Design and Missing Data. Typologies of Absence and Epistemic Justice

This curatorial introduction explores the politics of absence in digital knowledge systems, focusing on how design can critically engage with and respond to the condition of ‘miss-ing data’. Absence is understood not as a technical gap but as the product of sociohistorical and institutional forces, with profound implications for epistemic justice and cultural rep-resentation. This issue foregrounds practices that question dominant data paradigms and reflect specifically on the role of design in engaging with data as a contested domain that demands participatory and critical approaches. From alterna-tive data infrastructures to participatory inquiry and exper-imental ways of visualizing, collecting, and archiving, this editorial for the current Open Debate section is interested in how design can become more attentive to its relationship with data, to the politics of datafication, and to the need to reimagine other ways of engaging with data through design.