From Ethics to Politics: If Design Is Problem Solving, What Then Are the Problems? (original) (raw)
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The Disconnect Between Design Practice and Political Interests
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.
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Since the 1970s the sustainability movement has called on designers to address the ecological impact of the products they design. This reappraisal has led to a growing awareness amongst designers of the potential for design to engage in discourses concerned with global issues such resource depletion, large scale population movement, labour exploitation, threats to food and water sources, as well as more recently climate change. Some of the more prominent practices to emerge out of these debates have been political in nature. Guy Julier describes this renewed interest in politics as 'design activism.' Design activism is a meta-‐discipline that has the capacity to transform the world by reshaping individual, social, and economic behaviour. One of the central tenets behind this heterogeneous movement is the certainty that people and objects actually inhabit complex relational assemblages that constitute particular environments and in themselves have designing agency. This is in direct contrast to earlier approaches such as eco design that remained largely subject-‐centric, applying ever more sophisticated technologies that would lead to a reduction in the consumption of materials and energy. In recent times design has taken up a more critical and interrogatory whole-‐systems approach to humans, materials and immaterial things. In this paper, we suggest that design can open up new forms of political representation and engagement, with a view to challenging dominant frameworks (habitus) that proliferate unsustainable practices. We will specifically draw on three case studies from Australia: 1) The Urmadic University 2) Natalie Jeremijenko and 3) Second Road to engage with future imaginings that adapt and mitigate potential possibilities through design. More specifically we have understood design activism as a political set of actions that materially and symbolically embody opportunities for change. These examples give rise to a multiplicity of affects, which include the emergence of new publics dedicated to critical and creative social imaginings; the creation of future scenarios that redistribute agency across non-‐human things and recast the place of humans within ecological systems; and the co-‐creation of new frameworks for equitable, transparent decision making within shared communities of interest.
In this brief article, I discuss the politics of design, specifically how the older art movements like Art Deco, Brutalism, et.al. have made a comeback. I discuss the tussle between Steve Jobs led skeumorphism and the flat designs, and question if the Google's 2014 Material Design offers the solution to the same or if that's just an easy answer. The perpetuation of negative space has been discussed. In the post-Weinstein world, the effects of #metoo on design are also covered.
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With the ever-more present climate crisis, resource shortage and the expansion of AI, the core question of the ethical aspects of our development of new products and solutions becomes unavoidable. But which topics are commonly discussed in design ethics literature and how has it evolved? To answer this question and to understand the existing underpinnings and foundation of ethics in design, we adopted a structured literature review searching literature across 42 renowned scientific design journals. A systematic search revealed 1177 academic publications relating to the topic. After filtering and reviewing the titles, abstracts and keywords of these publications, a total of 121 sources were singled out as qualified to constitute the foundation of this review. From these, 8 central themes in past and present design ethics research were identified: Design processes and practices, design education, participatory/cocreation, responsible design, social design, sustainability, technology, and human-centred design of which the three predominant themes are related to questions of the designers´ role and actions (design processes and practices), the effects and consequences of new developments(technology), and the common objectives of addressing the urgency of ecological imbalance (sustainability). This opens a discussion of future research, what are we missing?
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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.
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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.
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Our understanding of design has been evolving steadily over the past 100 years and in recent years there has been a rush of new research into a variety of dimensions and Ethics is one the many dimensions that have received research attention. In this paper we look at the various dimensions of design and at current and past definitions to see the contemporary understanding of the subject as we see it today with the aid of models that the author has evolved over several years of reflection and research. We then trace the evolution of design as a natural human activity and restate this history in terms of the major stages of evolution from its origins in the use of fire and tools through the development of mobility, agriculture, symbolic expression, crafts production and on to industrial production and beyond to the information and knowledge products of the day. This sets the stage to ponder about the future of the activity and of the discipline as we see it today.
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."