The Politics of design: Exploring the role of design-­‐as-­‐activism in Australia (original) (raw)

Design Politics in the Anthropocene

Material trajectories: designing with care?, 2023

The Ecocene is a vision for design in response to Anthropocene planetary conditions. Progressive movements are challenging defuturing norms in design. Whether appropriate responses will happen on a s cale that will make substantive mitigation and adaptation to climate change and other ecological crises effective depends, in part, on human abilities to design and enact massive change. As a practice that helps create the material conditions for everyday life with artifacts, services, spaces, and systems that enable future ways of living, design will play a role in the development of more sustainable and more equitable worlds. This essay highlights five design movements supporting radical and adaptive responses to environmental crises. The feminist design ecologies embedded in the Ecocene proposal are a foundation for the redesign and co-creation of worlds anew.

Design / Ecology / Politics: Toward the Ecocene (2018)

Bloomsbury Academic, 2018

Design/Ecology/Politics is a clear articulation of the powerful role for design – once informed by ecological literacy and critical perspectives. This book moves the debate in sustainable design beyond its narrow focus on the design of marginally more sustainable consumer products. Ecological theory exposes philosophical problems at the root of the environmental crisis. Social theory exposes the social and political function of design. This book will describe the relationship between these three dynamics. While there are prominent movements in design working towards socially responsive practice, these efforts are hampered by the manner in which power relations are constructed, reproduced and obfuscated by design. Revealing these dynamics creates new possibilities for transformative practice – i.e. design which will create ways of living enabling human prosperity over time. To be published in 2018 by Bloomsbury Academic.

Rethinking Politics From Design (and Design From Politics)

2018

This issue of Disena explores beyond the restrictive boundaries that were originally imposed on design, installing questions about a design that reflects empirically on the conditions for the sustainability and habitability of the world (Sloterdijk, 2014). Instead of understanding design and politics as opposing and ontologically stable domains, we believe it’s relevant to revitalize design’s political drive, that is, its capacity to co-produce the social and unfold new political issues.

Who is Sustainable? Querying the politics of sustainable design practices

Share This Book: Critical perspectives and dialogues about design and sustainability., 2013

"Design, formulated as a discipline concerned with form and problem-solving, may seem preoccupied with matters other than those of politics and the political. Traced through a history of the fine arts, for example, the concerns of design include aesthetic expression and material form. As a liberal art, design is arguably a discipline that synthesizes knowledge from across the natural and social sciences and applies it to solving complex technical and social problems. These dimensions of design are apparent in its expanding roles in sustainable development—for example, in expressing life cycle information about products, changing energy consumption behavior, rethinking transportation or food services, and steering decision-making processes in communities or companies. Amended as ‘sustainable,’ design is repositioned from being part of the problem of unsustainable development. However, preoccupied with forms or solutions, design is not always attentive to its political dimensions. How, by, and for whom sustainability is formulated are political questions to be discussed within discourses and practices of sustainable development—and sustainable design... ...Such questions are at stake in critical studies and critical practices of design. Reflecting here on design examples from my own work and that of others, I articulate a series of such questions inspired by critical theory and political philosophy. These open a discussion of the roles of design in sustainable consumption and sustainable communities, in which it is profoundly implicated in the reorganization of everyday life. Combining reflections and examples, the graphic form of this article reflects an interweaving of theory and practice, the materiality of academia and the criticality of design."

Design Ecology Politics: Towards the Ecocene, by Joanna Boehnert

The Design Journal, 2019

Joanna Boehnert has a well established reputation for demanding that politics be foregrounded in any consideration of design, and especially design for sustainability. Design Ecology Politics: Towards the Ecocene is her masterwork, an extended diagnosis and prognosis of the structural causes of the present and ongoing unsustainability of contemporary society. The book is a culmination of a long track record of publication, including a PhD on the visual communication of ecological literacy, and active participation in the scholarly discourse of design for sustainability. Boehnert has been active for several years in debates on the agency of designers in responding to the challenges of The Design Journal

Visions that change. Articulating the politics of participatory design

CoDesign, 2020

In this paper we draw upon the articles included in this special issue to question how to re-politicise co-design and participatory design (PD). Many authors in these fields have recently made a plea to reengage with 'big issues' as a way to address this concern. At the same time, there is an increased attention into the micro-politics of the relations that are built-in co-design and PD. These two approaches are sometimes presented as working against each other with a depoliticising dynamic as a result. The editorial hypothesis of this issue is that designing visions can turn the tension between addressing the big issues and close attention to the particularity of relations into a motor for re-politicising design. Through engaging with literature, the articles presented in this issue, and two fieldwork cases that explore this dynamic, we discovered that paying careful attention to the activity of designing visions can support re-politicisation. While visions enable us to develop relations with close attention to their politics, building relations supports a more political approach to designing visions on issues. We argue that vision-making can particularly support re-politicisation when it enables the articulation of the political by relating its situated reality to how it unfolds in space and time.

Design activism: catalysing communities of practice

Architectural Research Quarterly, 2020

Over the last decade, we have witnessed renewed interest in design as a socially engaged practice. Much of the debates around ‘social design’ point towards myriad approaches and disciplinary fields interwoven with grass-roots initiatives and social movements. Among these, design activism has gained traction as critical spatial practice that operates on the fringes of commercial and institutional spheres.The temporal, spatial and experimental nature of design activism is well delineated in scholarship but its long-term effect on everyday urban environments remains elusive. Moreover, the influence of design activism on socio-spatial dynamics is indeed largely under researched. By mobilising social practice theory, this paper proposes a novel theorisation of design activism that sheds light on the social formations and collective practices catalysed through the activist impulse. This ontological shift embraces an understanding of the socio-material world through practice. Such characte...