Elizabeth Grierson is professor of art and philosophy at RMIT University.Harriet Edquist is professor of architectural history at RMIT University.Hélène Frichot is assistant professor of critical studies in architecture at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

At a moment when the term “design” is used not only to designate acts of a designer — such as projecting the organizational, representational, technical, and material dimensions of an object, building, image or interface — but to reference any act of strategic or even managerial thinking, De-Signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice offers welcome conceptual and discursive tools for thinking critically about the future. Demonstrating the complex relays between thinking and doing, or theory and practice, it marks out a variegated new ground upon which to operate beyond the purely instrumental.

• De-Signing the City: Interventions through Art, Elizabeth GriersonTowards De-Signing: Narrative, Networks and the Open Work, Scott McQuireDesignations, Mark JacksonSigns of Postmemory in Dresden: Restoring the Displaced, Marsha BerryPosed Solitude: Signing a Poetics of Community, Maria O’Connor24 Hours Noticing: Designing our Encounters with Place, Laurene Vaughan and Yoko AkamaRepresenting the City: Complementing Science and Technology with Art, William CartwrightEmbodied Encounters: The Photographic Seeds of Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr’s Ten Canoes, Linda DaleyMapping Modernity in “Marvellous Melbourne”: Ada Cambridge’s A Woman’s Friendship, Harriet EdquistMapping an Ethico-Aesthetics for Wet Biotechnological Architectures, Hélène FrichotDigital Organic Design: Architecture, the New Biology and the Knowledge Economy, Karen BurnsDe-Signing as Bio-technological Endosymbiosis, Stephen LooDesign, Second Life and the Hyper Real, Lisa DethridgeHopeful: Biology, Architectural Design and Philosophy, Chris L. SmithDesign and New Materialism, Neil Leach