For “articulating alternative ways of being”, read design’s ability to describe how the world is inherently mutable or malleable — how everything is a decision, or the result of a decision — and to suggest and describe alternatives.
Design suggests design, in this sense, as it implies that design has led to this particular state, almost no matter what the scenario, and that therefore another state can exist; we can redesign things, if we see the world in this mutable way.
Jonathan Ive, the senior vice president of industrial design at Apple, in Gary Hustwit’s documentary Objectified, has an almost pained expression on his face when he tries to understand how, in some instances, the world has come to be in material form.

“Why, why, why is it like that, and not like this?” (Jonathan Ive, Objectified, 2009)

Imagine looking at the world through Ive’s hurting eyes. The essential mutability of the world may be a somewhat naive, or — more charitably — optimistic, viewpoint. It could also be seen as solipsistic, in that it privileges the viewpoint of the designer, suggesting that the designer has perhaps the fundamental position in reorienting the world, that all things are design challenges. In other words, a hammer sees only nails.