Design & Democracy: Activist Thoughts and Examples for Political Empowerment 9783035622836, 9783035622829

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Foreword BIRD
Introduction Underneath the Pavement
Acknowledgments
1 Design (Govern)mentalities: Implications of Design and/as Governance in Cape Town
2 Design for Policy: Looking for the Next Step Design for Policy: The Time of Maturity
3 Democracy by Design
4 Democracy by Making – A Failed Rendezvous of Design and Pragmatism?
5 Designing Democracy or Muddling Through? – A Cautious Plea for Reflection and Moral Disarmament in Social/Transformative Design
6 Design and the Politics of the Everyday
7 Desocracy – Contradictions and Possibilities within and between Democracy and Design
8 How to Act?
9 Office for Design of Democracy – Conclusions from a Field Trip
10 Agonistic Events to Remember
11 Design Activism, Democracy, and the Crisis of Social Networks
12 Democracy Under Construction, Construction as Regime: Design, Time, and Imaginaries of Publicness in mid-2010s’ Turkey
The Authors

Citation preview

Design and Democracy

Board of International Research in Design, BIRD

Members: Michelle Christensen Michael Erlhoff Sandra Groll Wolfgang Jonas Gesche Joost Ralf Michel Marc Pfaff

Advisory Board: Lena Berglin Cees de Bont Elena Caratti Michal Eitan Bill Gaver Orit Halpern Denisa Kera Keith Russell Doreen Toutikian Michael Wolf John Wood

Michael Erlhoff Maziar Rezai (Eds.)

Design and ­Democracy Activist Thoughts and Practical Examples for Sociopolitical Empowerment

Birkhäuser Basel

CONTENTS Foreword BIRD

007

Introduction Underneath the Pavement

009

Michael Erlhoff and Maziar Rezai

Acknowledgments 011 1 Design (Govern)mentalities: Implications of Design and/as ­G overnance in Cape Town

013

Ramia Mazé

2 Design for Policy: Looking for the Next Step Design for Policy: The Time of Maturity

028

Laura Pandelle, Julien Defait, Stéphane Vincent (The 27e Région)

3 Democracy by Design

035

Agustin Pereyra Decara

4 Democracy by Making – A Failed ­ Rendezvous of Design and Pragmatism?

044

Laura Popplow

5 Designing Democracy or Muddling Through? – A Cautious Plea for Reflection and Moral Disarmament in Social/Transformative Design 058 Wolfgang Jonas

6 Design and the Politics of the Everyday

073

Tom Bieling

7 Desocracy – Contradictions and ­P ossibilities within and between ­D emocracy and Design

085

Michael Erlhoff

8 How to Act? Saskia Hebert and Andreas Unteidig

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095

9 Office for Design of Democracy – ­ Conclusions from a Field Trip

104

Friedrich von Borries

10 Agonistic Events to Remember

110

Carl DiSalvo and Amanda Meng

11 Design Activism, Democracy, and the Crisis of Social Networks

119

Maziar Rezai

12  Democracy Under Construction, ­ Construction as Regime: Design, Time, and Imaginaries of Publicness in mid-2010s’ Turkey

