The questioning of design by the“when” gives here the opportunity to reconstruct the guiding lines of an archaeology of the discipline in four steps: the prehistory, where the problems of cultural design are presented; the history, from the birth of the culture of design depending on its practice and research; the present, characterised by the opening to social innovation; and, finally, the future, which poses design in the face of climate change and the instabilities of the Anthropocene. This genealogy, by reconstructing the key concepts of design, shows that, at each stage, the answers to the question“when is design” change according to a process that opposes already stabilized solutions to the innovation of new inventions. This leads us today, facing the horizon of the Anthropocene, to replace the human-centred design aiming at improving the habitability of the world and the living conditions of a single species, by the future living-centred design aiming at the stability of the world and the permanence of the network of life.