The Power of a Question

Designing Questions by Anab Jain, Nikolas Heep, and Stefan Zinell
Hatje Cantz, June 2, 2026

“What does a hopeful future truly look like?” A student’s question opens Designing Questions, a book from the Design Investigations department at Vienna’s University of Applied Arts. Its central claim: In the face of converging crises and swift change, the most radical act may be to reclaim the power of questions. Each chapter features an essential question as its title: How do we design questions? Why should design speculate? How do we investigate through making? How do we design when everything is entangled? Can designing questions shape our futures? Drawing on scholars including bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Designing Questions enacts a pedagogical shift in design: from inside to extending the discipline; from solutions toward “questions, speculations, and emergence”; from making as execution toward making as inquiry; and from fixed intelligence toward relational, situated intelligence. Designing Questions presents the classroom as a space for curiosity, embodied understanding, and imagination. It makes a compelling case for inquiry as core to learning and making. Ultimately, it insists that hope lives in “rehearsing other worlds together.” Teachers and leaders building interdisciplinary, project-based, or future-focused programs will find provocation, inspiration, models, and permission here.