TOWARD A DESIGN PHILOSOPHY THAT STUDIES THE DESIGN OF ARTIFACTS AND THE WORLD IN WHICH THEY ARE EMBEDDED: THE CASE OF DIGITAL TWINS

In this chapter, we engage in an ecological phenomenology of the redesign of the World in the digital age in order to show why the consideration of the redesign of the World in the digital age is relevant for contemporary design philosophies and philosophies of technology (section “A New Critical Perspective for Design Philosophies”), and how design philosophers can research both the design of concrete artifacts and the World in which they are embedded in an integrated manner (section “An Ecological Phenomenology of the Redesign of the World in the Digital Age”). Based on our findings, we propose to study design at the physical level of artifacts, the processual level of invention and evolution, and the metaphysical level of the redesign of the World in an integrated manner. In order to set the stage, however, we first ask why contemporary design philosophies—and we take Value Sensitive Design as a case in point—are not able to move beyond the artifact level of design and are not able to study the World in which these designs are embedded (section “The Inability of Contemporary Design Thinking (Value Sensitive Design) to Reflect on the Redesign of the World”).