135

Eray Çaylı

The Authors

151

CONTENTS 005

FOREWORD BIRD Design is political, by now we can all concede to such a certitude – but what kind of political, and whose politics? As design ventures steadily more into the politics of itself, endeavouring into a practice positioned as an aware politicized act, questions of power and production intercede to elicit modes of design as/through/of democracy. While the democratisation of design incites civic movements from citizen f­ orensics to critical cartography, revealing bias and calling into question the hierarchies of knowledge and production, critical makers use open-source software, hardware, and wetware to critique and propose alternatives in a do-it-yourself and do-it-together manner. Meanwhile, designers transmute into public practitioners, expanding the role of design in society through engaging with governments to devise and draft administrations, bureaucracies, and policies. These are modes of design that negotiate, facilitate, advocate – provoke and evoke – incite, and experiment with putting civic-led commons-based values into practice. They are tactics of a field that increasingly takes on the challenge of mediating power relations between states and their people, between local and global citizens, between the wielding of latent power through systems and things and the oppositions that they induce. And never have we seen, it seems, so many design students and graduates zealous to employ their abilities to critique social injustice and engage in constructive societal transformation. And so, critical civic designers engage in the politics of spaceship earth as the ground on which design research and theory transpire, and design academia seems to be undergoing yet another proliferate metamorphosis. Notwithstanding such a paramount drive, however, we must operate with the utmost consideration, taking considerable care to not merely materialise ideology, nor manufacture democracy as a stable object or a fashionable phrase. The art of design in its indiscipline is to never yield to stability, but rather to indulge in the intersections of incongruities, uncertainties, and complexities. Negotiating novel ground by seeking out theoretical and practical blind spots whilst engaging head-on with jittery research objects. This book takes the convergence of design and democracy as an intermedial space for discussion. It does not propose a definition of their relationship, but rather, it ­engages in untangling knots and weaving new relations. And even as it extends the borders of design, it critically discusses not just the abilities, but also the possible boundaries of the field – and of its theoretical foundations and academic curricula, should this expansion continue. As an intervention, it endeavours into the incomplete and hesitant, engendering possible pathways to engage in the tension space of design and democracy. Michelle Christensen Board of International Research in Design (BIRD)

FOREWORD BIRD  007

INTRODUCTION UNDERNEATH THE PAVEMENT Michael Erlhoff and Maziar Rezai

An extremely complicated and, therefore, a very inspiring and exciting subject: ­democracy and design. This is so because both democracy and design get permanently entangled in contradictions. They are a promise of social and peaceful development and, at the same time, of inventions and new perspectives. However, these promises are habitually converted into banal strategies of marketing and domination. A fact that, on the other hand, turns both democracy and design into, literally, highly interesting concepts for theoretical analysis as the point is to comprehend and, possibly, to benefit from the ‘in-between’, the internal relationships and the potential of democracy and design. Be realistic, demand the impossible! (Che Guevara)

Democracy as the dream of assertive subjects and as an option for those subjects to co-determine everything is obviously based on permanent emancipation and, hence, on the necessity to actively enforce this. For various reasons, this is undoubtedly exceedingly difficult: on the one hand, authoritarian regimes always seek to seize power and to suppress the voices of their subjects; on the other hand, governments are elected at regular intervals, but, between elections, they often develop ruthless independence and create such bureaucratic structures, which had by no means been elected, but which are de facto extremely powerful and determine everyday life – also by using the force of the police and the army. Democracy also fails at a decisive point, namely when it comes to accepting minorities. The latter sometimes speak up but will never be able to succeed: democracy, at least democracy as we know it, is always determined by the majority – although this majority is actually composed of diverse minorities with their respective individual concepts of convivial life. Finally, if democracy branches out into the market, it is driven, in particular during elections, by marketing and advertising strategies. At times, the question arises as to what, exactly, is the difference between democracy and a supermarket – the only difference may be that even minorities will have at least a fictitious chance of making themselves heard at a supermarket. It is no coincidence that, in England, when speaking of merchandise, these items are called ‘goods’, something ‘good’ – suggesting that morality is an agent in the market. Public initiatives and protests, in which the tangible problems of systems and regimes are attacked, reveal a shimmer of hope that there might be a possibility to

