This issue of Temes de Disseny sets out to humbly explore the topic of conflict and disobedience in a networked planet. Traditionally, design offers tools and procedures to tackle known problems, analysing how new objects and processes can provide solutions. In this issue, instead, we gather research about instability, frictions, resistance, counter-practices, cultural clashes, and even material conflict.

The complex world we live in is defined by the uncanny patterns resulting from the accelerated intersection of different spheres and their often competing invisible layers. For instance, the personal sphere collapsing into new automated privately-owned infrastructures. Or traditional State jurisdictions and frontiers being pierced by data and platforms. Or the realm of the biological becoming both a new battleground and a source of extended subjectivity, or even counterpower.

Can an age of instability and global threats be seen through design research? How does resistance emerge if conflict is barely visible? Can design provide relevant approaches to understand planetary-scale problems?

Temes de Disseny invites designers, critical technologists, and fringe researchers to offer insight on creative strategies of practical dissent, as well as casting light over the design of (and the resistance to) new infrastructures of information, labor and energy. We are also interested in research that outlines new approaches to the agency of non-human agents and how alternative design practices relate to a radically different vision of bodies and post-identities.

Temes de Disseny welcomes the account of radical practices, comparative case study, practice-based reflections, visualisations and cartographies, and even exploratory work, from the whole spectrum of contemporary design, including when it leaves the beaten path and allies with activism, art, cultural studies, or biotech.