The design-ification of future making: uncertainty and divination in contemporary business discourse

Ulises Navarro Aguiar and Karl Palmås

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2025, vol. 18, issue 5, 650-665

Abstract: This article investigates how design-oriented approaches have made their way into contemporary business discourse. It does so by exploring how the figures of ‘the strategist' and ‘the entrepreneur' are portrayed and linked to design in recent business literature on strategy and entrepreneurship, respectively. Theoretically, the article draws on, but also departs from, Jens Beckert's investigation of firms as ‘engines of imagination,' juxtaposing it with Laura Bear's work on speculation and capitalist divination. By using strategy and entrepreneurship as case illustrations, the analysis identifies a discursive shift in how firms are supposed to orient themselves towards the future, from a focus on taming uncertainty through predictive knowledge (or credible fictions that could pass as such), to a focus on leveraging uncertainty as a resource in overtly speculative and divinatory ways. The article conceptualizes this shift as the ‘design-ification’ of future making, whereby design emerges as a means to style and fuel the speculative imagination, producing affective possibilities and reinforcing the promise of an ever more uncertain future. The article concludes by foregrounding the contingency of the certainty/uncertainty duality, inviting scholars to treat them as emic terms found at work in concrete situations where actors vie to shape what is to come.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2024.2436845

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