Design activism

Precarious objects explores the traffic between design and activism by telling stories drawn from contemporary counter-precarity cases in Italy. As a category of labour and of global social experience in general, precarity is a wicked problem that affects all aspects of life, regulating the production and circulation of a wide range of material and immaterial effects. In this book, three microhistories of counter-precarity explore existent forms of resistance and resilience to precarity. Drawing on ethnographies and archives and bringing together debates from design theory, cultural studies and geography, this study shows how design objects and practices recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life.

Gegen zeitgenössische Werke, wie sie prominent die Documenta (13) zeigte, wird häufig der Vorwurf der Affirmation erhoben. Stattdessen wird eine kritische Funktion der Kunst eingefordert. Während die Gegenüberstellung von Kritik und Affirmation die (post-)moderne Diskussion des Verhältnisses von Kunst und Wirklichkeit charakterisiert, scheinen jüngere Kunstentwicklungen diese einseitige Entgegensetzung jedoch gerade unterlaufen und um das Moment der Transformation erweitern zu wollen. Angesichts dieser künstlerischen Entwicklung, die auf philosophischer Seite von einem neuen Realismus flankiert wird, fragen die Beiträge des Bandes, wie affirmative, kritische und transformative Momente der Kunst relationiert werden müssen, um das Wirklichkeitsverhältnis gegenwärtiger Kunst zu erfassen.

Bu araştırma, İstanbul'daki sokak kedilerinin iyi oluşu için yapılmış vatandaş güdümlü geçici birleştirmeler üzerinden yerelde sokak kedileri için ne tür su, gıda ve barınak ağları inşa edildiğine bakar; bunun tasarım aktivizmiyle nasıl ilişkilenebileceği sorularını sorar. Geçici birleştirmeler, en az önceliklendirdiği sokak kedileri grubu kadar savunmasız: Şehrin akışı içerisinde farklı aktörlerin müdahalesine (ekleme, çıkarma, yok etme) açık olmaları onları birleştirme yapan temel sebep. Benim bu araştırmadaki savım, olumlu toplumsal dönüşümü hedefleyen bir karşı anlatıyı nesneler ve mekanlar üzerinden yarattığı ve vatandaşların şehre dair tahayyüllerini açığa çıkararak şehrin nasıl tasarlanabileceğine dair olasılıklara işaret ettiği için vatandaşlar tarafından atığın yeniden dolaşıma sokulmasıyla açık ve esnek şekilde tasarlanan ve sürdürülen ve ihmal edilmiş bir hayvan nüfusunun iyi oluşunu hedefleyen geçici birleştirmeleri tasarım aktivizmi olarak okuyabileceğimiz.
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This research focuses on the citizen-led temporary assemblages, water, food, and shelter networks built and maintained for the well-being of street cats in Istanbul and scrutinizes the design activist potentials of these assemblages. Temporary assemblages are as vulnerable as the street cat population they serve: The main reason behind their temporality is their vulnerability towards the intervention of different actors (adding, removing, disposing). My argument in this research is that each of these assemblages, designed and maintained in an open and flexible nature through the upcycling of waste to ensure the well-being of a neglected animal population, could be interpreted as design activist practices for they create a counter-narrative over things and spaces aiming positive societal change  and point to potentials as to how the city could be shaped.

This thesis is an exploratory study of moves and movements of the design discipline towards social and activist critical practices. It departs from a growing concern for design as a socially committed activity that has been around since the 1960s. The social turn, as we describe it, was a historical plea for designers to expand the nature and complexity of the problems addressed by design, moreover, to involve the users and stakeholders in designing processes. Turning to work with different sectors and diverse publics, the ‘social design’ movement emerged in opposition to the industrial and the commercial paradigms. As participatory and co-design approaches spread to general practice and for all kinds of purposes, social design became increasingly seen as a culture to represent a wider historical actualisation of the discipline. Still, in recent years, authors point to the difficulties of becoming socially engaged. Although literature on the ‘how of’ collaboration abounds i.e. the motivations, structure and techniques to involve others in design processes; it appears co-design entails ambiguous practices where designers often find themselves without a discipline. Struggles to craft a role for design in initiatives coordinated by networks of communities and institutions too often has led to actions imported from other fields hence the end of design.
Coming from a background in graphic design, taking steps to become a social designer, we experienced how difficult it is to do away with the discipline. Specific gestures, actions and products in our social engagements that destabilized the visual communication design process also revealed visual communication design practiced in unknown or unexpected ways. Shifting the perspective to consider, beyond destabilization, it is indiscipline that happens to design in the encounter with others we articulated the question: what if choosing to become social is not to lose the discipline? This matter is worth to research because while social design became known for its risky participatory moves, some authors point to shifts in the politics of designing that have not yet been clarified. Through a mixed methodology based on action research and grounded theory we devised case studies to better describe, explain and explore, from a performative perspective and deeper anthropological stance, all that happens in co-design beyond exclusive attention to the design expert. While disclosing different social form-acts of social interaction within design, four images of indiscipline emerged. 1) IT’S ABOUT THE HOW, 2) DESIGN IS THE SITUATION, 3) BEGININGS NOT ENDS, and 4) DESIGN IS A LIVING THING, all point to different sides of the performative and politics turn that happens to design when it becomes social.
Addressing the lack of discourse that does not treat the social as a irreducible complexity, this thesis develops a theory of design that reclaims the encounter with others as the space and possibility to grow the discipline in ways that even unexpected may also be radically social. The main conclusion is that indiscipline is not anti-design but an expansion of design possibilities in the encounter with others, which not yet seen or made visible can potentially represent moves from conventional practices towards critical socially engaged designing. Recommendations for future research are to expand the inventive and pedagogic potentials of indiscipline as a concept to understand the social turn and to practice becoming socially engaged in ways that are deemed better for others and ourselves. Another opening is to understand how indiscipline may be articulated in design education how and when students may be ready for design practice to become a more living thing.