INTRODUCTION UNDERNEATH THE PAVEMENT  009

experience true democracy and the social options that it implies. But one has to admit that, unfortunately, reactionary and authoritarian activities have also produced, and still produce, such protests, both in the past and in the present day. However, these are usually very quickly seen for what they really are: undemocratic. Just as democracy itself is a question of form, so are the activities against it and those supporting it. A fact that is again both an experience and, necessarily, a subject of analysis. But, when raising the question of form, we inevitably talk about design – because design shapes everything, establishes the norms of normality, and creates, both obscurely and manifestly, the processes of social interaction and social life. A fact that urgently needs to be investigated – and this is what shall be attempted in this book in many different ways. Certainly, design is an agent at the heart of capitalism and an essential instrument of industrialization. It thus also co-creates the market strategies that the ruling powers aim to occupy within democracy. Hence, design is understandably ­regarded as being opportunist and conformist. On the other hand, we have to admit that any kind of protest, including protests against the market and against societal depression through industrialization, also has a substantial connection to design, or is, indeed, shaped by design. This is true for the forms of discourse that lead to protests and, as a matter of course, for their public articulation. In other words: for posters, banners, or pamphlets, and for the organization of protests; even for the respective attire and, altogether, for the form of appearance including sounds and specific types of campaigns. Admittedly, those who, in the service of governments, wish to or have been assigned to prevent protests, are also deeply affected by design: just think of the uniforms, the weapons, the vehicles and water cannons, the loudspeakers, the rallies, and so on. All this has also been designed, is a product of design, including the military formations and the respective gestures. This shows that design is inevitably a political action, either an affirmative or critical one or at least a subversive one. This becomes obvious in the manner of the respective design: the ruling powers, their protagonists, or apologists, usually appear in uniform or in uniform ways, they are always better funded, have better equipment and more advanced technologies, they demonstrate authority and ruthlessness. Designers are always involved in this process. Truly social and lively protest often uses design to compensate for its lack of financial resources, and, in so doing, it tends to be especially characterized by creativity. This kind of protest opens up possibilities; it moves in the social space and unfolds conviviality. It is critical and in a peculiar way forceful; it negotiates with options. The essays in this book attempt to discuss and explain these contexts and contradictions, these rebellious perspectives in democracy and design, and they do so in an open form. They provide examples and reflections. They do not despair. Instead, they invite democracy and design to unfold the umbrellas, to use headscarves as banners, and to discover the beach underneath the pavement.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Numerous people have contributed to this volume. We would like to thank U ­ lrich Schmidt and the Birkhäuser Verlag team, and all the contributing authors for tirelessly working with us. The writers, who work as designers, educators, and researchers, bring their valuable insights on design and democracy matter from all over the world. We are grateful to be able to publish the thoughts coming from Argentina, France, Germany, Iran, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Also, we are thankful for the support from the Board of International Research in Design (BIRD), Uta Brandes, Alain Findeli, and Michelle Christensen. As ­ lireza ­Ajdari, Virginia Tassinari, Harald Welzer, and Damian White, scholwell as A ars who were interested in contributing to this book, but each one couldn’t for various reasons. Finally, we acknowledge the designers, thinkers, politicians, writers, and ­researchers who have inspired us to pursue this project.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 011

1  DESIGN (GOVERN)MENTALITIES: IMPLICATIONS OF DESIGN AND/AS ­GOVERNANCE IN CAPE TOWN Ramia Mazé

Introduction Design is enmeshed in power relations and hegemonies, political regimes, and ideologies. These political dimensions are more explicit in architecture and its histories of service to states and empires, democracies, and dictators. In architecture, the politics of form has been widely theorized in terms of the ‘panopticon,’ a building type conceived two centuries ago by the social theorist Jeremy Bentham. A panopticon prison, for example, distributes cells around a central guard-tower, such that inmates are both physically separated from one another and subject to a centralized surveillance mechanism. The philosopher Michel Foucault (1995 [1975]) elaborated on the panopticon prison not only as a building but as a mechanism of power. For Foucault, it articulated the shift from one paradigm of governance to another: from top-down rule by a sovereign over territory through physical force to modern forms of control over social relations through a variety of mechanisms. Modern government, thus, takes form on an everyday and ongoing basis through ‘governmentality’ (Foucault 1991 [1978]), which includes hard urban and architectural forms that physically contain and control a populace as well as less tangible mechanisms, such as surveillance, that steer people’s perceptions and behaviors. Political analysis has also entered into design through concepts such as ‘governmentality.’ Langdon Winner (1980) points at Robert Moses’ urban plan for New York, which, among other choices to similar effect, included height limits to highway overpasses that prohibited public buses and thus access to beaches and parks for some social groups. Elaborating his concept of ‘political ergonomics,’ Winner (1995) argues that different design choices result in ‘different social contracts’ between a user, civil society, and the state. In terms of ‘the tangibility of governance,’ Dori Tunstall (2007) elaborates how national design standards for voting ballots and voter information directly affect whether or how individuals or groups of people vote. Mahmoud Keshavarz (2016) examines passports, camps, and borders as designed things deployed by the state as instruments of migration policy, as well as the use of these as forms of resistance by migrants against state violence. This vein of Foucauldian thought in design scholarship exposes and unfolds how government and policy literally touch and control people through designed forms of governmentality in everyday life.

