about the absurdity of effort and the performance of success.