We know more than ever before. Yet the world has not become easier to understand. Information is available at all times, while the systems that organise everyday life grow increasingly opaque. The promise of autonomy attached to new technologies gives rise to new forms of dependency. Products conceal globally entangled flows of goods and resources. Digital environments reorder realities and steer decisions. Conventions harden, even as the complexity of lived experience is denied.
MAKE IT MAKE SENSE emerges from this condition. As an idiom of internet culture, the phrase appears where explanations fail, contradictions become im- possible to ignore and causal relationships no longer seem to hold. Circulating through comment sections and individual posts, often as an ironic meme, it nevertheless carries a serious demand beneath its apparent absurdity: a call from a generation searching for meaning in a world that increasingly seems
to resist it.
For design, this changes the point of departure. Form, function and use remain fundamental, but they are no longer sufficient to describe the reach of the disci- pline. To design also means to examine the conditions within which things take shape. Who defines a standard? What forms of behaviour does a system prescribe? What is made visible, and what remains in the background? For whom does design create access, and whom does it exclude?