DESIGN (GOVERN)MENTALITIES  013

Today, design as a service profession for the government is rapidly expanding. ‘Design to drive renewal in the public sector’ and ‘modernization of public ­administration’ is proclaimed in the European Commission’s (EC 2013) Action Plan for Design-Driven Innovation. The EC plan implemented by ‘Design for Europe’ highlights examples of employed designers and entire design units in national and municipal government as well as the master’s course ‘Design for ­Government,’ for which I’m responsible, in collaboration with ministries in ­Finland. In my context, design has been an integral part of the Finnish government’s 2016 Strategic Program and written into the City of Helsinki strategy. Design has thrived and expanded within political economies of governmental (neo-)liberalization, redistribution of governmental services, and rationales of renewal and innovation (­Julier 2016). This is evident in Finland but also far beyond, as such rationales are perpetuated through the UN and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Eliadis, Hill and Howlett 2007b) – and through international ­design organizations. The rapid expansion of design within the government is rapidly outpacing political analysis of its forms and implications. Further, the forms of design expanding within government – namely, design thinking, co-design, and service design – are not those previously interrogated in the Foucauldian vein. When Christian Bason (2016), currently chief executive of the Danish Design Center and formerly head of the cross-governmental MindLab, argues for ‘policymaking as designing,’ he is advocating for the design of processes and strategies rather than the design of forms that physically contain and control. The expansion of design in government can be argued as part of a larger political-­economic shift. As Foucault argued, previous forms of ‘hard’ state power through military and physical means have gradually been displaced within ­modern and liberal governance by more subtle and less tangible forms. Here, the double-­ meaning of the panopticon is indicative. The panopticon prison does control through physical separation and containment but, more profoundly, it is the ‘soft,’ psychological power of surveillance that operates invisibly to instill individual self-governance and social order. A relevant parallel in design, articulated by ­Keshavarz and myself (2013), is the management and direction of people’s experiences and subjectivities within consensus-driven participatory and co-design processes. As it expands in conjunction with the emergence of modern forms of governance, design within and upstream in government is overdue for political analysis. Public administration scholars, such as Pearl Eliadis, Margaret Hill, and Michael Howlett in their book Designing Government (2007a), examine the expanding range of political instruments used in governance. They articulate the shift from ‘government’ per se to processes of ‘governance,’ that is, from hierarchical and centralized institutions and top-down enactment of power and policy to more ‘networked’ arrangements and ‘interactive’ mechanisms. This includes, I argue, designed forms and forums, which must also be interrogated.

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Within my research, I am interested in how design operates in terms of ­ overnance and governmentality, by which I mean the regulation and steering of g ­conduct. For example, I study how design provides new understandings of – and capacities to manipulate – the interface between the personal and the state. In this article, and in order to explore this in action, I turn to some examples highlighted through the World Design Organization.

