I used to think design was supposed to solve problems cleanly, tie everything up with a neat bow.
Then I stumbled across a chair at a design museum in Copenhagen that was deliberately uncomfortable—sharp edges, weird angles, a座 that seemed to reject your body. The placard called it “discursive design,” and I stood there confused, maybe a little annoyed, definitely intrigued. Turns out that discomfort was the entire point. Discursive design doesn’t want to make your life easier; it wants to make you think, argue, feel something complicated. It’s design as provocation, as conversation starter, as the friend who asks uncomfortable questions at dinner parties. The philosophy traces back to critical design movements in the 1990s, when designers like Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby started creating objects that challenged rather than served—products that made you reconsider your relationship with technology, consumption, ethics. They weren’t trying to sell you anything, which was, honestly, refreshing.
When Objects Become Arguments Instead of Solutions
Here’s the thing: most design operates invisibly. Your phone’s interface guides you without you noticing, your chair supports you comfortably, your kitchen knife cuts efficiently. Discursive design does the opposite—it refuses to disappear into function. I’ve seen projects like Dunne and Raby’s “Designs for an Overpopulated Planet” series, where they imagined absurd survival gear for climate refugees, and the emotional reaction was immediate: disgust, sadness, anger at the future they were depicting. Wait—maybe that’s manipulative? Or maybe it’s just honest about what design always does, which is shape how we see the world, except this time it’s not pretending to be neutral.
The philosopher Bruno Latour talked about how objects have politics, how a bridge’s height can enforce segregation, how a doorknob can exclude. Discursive design makes that power visible, even exaggerated. It’s uncomfortable because it should be. I guess it makes sense that this approach emerged alongside growing awareness of how technology and design weren’t neutral problem-solvers but active participants in social structures, environmental destruction, surveillance capitalism.
The Messy Ethics of Making People Uncomfortable on Purpose
But there’s a tension here that nobody really talks about enough.
If you’re designing something deliberately provocative, something meant to start difficult conversations about, say, genetic engineering or data privacy or resource scarcity, who gets to decide what questions are worth asking? Who’s included in the conversation, and who’s just being shocked for shock’s value? I visited an exhibition once where a discursive design piece imagined a future where people could only eat government-approved meals based on their health data—complete with mockup packaging and everything. Some visitors found it thought-provoking; others, particularly those who’d experienced food insecurity, found it tone-deaf and cruel. The designer hadn’t considered that for some people, this wasn’t a hypothetical future to debate over wine—it was close to their lived reality. Discursive design works best when it punches up, when it challenges power structures rather than just making edgy art that looks good in galleries. Otherwise it’s just design students being clever, which, honestly, the world has enough of already.
The strongest discursive projects create what researchers call “productive discomfort”—not shock for its own sake but friction that generates genuine reflection. Maybe that’s the philosophy at its core: not answers but better questions, not solutions but the recognition that some problems are too complex for clean solutions. Anyway, that uncomfortable chair in Copenhagen? I think about it more than most comfortable chairs I’ve sat in, which was definately the point.
