This text articulates doubt over design discourses and practices. This doubt comes from personal experiences of two former Master students in the 'Experience Design' program at Konstfack University College of Arts, Craft and Design in Stockholm, Sweden. Both graduated in the spring of 2011 from the two-year program, one coming from a background of design and visual arts and the other from design research. They shared interest in thinking and doing design differently. Their doubt was based on a gradual understanding of how design education and its practice imposes and reproduces a homogeneous and dominant form of action, which they came to see as being complicit with the dominant form of politics in our societies: the 'politics of fear.' The paper argues how and why the politics of fear functions in design practice and education. It does this via an auto-ethnographical text and the particular case of designing a 'better death', a design course on the 'aesthetics of dying' focused on the last days in a palliative care center. The authors question why design education teaches designers to perpetuate their own habits, and develop an inability to accept what is foreign and why in seeking to solve problems it imposes itself on the other, instead of opening to alternative forms of action and life.