Transition design, as outlined by Irwin, Kossoff, Tonkinwise, and Scupelli (2015), offers a framework that aligns with the urgency of publishing practices oriented toward systemic and cultural shifts. They argue that “design must evolve from problem-solving to problem-framing, from short-term solutions to long-term transitions” (p. 6). This essay approaches publishing through the lens of transition design—a mode of practice oriented toward long-term societal shifts. Transition design emphasizes systems thinking, stakeholder engagement, and the development of infrastructures for more sustainable and just futures. In this context, to publish is not only to make something visible, but to prototype, host, and support processes of transformation. To publish is to construct publics, but also to design pathways for cultural and ecological transitions.

In a global context marked by ecological urgency, cultural transformation, and contested flows of information, publishing has taken on an expanded and strategic role. Beyond the traditional notion of dissemination, to publish now means to make issues public—shaping visibility and engagement through ethical, political, and aesthetic choices. The concept of Publishing Futures emerges within this expanded field, positioning publishing as a design-driven practice that seeks not only to reflect the present but also to imagine and materialize preferable futures.

The role of the designer has shifted dramatically. Once confined to the production of form and communication tools, designers now operate as cultural mediators and facilitators of change. Dunne and Raby (2013) argue that “designers need to move away from being the servant of industry and the economy and become more like critics of material culture” (p. 189), highlighting a shift toward speculation and imagination as tools of agency.

Design now operates across diverse platforms—from performance to augmented reality, from code to communal meals and ritual cooking practices—always entangled with the specific contexts from which it emerges. As Easterling (2021) puts it, “design is not only the shaping of things, but also the calibration of dispositions and potentials” (p. 31), pointing to an infrastructural and strategic role for design beyond form.

In this expanded regime of visibility, the verb to publish becomes an act of political agency. “To make something public,” writes Latour (2005), “is to find means to gather around it a public, to bring to light the connections it makes and the interests it gathers” (p. 18). Publishing, then, is not just the production of content—it is the creation of conditions for engagement, responsibility, and transformation. In this light, a meal, a seed exchange, a solar-cooked feast, or a harvest ritual may become potent acts of publishing—gathering communities, making visible systems of value, and resisting silencing through embodied, collective gestures.

Publishing as a Design Practice

Publishing is no longer solely the domain of the editorial industry; it is now a form of critical, situated, and transitional design. This reframing aligns with Latour’s (2005) claim that “a public is not a pre-existing thing” but is “gathered together by an issue” (p. 13)—emphasizing composition over communication.

Design today is not just the creation of finished objects, but the cultivation of spaces for collective sense-making. These platforms—zines, social media, archives, shared meals—exemplify what Drucker (2004) calls “the performative nature of publishing,” where meaning is made through the act of staging, not just stating (p. 1).

In this sense, commensality becomes a performative and publishing act: to gather around food is to engage with cultural memory, identity, and belonging in a sensorially rich and politically charged register. The table, like the printing press, stages relationships—between humans, land, histories, and futures.

However, Drucker also cautions against idealizing independent publishing without attention to structural inequalities: “The myth of the alternative often serves to obscure the dependencies and privileges that make such work possible” (p. 65).

And yet, Dunne and Raby (2013) suggest a different route—one that embraces contradiction and speculation: “Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality” (p. 2). Publishing, in this light, becomes not a conclusion but a beginning: an opening for critique, ambiguity, and future-making—whether through printed matter or ritual acts like cooking, cultivating, or sharing food.

Expanded Publishing and Ecologies of Practice

Publishing has become an ecological and transitional practice—one that attends to relations, environments, and entanglements, while fostering the conditions for systemic change. This is aligned with Anna Tsing’s (2015) call to develop “the arts of noticing,” through which we “look for what is happening amid the ruins” (p. 19). Publishing, in this ecological frame, is not a linear act but an emergent choreography of voices, materials, and temporalities.

Designers are increasingly approaching publishing as a “living, entangled” practice—through fermentation workshops, seed libraries, solar kitchens, and sound archives—forms that prioritize care, attention, and interdependence. In this context, Manzini (2015) emphasizes the role of design in catalyzing social innovation, suggesting that designers today must help “create enabling solutions and build the infrastructures that sustain them” (p. 89).

Escobar (2018) advocates for designing “for the pluriverse—a world in which many worlds fit” (p. 16). Publishing, understood pluriversally, is not a universalizing logic but a means of making visible situated knowledges and resisting erasure. “Design,” he writes, “is a tool to support autonomy and the collective construction of the real” (p. 138).

