GUEST EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION The Somatechnics of Critical Design Stacey Moran Nowadays, it seems that everything is designed. Nike sneakers; electric cars; smart phones, smart refrigerators, and smart cities; genetically altered embryos or ‘designer babies’; brand logos; political campaigns; and our carefully curated lifestyles from the interior of our homes to our filtered selfies and Instagram posts. Architectural historian, Beatriz Colomina and architect, Mark Wigley claim that design is so pervasive that it no longer refers simply to a profession or a product, but rather, we are all designers, like spiders ‘enveloped in the nets of (our) own making’ (2016). For the longest time, design was viewed pretty straightforwardly; the common understanding was that design is ‘good’: it improves people’s lives by solving problems. Julian Hanna, James Augur, and Enrique Encinas note that while this remains true in some sense, unfortunately, however, design has become so interwoven with ‘the market and conspicuous consumption that it has become essentially a novelty machine’ (2017). Linked to capitalism and globalisation, design has successfully ‘trained [us] to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed’ (Mazur 1927). 1 This desiring machine is wreaking havoc on the planet, at the same time as it is deeply entangled with the technologies and infrastructures that shape the soma, our embodied worlds, and what it is possible for them to become. Our ‘worlds’, in the Heideggerian sense, are designed through these technologies of production, and this is a somatechnological issue. This special issue, The Somatechnics of Critical Design, aims to provide a meeting place for critical design and somatechnics. While these two discourses are largely unacquainted, and may even seem quite alien to one another, in what follows, I review some of the literature in the field of critical Somatechnics 10.3 (2020): 275–285 DOI: 10.3366/soma.2020.0323 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/soma