In this article, I argue to expand the application of the concept “devices of articulation”—a term signifying those artifacts that are purposefully created to articulate public issues: controversial phenomena that are too important not to be considered by designers but are not necessarily solvable by political or scientific means. Whereas problems might be fixed, issues can only be temporarily stabilized. I, therefore, investigate how two design projects—Smogware and the Rain Project—forge new relations, meanings, and consequences among elements that are typically understood to be unrelated, to support public engagement with the issue of environmental pollution.

This article develops a synanthropic design approach. The Port of Rotterdam currently houses one of Europe’s largest colonies of the synanthropic species of Lesser Black-backed Gulls. The thriving of this particular colony is entangled with human interventions and economic activities in the larger Dutch Delta. We map the managerial, legal, political, and economic interrelations and dependencies that animate the human and more-than-human contact zone. By including a gull's perspective on the Dutch delta environment, this study aims to support the facilitated coexistence of humans and Lesser Black-backed Gulls in the Port of Rotterdam – now and in the future. The synanthropic design interventions and new governance model proposed in this study show how the Port of Rotterdam can be re-imagined as “Land of Gulls and Humans.”

Designers are a positive breed, and many scholars studying the extensive field of design and its professional history – including some involved with Cumulus Antwerp 2023 – seem to agree that designers can contribute to positive ‘societal impact.’ In this paper I investigate how these optimistic views of designers’ alleged ‘social agency’ are actually constituted, by describing how – over time – different notions of design have been mobilized in relation to various understandings of ‘the social.’ In current times of complex, layered, and interrelated crises especially, designers and design theorists need to get their vocabulary straight in order to specify what design can actually do – as well as what it can’t. I therefore argue that to articulate relevant and meaningful roles design might play concerning various problematic entanglements, it is essential to differentiate problems that can be fixed, from issues that can merely be stabilized (Marres, 2007), and approach both phenomena precisely for what they are. Moreover, by acknowledging that both problems and issues are not a given but rather need to be constructed, ‘designerly agency’ in relation to ‘societal change’ can be understood as consisting of both the framing, setting and solving of problems, as well as the articulation of issues, through the creation of objects, environments, services and systems.