Yet these interventions are not immune to critique. Morton (2007) reminds us that “ecological art must be uncanny, strange, disorienting,” not merely beautiful (p. 17). He writes against the comforting aesthetics of “nature,” advocating instead for “ecology without nature.”

Tsing (2015) likewise warns that even well-meaning ecological gestures can “reproduce colonial categories of management and extraction” (p. 97). Publishing must remain vigilant toward the infrastructures it operates through. From a transition design perspective, this also means designing not only for change, but with the political and cultural systems through which change must pass (Meadowcroft, 2009). In solar cooking experiments, the slowness and unpredictability of the method are not inefficiencies, but critiques of industrial time.

The Cultural Turn: Publishing and the Politics of Representation

Publishing is not only an act of making visible—it is a terrain where identities, histories, and power structures are negotiated. Minh-ha (1989) argues that to speak from the margin is to “define a position that is at once inside and outside the dominant structures” (p. 6). Publishing from this position is a form of epistemic disobedience—challenging not only what is said, but who gets to speak, and under what conditions.

Through zines, ephemeral publications, and ritual meals, designers and artists have created spaces for what Hartman (2019) calls “critical fabulation”—a method that “refuses the limits of the archive” to imagine lives that were “unimaginable within the logic of slavery and its afterlife” (pp. xiii–xiv).

Yet visibility is not inherently emancipatory. Ahmed (2012) warns that “inclusion can be a form of conditional belonging that maintains the status quo” (p. 59). Publishing can make one legible to institutions without necessarily transforming them.

This tension is echoed by Berlant (2011), who describes cruel optimism as “a relation in which something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (p. 1). The desire for visibility, inclusion, or recognition through publishing may thus entrench the very exclusions it seeks to overcome.

To publish, then, is not just to speak, but to ask: “Who is listening?” and “What does it cost to be heard?”—especially when publishing takes the form of feeding others, cooking under the sun, or blessing the harvest.

Food, Performance, and Embodied Publishing

Publishing is often associated with visual or textual media, but in its expanded and embodied form, it increasingly encompasses the sensory, the performative, and the ritualistic. Among the most fertile grounds for this expansion is the intersection of food and design—a space where acts of preparation, sharing, and eating become deeply communicative gestures. Historically, the act of eating together—commensality—has not only satisfied hunger but structured religious rites, social hierarchies, and political solidarities. The table, in this sense, becomes a sacred and strategic stage: a site of negotiation, memory, affiliation, and dissent.

The Table as Archive and Stage

One of the most iconic representations of food as communication, ritual, and power is Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. This image has transcended its religious origin to become a symbol of community, betrayal, memory, and sacrifice. As a tableau, it is also a publishing act: a visual staging of a shared meal imbued with eschatological narrative and political subtext. The Last Supper reconfigures the table into a site of transmission—where faith is negotiated through food, and the body is transubstantiated into word and witness.

Similarly, in South Asian and Southeast Asian contexts, religious and ceremonial meals—such as the Buddhist Danaofferings or the Langar in Sikh communities—reaffirm collective values, social justice, and spiritual equality through shared food. These rituals not only feed the body, but encode ethical and cosmological systems. In both cases, the table becomes a page—publishing, through repetition and affect, a collective way of being in the world. Commensality is more than sociability—it is a mode of worldmaking. From the Eucharistic table to communal Ramadan iftars, from harvest festivals to landless workers’ kitchen cooperatives, meals have long functioned as political, spiritual, and social publications. Food rituals articulate cosmologies, claim territorial rights, transmit ancestral wisdom, and affirm community bonds. As Roland Barthes noted, “Food is a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behaviour” (1961/2013, p. 24). To cook, to serve, or to eat together is to publish cosmopolitical relationships—with the land, with others, and with the divine.

The meal is thus a dynamic archive—not of static texts, but of embodied gestures, inherited techniques, oral narratives, and ritual repetitions. Meals are vehicles of memory and prophecy: they recall the past and imagine alternative futures. As performance theorist Rebecca Schneider (2011) writes, “performance leaves residues” and reperforms the archive (p. 100). The kitchen, like the printing press, becomes a site of inscription and iteration—where knowledge is kept alive through touch, smell, and repetition.

Publishing Through Food: Designers, Chefs, and Ritual Practitioners

Many contemporary designers and food practitioners are exploring these ideas by treating food as both method and message. Artist and designer Inês Neto dos Santos choreographs edible installations that reactivate domestic rituals and ecological entanglements, treating the kitchen as a space of political intimacy and speculative design. Chef and activist Olia Hercules, in her work on Ukrainian cuisine, foregrounds the intergenerational resilience of food cultures under threat, asserting cooking as a mode of diasporic publishing.