Design within government and the World Design Capital® The expanding forms and roles of design in government are evident in the phenomena and content of the World Design Capital (WDC). This is a title awarded biannually to one city around the world, following a bidding process to the World Design Organization (WDO)™. The WDO as an organization and the WDC phenomenon are manifestations of design as an instrument of national policy. ‘Design as an essential component in national strategies to stimulate the development of sustainable economic, social, and cultural growth’ (WDO 2019) was the premise of a WDO-organized international conference at the inaugural WDC in Torino, ­Italy, in 2008. Behind each WDC city is a powerful lobby assembled for the competitive bid process and implementation – 2012 WDC Helsinki was backed by the national and municipal government, an array of business and cultural actors, and widespread popular support, ‘one of the most extensive cooperation projects ever implemented in Finland’ (Icsid, now named WDO, quoted in Berglund 2013). Thus, each WDC can be seen as an instantiation of how governments frame and instrumentalize design as part of the policy. A WDC, furthermore, spotlights how government can use design. Each WDC selects and promotes a particular design profile and examples through communication materials and a program of events. For example, WDC Helsinki included sustainable design and design activism within a profile of citizen engagement. This, alongside the promotion of mainstream design innovation and creative industry, entailed a complicated profile ‘as activism at the margins shades into design policy and commercial opportunities’ (Berglund 2013: 209). Eeva Berglund argues the WDC Helsinki perpetuated a Finnish historical strategy of governmentality through technocratic mainstreaming and consensus-building: ‘In fact what [WDC Helsinki] promotes is less the design of objects or even services and more the design of the right kinds of citizens’ (Berglund 2013: 207–208). Thus, by drawing a parallel to Foucault’s ‘governmentality,’ she articulates how such profiling becomes a way of forming and steering a populace in particular ways. As such a spotlight, the designation of Cape Town, South Africa, as the subsequent WDC in 2014 was particularly significant. For one thing, 2014 marked the 20-year anniversary of the end of apartheid rule in South Africa. For another,

DESIGN (GOVERN)MENTALITIES  015

this first and still sole WDC in the Global South, amplifies Cape Town’s ‘world city syndrome’ (McDonald 2012). As described by David McDonald, this denotes a persistent fixation of governmental and other interests in Cape Town on being a ‘world city’ in the normative mold set out by UN-Habitat (2001). He further describes how neoliberalism is part and parcel of the world city formation process and outcome, including the homogenization and commodification of lifeworld, ‘(de)­Africanization’, and strategies for containing dissent and marginalizing opposition. Thus, and for the purposes of this article, 2014 WDC Cape Town spotlights some problematics of (post-apartheid) policy as manifested in and through design. To a great extent, the design profile of WDC Cape Town continued that of other WDCs. Many among the hundreds of examples (especially those within the theme ‘Beautiful Spaces, Beautiful Things’) were those recognizable spatial and material forms readily photographed and featured in the Financial Times (f.ex. van der Post, 2014). Less tangible, but familiar forms of design within government, were two, unconnected projects including a series of high-profile ‘pioneer workshops’ and the VPUU project. The pioneer workshops were explicit instruments of government, created to fulfill the target of Cape Town’s mayor to engage with every one of the city’s 111 wards. As captured in a polished video (WDO 2019), designers had multiple roles, for example, in identifying and selecting participants, framing the agenda, and preparing ward councilors, as well as facilitating the workshop to generate a proposal that could thereafter be visualized and put forward for city council allocation of funding. Design roles went well beyond mere facilitation, including tutoring (f.ex. framing four possible definitions of ‘design thinking’ for participants to choose among), prioritizing (coaching participants to ‘critically assess own ideas’), and decision-making (a voting procedure to progressively narrow and ­select proposals). Thus, a politics of consensus that is typical within participatory design (­Keshavarz and Mazé 2013) is also evident here, including the use of design to frame, select, and steer competing and even conflicting interests and voices toward a particular end. A more visible example is the VPUU project. This was the first of only three examples (out of the hundreds eventually included) in the bid prepared by the City of Cape Town for the WDO (Cape Town Partnership 2011). Images from the VPUU project, branded within the highly visible yellow WDC branding and banners, met everyone passing through the arrival gate at Cape Town International Airport during 2013–2014, including myself. Yet, the significance – and political dimensions – of VPUU are much more profound than these widespread but superficial ­depictions.

