ABSTRACT
Designing is considered an ability that is endowed to everyone at large, going beyond one’s professional expertise. However, without a careful examination of the colonial legacies, instituting everyone’s creative practices as designing encourages the making of nondesigners as being isomorphic to the design professions. The chapter aims to evoke more imaginations of how designing relates to other makings practices while not fully rendering them as designing. Here, the general term ‘making’ is employed to indicate a scope emphasising the richness of the divergent practices of forming, causing, doing or coming into being, in which designing is only one or several modes of making. In this chapter, through a literature review, I first examine how the discourse and narrative of design professions over-occupy makings. This is followed by a mini autoethnography that illustrates how multiple practices of makings make transformative change and enhance the hierarchy in a ‘design’ project of remote care that I am engaged in. This chapter concludes by proposing the plurality of makings as a method of introspection to sensitise our design practices, as well as bodily and affective experiences. In the scope of plural makings, participation does not necessarily mean inviting them to enter the design process but rather means an embodied designer joining in the meshwork of ongoing makings.
