Debate’s design is colonial intellectual property. Game design necessarily implies a relational form of planning that subsumes fairness concerns within broader epistemic inquiries, which framework silences. This disappears fugitive and disruptive innovation and reproduces colonial mechanisms. It’s try or die to redesign debate to empower decolonial innovations to create new relationalities.

As Ansari puts it very clearly, “A decolonizing ontological framework must see design as a sociotechnical mechanism of inquiry, re-enunciation, and re-narration. It is a project of looking back and re-framing certain material practices, and also a project of understanding the relationality of things beyond their mere objecthood” (Schultz et al., 2018, p. 92). That can be achieved through a top-down or bottom-up approach, even though, as far as decoloniality is concerned, it is best implemented through a proper conjugation of them led by (or at the service of) the latter. The point here is overcoming modern instrumentalist reduction of technical design, which strips design from values other than the modern and capitalist hegemonic ones (Feenberg, 2010, 2017). It has to do with acknowledging the design’s relational, artistic, and caring nature, as well as its inevitable colonizing or decolonizing role. As Keshavarz (2020) critically presents concerning humanitarian design to refugees in Europe, technical design, taken and practiced as a merely (instrumental) problem-solving activity, keeps sociotechnically producing the same oppressive reality where disempowered and displaced people treated as refugees is an almost inevitable consequence (more about the critique to reducing design to problem-solving is discussed later.) Further, resuming the dialog with Simondon, the point is about (1) reclaiming to design—or invention—the harmonization it is supposed to (or can) advance between human beings and the natural environment we inhabit (and co-shape) and, to a certain extent at least, also between different groups of human beings (Simondon, 1989, p. 164; 2009, p. 129); and (2) educating the poet-technicians capable of such designs/inventions (Simondon, 2009, p. 111-112). As Jimenez and Roberts argue concerning innovations: Future research should put this in action to see in what ways innovations/tech hubs can produce values of environmental ethics, collective benefits and a strong spiritual and affective rationality, thereby promoting an alignment with such worldviews. The inclusion of indigenous viewpoints (like Buen Vivir) should not just be instrumental, it should be epistemological and ontological. In our view, the Western (neoliberal) approach to innovation represents only one possible approach among others, and we should therefore accept the possibility of a plurality of legitimate paradigms around innovation and its impact in our societies. In this sense, in a world with increasing inequality, huge environmental and ecological risks, ‘Is another innovation possible?’ (Jimenez and Roberts, 2019, p. 189