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The case of VPUU (Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading) VPUU stands for ‘Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading’, which is simulta-

neously the name of a non-profit company, a project in Khayelitsha and other locations, and a South African-German Development Cooperation program initiated in 2001 by the German Development Bank (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau or KfW). ­ frican KfW provided 10.5M Euro (Graham et al. 2011) pooled with other South A governmental funds and, with Cape Town as the executing agency of the program, Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township was selected as a site for implementation in 2005. The three-pillar model for implanting VPUU is a general model following UN-Habitat and also implemented in two South American countries by KfW (Bauer 2010). The VPUU model has since been rolled out in five municipalities of the Western Cape Province (Cassidy 2015). This setup illustrates the global and multi-level political-economic dimensions of VPUU, which underpins its organizational, operating, and political logics. VPUU is a case that reveals several layers of design in the context of governance today. First, as spotlighted within WDC Cape Town, it can be understood as part of ‘design policy,’ that is, as illustrating a claim or directive about South African and Cape Town government and policy for a local and global audience. Secondly, it is an example of modern forms of governance – in this case, security policy conducted in a ‘networked’ and ‘interactive’ way through an assemblage of stakeholders, local and global financing, models, and (govern)mentalities – in which design is increasingly instrumental. Lastly, and in focus for the remainder of this article, VPUU is an example of the varied, designed, and politically-loaded forms and forums through which governance is conducted in and beyond government today.

Research standpoint(s) My interest in VPUU started with a two-week research visit to Cape Town during WDC preparations in 2013. This included a visit to the African Center for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town and limited qualitative research including a visit to VPUU in Khayelitsha and an informal interview with Kathryn Ewing, PhD in urban design and architecture, a VPUU founding director and former Worksteam leader of ‘situational crime prevention.’ This article should be understood as a critical essay, drawing primarily and retrospectively upon a proliferating body of literature since my own visit. Subsequent to my visit, I have followed the development and studies of VPUU at a distance, which has been possible because of its ongoing and obligatory self-­ evaluation (required of development projects funded by KfW and other foundations). It’s important to note that VPUU is privileged and likely d ­ isproportionately

DESIGN (GOVERN)MENTALITIES  017

­ ighlighted among the many projects in Cape Town and Africa because of its fundh ing situation and global affiliations (KfW, UN-Habitat, WDC, etc.). It has been the ­focus of several research studies, including those unaffiliated with VPUU by ­Vanessa ­Barolsky (funded by the Canada-based International Development Research Centre), Leon Schreiber, and Michael Barry. While the Schreiber and Barry study was conducted through their affiliations with North American universities, it can be relevant to note that Schreiber is currently a member of parliament in South ­Africa for the Democratic Alliance party. VPUU is described and discussed here primarily on the basis of existent research about the project, including that of the scholars mentioned above and others associated with ACC (f.ex. Mercy Brown-Luthango, Liza Rose Cirolia, Mntungwa Gubevu, Elena Reyes, and Ruth Massey) and their collaborators such as Ash Amin.

VPUU: Governance and governmentality Governance in Cape Town, as elsewhere, has shifted from policy created and enacted top-down from a singular authority to more ‘networked’ and ‘interactive’ forms distributed across a variety of stakeholders with different interests, (inter) dependencies, and agency. The lack (or withdrawal) of direct government and complexity of governmental arrangements is particularly evident within Cape Town’s 450 ‘informal settlement pockets’. In a city of 3.8 million people (continuously inflated by urban land invasions by homeless and landless people, new and illegal land occupations), over 20% of households live in such settlements (Amin and ­Cirolia 2018). By default and by intent, VPUU has become a key intermediary between the state and the populace in Khayelitsha, instrumentalizing, creating, and regulating policy, functions more traditionally performed by formal institutions of government. Literally doing governance in Khayelitsha, VPUU organizes and regulates security. A primary instrument, and one of three pillars in the VPUU model, is physical safety. This is addressed (and depicted in WDC imagery) through interventions in the built environment including architecture, lighting, and common spaces, as well as organizational forms such as community patrols to support the police service. Thus, VPUU creates a variety of tangible interfaces between the state and populace. VPUU’s operations also extend beyond and upstream, aiming at ­preventing violence in the first place by affecting public health (Lloyd and Matzopoulos 2018), social cohesion (Barolsky 2016), and civic enfranchisement (Schreiber and Barry 2017). VPUU is thus a case of the ‘pluralisation of the governance of security’ (Shearing and Wood 2003: 403). Security, safe spaces, and prevention are, however, not only delivered topdown, by government or even through intermediaries such as VPUU, but also evolve

