Quasi-design: Epistemic collaboration through design

This article introduces Quasi-Design as a conceptual framework for specifying how design intervenes in ongoing knowledge practices. While research through design (RTD) has described how design research moves across disciplinary traditions and contexts of inquiry, it has offered a limited account of how designing operates on the knowledge practices it encounters. Quasi-Design addresses this by conceptualising design as an interventionist practice that stages breaches in sociotechnical scripts. These breaches render knowledge practices experiential, reassemble their coordination in situ, and redistribute the capacity to recognise and reconfigure them. Across three case studies of PowerPoint-mediated academic presentation, the article argues that design’s epistemic contribution lies in staging and reworking the sociotechnical organisation of knowledge practices.