Design is as social an activity as is language. Both are instances of the communicative ability we can rightly claim as a human necessity for being and becoming. Paraphrasing Steiner, we can say that the need for a human being (of human becoming) to find appropriate means of articulation and shaped expression will continue to press on language which, under that pressure, becomes either literature, art, or more concretely, becomes design. However, design is much more than just the end product of a linear thought process that satisfies materialistic needs and wants, and is instead a process dealing with „wicked problems‟ and conceptual integration. Therefore this work will forego any attempt at dealing directly with the „concrete end products‟ of the design process, and focus, instead, on design theory / thinking, and a design-like identity-creation process that has been variously called a designerly way of knowing, knowledge of the third kind, and ontological designing. These approaches to design thinking begins with some form of design theory, but, and following the new design trend of focusing on process instead of product, instead of placing theory at the service of the manufacturing process leading into the product itself, it regards enhanced human thought patterns as far more important, thus placing this type of theory at the service of human capability, first and foremost. This particular approach to ontologically inclined design theory, I will argue, is also the best approach to a renewal in design teaching and learning, since it focuses on the identity-creation capacity of the student more than on designed products: the end result of a design education should be a critical and symbolic analyst capable of dealing with the complexities of designing interactive spaces populated by both humans, as users and critics, and the non-human actors (cf. Latour, below) we call designed objects.