In the disciplinary mix of approaches to digital transitions, technological innovation and the ways we live by them, we decidedly find design as a knowledge and skills domain going beyond hard system design. As we have learned from e.g. IDEO design models, human request, capacity and competence are put at the centre of design processes. The elements of designing–how we imagine and are inspired, how we manoeuvre, behave and experience in the social mesh of everyday life, how we approach communities of diversity, how we communicate and interact through tools and extensions, how we put knowledge and critical investigation into in creation of artefacts, services or solutions; how we plan, experiment, and effectuate–are all part of human capacity.

This human capacity can be studied in a wealth of humanities disciplines: history, art history, philosophy and aesthetics, theatre and performance studies, literature studies, cultural studies, ethnography and anthropology, languages and intercultural communication: you name a discipline, and it will bring human capacity to a field which is also traversed by the knowledge that human-centredness also means acknowledging how humanity and the single human being are part of a common mesh of living organisms and networked technologies. 
Looking back on the lesson on Digital Divides, we can certainly say that the transition from one era–Modernity, rooted in the Renaissance–and into another, which may go by many names (post-modern, post-human, anthropocene, globalised) has been driven by mega-trends of global economy, geopolitics and technology, creating as many rifts and gaps as bridging gaps. 

In comparison, N. Katherine Hayles’ proposal for the humanities, to “join theory and practice through the productive work of making” may seem modest and to an extend targeting the humanities as a common field more than proposing the humanities to apply knowledge into the Big Picture. But, what has been put so successfully to work in the Sciences, in Technology, and in Business Studies, with “collaborative environments in which research and teaching blend with one another in the context of teams with many kinds of skills, typically in spaces fluidly configured as integrated classroom, laboratory, and studio spaces”, may actually be the first of many necessary steps to de-silo humanities knowledge and methods and put it to work in targeting the new gaps and rifts by contributing other rationales for making sense of the transitions, we are in.

References

• Ingold, Tim: Lines: A History, Routledge 2007; The Life of Lines, Routledge, 2015
• Latour, Bruno: Reassembling the Social–An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford University Press, 2005