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naturally and out of necessity. In terms of ‘governance from below’. Amin and ­ irolia elaborate local and bottom-up ‘planning rules and practices, deep-rooted C cartographic knowledge, established decision-making processes, controlling parties, social battles, hidden rules and rituals of access and allocation’ (2018: 277). These may be unknown, ignored, or marginalized within formal governance interventions, Amin and Cirolia argue, which may unwittingly produce low morale, inertia, resentment, and opposition. Yet, the social contract between the state and populace is inevitably lived out through direct interactions with and through intermediaries and interfaces. Thus, examining these and some relevant political tensions and dynamics therein can also suggest wider implications for design.

Forms of governmentality VPUU is situated within the apartheid legacy of governance and social-spatial

­ olicy. Khayelitsha (‘new home’ in isiXhosa) was established 25 km from the city p center in 1930 by the apartheid state. Apartheid implemented the national social policy of segregation in spatial terms, dividing people into four racial groups and zoning land on a racial basis. The 1950 Group Areas Act zoned municipalities for mutually exclusive and racialized land ownership and occupation. The act was instrumentalized through large-scale property expropriation and forced relocation of 1.7 million people. Principles of European modernism were referenced in defense of the ‘hard’ divisions, clearances and borders between areas: ‘follow­ orbusier’s lead, named the Surgical method … through surgery we must ing Le C create ­order,’ states the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Matters Relating to the ­Colored ­Population Group (Republic of South Africa 1976). The ‘hard’ legacy of spatial segregation remains – patterns of post-apartheid urban development and settlement have largely taken place within, and thereby reinforced, the inherited apartheid spatial framework (Amin and Cirolia 2018). VPUU does not aim to solve this political legacy. Within Khayelitscha, VPUU operates in the evolving aftermath of apartheid and post-apartheid policy, in which the pledged housing, infrastructures, and public services have not been fully delivered nor evenly distributed. The informal settlements, largely consisting of shacks, that were previously considered as temporary have become established and are ­increasingly treated by the government as permanent (and thus subject to upgrading). Within Khayelitsha, VPUU aims at violence prevention through a three-pillar operational model (Graham et al. 2011): ‘social crime prevention’ through community patrols, education, legal, health, and social services aimed to prevent or ­support victims of violence; ‘institutional crime prevention,’ in the form of job training, economic development and facilities, and ‘situational crime prevention’.