Following the success of the international conference Activism @theMargins: Stories of Resistance, Survival and Social Change in Melbourne, Australia in February 2020 and the book from Sitins to #revolutions: Media and the Changing nature of Protests published in November 2019, we propose to develop a volume of papers that further reflects on the range of activist activity over time-and of our time.

Mapping and fitness apps, government agencies and departments, and citizen science projects provide a wealth of data on urban green spaces, charting parks, reserves, and green corridors in and around Sydney. These maps represent vegetation as surface and, as Doreen Massey in the 2005 book For Space noted about other types of Western maps, detach the observer from the object of their gaze. The authors argue that, in order to make recombinant ecologies present, as well as visible, we need a different order of maps, able to place the observer back in the thick of things, and to capture the entanglements between humans and more-than-human gatherings. This, they maintain, requires a shift to mapping as an embodied methodology that brings together walking, visual documentation and drawing. To do this, they present three walking maps of plants imagined as ‘tropical’ growing in Marrickville, a suburb in Gadigal-Wangal Country in Sydney’s inner west, an area located in the ‘sub-tropical humid’ climate zone map. Through the generation of three plant-led walking maps, they reveal recombinant Marrickville ecologies. They show how plants redesign the urban landscape and engender everyday practices in the gardens, verges, and non-cultivated parcels of land and, in doing so, contribute to sensing the suburb as tropical.

‘Recombinant Ecologies in the City’ explores the role of visual communication in making present the ecologies resulting from the coming together of diverse beings – plants, animals, bacteria, fungi – in the city. Recombinant, as Hinchliffe and Whatmore (2006: 123) propose, is a way to understand ecology as ‘assembled through the dense comings and goings of urban life, rather than the discrete and undisturbed relations between particular species and habitats that are the staple of conservation biology’. Recombinant ecology is a lens to show how cities are lived, shaped, and made livable and lovable through the interrelations and associations of humans and other creatures. We take Hinchliffe and Whatmore’s proposal to consider the city as a living and convivial environment ‘attuned to the comings and goings of the multiplicity of more-than-human inhabitants that make themselves at home in the city’ (p. 125). This special issue documents some of the ways in which this more-than-human multiplicity is or could be visualized. In doing so, it dialogues with UN Sustainable Developments Goals (SDG, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/). Considering recombinant ecologies provokes questions about extending the protection of ‘life on land’ (SDG 15) to cities; provides tools to recognize the incidence of climate change in the urban environment (SDG 13); and (hopefully) motivates everyday actions of environmental care.

This is the map produced as part of The Planty Atlas of UTS, a design intervention by Mapping Edges Research Studio conducted for the 2019 Creatives in Residence program at the University of Technology Sydney Library. The intervention included a plants + planty books installation, workshops and walkshops designed to make present the recombinant ecologies around the university campus.

In the face of the neo-nuclear era, when the majority of the global population dwells in an urban environment, one cannot imagine future social constructs and design praxis scenarios without first acknowledging the importance of the present. Bombarded daily by mass media regarding dysfunctional socio-economic and environmental issues, driven by the urbanisation, globalisation, and informalisation megatrend triad, it seems imperative to start fundamentally re-thinking the way we organize, design, dispose and manufacture in our urban future.
Following the ethos of a socially conscious design approach, the focus of the initial research phase is to emphasise a heroic element of mundane disposable plastic waste materials, empowered by self-manufacturing craft techniques. The objective is that the proposed design transformation by KraalD studio will be a validating micro-affirmation of an emerging co-creative global prosumer, questioning "What kind of cultural and socio-ethical encounters will the proposed Designedisposal asterism provoke in the future?"
The research will utilize Designedisposal exhibitions and workshops as a platform to question further: Will this seemingly simple design process lead to social innovation opportunities, connecting London’s waste management network and small scale co-production urban transformation?
Therefore, I intend to create new possibilities within contemporary design practice, using the plastic thing as an abductive tool for re-imagining new urban meta relations, reclaiming urban sociality as a new consumer need to be reawakened. Urban Ubuntu.