Designing Politics: The limits of design

REVISTA DISEÑA, 2017

What has design to do with politics? The usual answer would be: nothing. At first glimpse, politics would be a realm indifferent and alien to design. While politics must deal with the governing of human interests for the sake of common good, design, instead, would be focused on form, the aesthetic and functional arrangement of the things that populate the world. The realm of the political would be populated by norms and values (liberty, tolerance, etc.), founding its duties on what Weber called 'the legitimate use of force' (Weber, 1944). The field of design, on its part, would respond to the rule of the needs of the user, focusing its forces on transforming, creatively and sensitively, the materialities into useful, usable or decorative products. It is precisely the separation between politics and design, deeply rooted in the thought and action of the latter, which this dossier attempts to thematise and problematise.

Design Philosophy Papers, 2003

Conference Proceedings of the Academy for Design Innovation Management, 2019

Long-term, sustainable transitions cannot occur without working at the political level to address the serious, global political challenges we are facing today. However, the capacity of design as a rigorous component and complement of the political world is yet to be seen. In this paper we discuss surveys we conducted, showing that there is a clear discrepancy between how designers engage in the political process as citizens and as professionals. We also discuss a subsequent workshop which allowed survey participants to explore these questions of roles and agency in greater depth and offered insights into barriers and opportunities. We found the workshop to be an effective method of helping designers identify leverage points and courses to intervene within both the designer's sphere of influence and sphere of concern. In so doing, we might begin to draw more designers into the critical work of designing for a transition towards more inclusive and equitable sociopolitical futures.

Journal of Urban Design, 2019

This paper aims to advance the development of participation in urban design from a substantive standpoint. It departs from a prevailing focus on ideals of participation and describing participatory methods and processes. Instead, the paper stresses the need to acknowledge ‘the political’ nature of public spaces and how this challenges participatory urban design processes. This leads to a substantive exploration of differences, conflicts and power in the planning and design of public spaces, i.e., unearthing the political. The case of a participatory process in a neighbourhgood of Barcelona illustrates the theoretical discussion. This helps bring forward a much-needed critical and reflective, rather than idealistic, theorization and practice of participation in urban design.

Strategic Design Research Journal, 2017

In recent years, a collaborative approach to solving socio-urban problems has become common. In some cases, organizational changes have been worked out in enterprises and governments to accommodate the collaborative process, and people started recognizing the already present collaborative aspect of the creative process. Nevertheless, a rigorous theoretical/conceptual background that can sustain continuous social innovation based on accountable experimentation is still majorly lacking in these contexts. The specific approach elaborated for Metadesign by the author can provide a bridge between these innovative intentions and a new epistemological framework that has emerged from contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and complexity theory. In the context of the so-called "Smart City", Metadesign could serve as an accessible approach to the democratic organization of communities so they can perform qualified and consequential creative work, including rethinking their own role in urban planning (meta-action). This approach is based on a new social interaction repertoire, partially derived from the popularization of digital interaction, but also from a new epistemic: complexity theory involves extreme shifts in the prevailing epistemological outlook, requiring new cognitive tools to cope with the increasing cognitive load in social interaction needed in collaborative creative work. This new epistemic also involves changing the way we frame objects of knowledge, recognizing new "objects of design", of particular interest to the Metadesign action, that can mediate social change in a concerted and conscious manner.

Protest 68-18, 2019

What is the relationship between design and politics? Which part does design play in political protest? And who has the right to design for whom? In this short essay, I explore the political character, a potentially political dimension of all design, as an introduction to a catalog of political posters by students of the HfG Offenbach.

designskolenkolding.dk

The Design Journal

This document is a report on the structured discussion workshop at the EAD 2017 Design for Next (Society) conference in Rome, Italy. The workshop was hosted by Bianca Herlo and Andreas Unteidig from the Berlin University of the Arts and joined by İdil Gaziulusoy from Aalto University and Wolfgang Jonas from the University of Braunschweig.

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 2017

Recent research in CSCW, urban informatics, and sociotechnical systems has proposed new framings and emphases of the city as a locus of research on computing and called for a heightened focus on the entanglements of social policy and design. Yet there are relatively few empirical investigations of actual policy-design entanglements in specific cities, and of those available, non-Western cities are underrepresented. We report an empirical study of the 2010 Taipei International Flora Expo (TIFE) as a case to explore these urban informatics/social computing issues. Specifically, we offer an empirically grounded analysis of design as a mechanism of public futuring and debates, which contributes to a better understanding of "participatory urbanship" [6]; and we do so focusing on a non-Western city, both to ensure a broader representation of urban ways of life and also to de-center Western experiences as the primary basis of urban informatics theory in CSCW.