CONCEPT
Ontological Design
Escobar's principle — central to Designs for the Pluriverse — that in designing tools, structures, policies, and narratives, we are creating ways of being. Design does not serve worlds; it constructs them.
The principle of ontological design holds that a tool does not merely help its user accomplish a task. A tool constructs a world — it determines what objects exist in the user's environment, what relationships obtain between those objects, what actions are possible, and what outcomes are desirable. The hammer constructs a world of nails. The spreadsheet constructs a world of rows and columns. The large language model constructs a world in which knowledge is propositional, language is the primary medium of intelligence, and the adequate response to any question is a fluent, confident, text-based answer. The recognition that design is ontological rather than merely functional is what converts the question of AI development from a technical problem into a political one.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The phrase draws on a philosophical lineage running from Heidegger through Hubert Dreyfus, Terry Winograd, and Fernando Flores. Winograd and Flores's Understanding Computers and Cognition (1986) was an early formulation: computers,