While references to solar cooking often appear in activist and ecological design discourse, verifiable examples can be found in educational initiatives like the Barefoot College’s ‘Solar Mamas’ in India, which train women from rural areas to become solar engineers. These practices go beyond technology—they suggest an ethics of care and autonomy rooted in community knowledge. Solar kitchens, often slow and dependent on weather, publish an epistemology of patience, of listening to the sun and adjusting rhythms accordingly. Though not widely discussed in academic design literature, solar cooking functions as a form of publishing that critiques industrial time and fosters embodied ecological awareness. Solar kitchens, often slow and dependent on weather, publish an epistemology of patience, of listening to the sun and adjusting rhythms accordingly.

The Cozinha Ocupação 9 de Julho in São Paulo, led by MTST activists, transforms cooking into an act of land reclamation and collective authorship. Here, food is published not as recipe but as resistance—a political gesture that feeds while affirming the right to dwell, to cultivate, and to narrate.

In Kenya, Slow Food Youth Networks have reclaimed indigenous grains and fermentation practices, organizing community feasts and documentation initiatives that act as culinary counterpublics. These decentralized publications circulate not just on paper or screens, but on tongues and tongues of fire, across communal pots and intergenerational kitchens.

Agriculture and the Sacred Commons

Agriculture itself is an act of publication: a choreography between humans, seeds, soils, and spirits. Traditional farming rituals—from Andean planting ceremonies to West African yam festivals—are not only agronomic but cosmopolitical performances, grounded in reciprocity, regeneration, and reverence. In such contexts, food is never “just food,” but an offering, a petition, a testimony.

Publishing through food also means resisting monocultures of the mind, to borrow Vandana Shiva’s (2000) phrase. The spread of industrial agriculture, corporate seed patents, and monocultural diets constitutes not only ecological degradation but epistemicide—the erasure of culinary languages and agricultural ways of knowing. By recovering and reinventing these foodways, designers, farmers, and cooks are publishing plural knowledges rooted in place, seasonality, and care.

Toward a Liturgical Publishing

Food-based publishing challenges the hegemony of the visual and textual by grounding knowledge in bodily rhythms, seasonal cycles, and spiritual rituals. It invites a liturgical approach to publishing—where repetition, gesture, and communal intention enact a shared world.

As Shannon Jackson (2011) reminds us, “Support is not peripheral but constitutive of what we understand as art” (p. 10)—and, indeed, as publishing. Recipes passed hand-to-hand, solar-cooked feasts, and seed exchange rituals are all acts of publication: ephemeral, situated, and suffused with ethics.

To publish, in this context, is not only to make public, but to make sacred, to make reciprocal, and to make with others.

Conclusion: Publishing Futures as Situated and Transitional Practice

Publishing today is no longer about transmission alone. It is a transitional act—anchored in systems thinking, relationality, and long-term transformation. Designers and artists are expanding publishing into the domains of ecology, food, performance, and care—building new formats for collective reflection and transformation.

Transition design, as described by Irwin et al. (2015), offers a compelling framework for this evolution. In their provocation, Kossoff, Irwin, and Willis argue that design must respond to complex, ‘wicked’ problems not with isolated solutions, but with an orientation toward long-term societal transitions. This involves a fundamental reframing of design’s purpose—from short-term efficiency to the cultivation of sustainable, place-based, and plural futures. Publishing, in this light, becomes not only a tool of communication but a mode of infrastructuring change. By positioning publishing within this approach, we begin to understand it not just as an expressive act but as a way of seeding infrastructures for emergent worlds.

Ezio Manzini (2015) reminds us that systemic change requires the creation of “enabling solutions,” which are both infrastructural and cultural. Publishing—as a set of situated practices—can help prototype and sustain such solutions. From seed libraries to collective kitchens, from solar feasts to community archives, the publishing act becomes a strategic intervention in the design of transitions.

Yet these gestures must be critically held. As hooks (2009) reminds us, “eating is political,” tied to histories of slavery, migration, and cultural survival (p. 39). Publishing through food must therefore resist aestheticization and strive for contextual awareness, accountability, and justice.

Publishing Futures are not fixed—they are situated, systemic, and in motion. They require an ethics of care, a politics of citation, and a commitment to structural transformation. Ultimately, to publish is not just to share—it is to shape the world otherwise: with our hands in the soil, with our breath over the fire, and with others at the table.

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