DESIGN (GOVERN)MENTALITIES  019

‘Situational crime prevention’ refers specifically to interventions intended to upgrade the built environment. This includes a series of public walkways through the informal settlement and areas for sport and gardening. ‘Active boxes’ are the hallmark of this part of the model – regularly spaced, lit, and staffed structures that multi-function as watchtowers, safehouses, commercial spaces, and community centers. Though widespread in WDC imagery, these forms are hardly ­spectacular. Fabricated from shipping containers, locally-sourced, and inexpensive m ­ aterials, it’s not necessarily evident what is designed and what is merely found or improvised. There are also immaterial infrastructures such as a mobile phone-based GPS systems operated by designated locals (primarily women) to register perceived safety and incidents of violence. In contrast to the imposing road, wall, and lighting systems that divided and separated areas under apartheid planning, VPUU infrastructures connect light up and make common paths, spaces, and data. These are nonetheless forms of ‘governing matter’, to borrow a concept from Amin and Cirolia, which control and steer access, mobility, and visibility. Belief (perceived safety) and behavior (community oversight, peer-monitoring, and self-control) are governed in a quasi-panoptic sense. As spotlighted by the WDC, it is these forms of ‘situational crime prevention’ that may conform to traditional expectations of design. Less evident in WDC, the other two pillars of VPUU could also be understood and analyzed as design. Indeed, these parts of the VPUU model include processes and strategies akin to those in design within government and ‘policymaking as designing’. For example, the composition and procedures of decision-making bodies is one of the strategic and ­determining mechanisms within policy-making. Furthermore, how specific relations are regulated, for example through legal and social contracts, is part of policy implementation. Beyond the ‘hard’ elements indicated above, these are also relevant and partly unfolded below.

Governance forums Governance through shaping particular organizational forms is evident in how VPUU’s Safe Node Area Committee (SNAC) is set up and conducted (cf. Cassidy 2015; Schreiber and Barry 2017). Preceding action within a particular area, VPUU sets up a SNAC through a process that includes an audit and interviews within rel-

evant l­ocal organizations; a ‘social compact’ developed during the consultation process, and; election of SNAC members by consulted stakeholders. Half of the 16-member SNAC are stakeholders from local government structures, the other half are from community- and task-based organizations (f.ex. early childhood development or health forums), NGOs, and faith-based organizations. Following the setup of the SNAC, VPUU provides an eight-week leadership training course for

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members, and then a community planning process begins with a baseline household survey and a series of community workshops, which culminates in a community action plan. VPUU consults SNAC on a monthly basis, and SNAC also acts as a recruitment/training body for the local security patrol and other activities. The main decision-­making forum for VPUU locally, SNAC selects the issues to be addressed and is a key to many community activities. The setup and conduct of SNACs can be criticized. Barolsky and Doriam Borges (2019: 113) argue: ‘the objective of the consultative processes that do take place appears to be largely instrumental and designed to ensure the efficient implementation of the intervention through the selection and socialisation of a cohort of ‘responsible’ leaders who are tutored, through training, in the practices, norms, and ethics of the economic rational actor.’ Lawrence Piper (2012, quoted in Barolsky and Borges: 112) has called the form of VPUU community consultation and the forums it creates, ‘“designed” in ways that allow for a very limited form of direct citizen participation in democratic decision-making.’ Barolsky and Borges argue (2019: 112) that community meetings are held ‘largely as forums for the endorsement of decisions already taken’, since the key issues are primarily debated and decided within the SNAC itself. Wider consultation is thus primarily focused on how an intervention will be implemented, rather than its substantive grounds. Since the community action plan is signed by the mayor at the end of a ‘consultative’ meeting, Piper suggests (2012: 7), ‘the process is largely a symbolic one.’ Such critiques highlight the ways in which governance mechanisms are, indeed, designed. Who is invited is one of the primary mechanisms of governance, as Peter Sloterdijk (2005) argues in relation to Athenian democracy, for example, and the invitation is a powerful steering mechanism within participatory design (Keshavarz and Mazé 2013). Membership could be perceived as political in VPUU: ‘Due to politics, we were removed from that [SNAC]. People wanted to bring in their people and so forth’ (former VPUU member interviewed by Barolsky and Borges 2019: 113). Yet, criteria used in the setup of VPUU and SNAC were intended as ­‘apolitical’ (Barolsky 2016; Ug ˘ ur 2014 cf. Ley 2009). VPUU’s choice of 50% non-­ politically affiliated membership is explained by a VPUU leader, Michael Krause, as ‘a conscious and participatory one’ (quoted in Schreiber and Barry 2017: 7). ­Schreiber and Barry explain the complex landscape and legacy of civic groups that emerged as a form of alternative government to the state during the apartheid era. Some civic groups, for example, belong to the South African National Civic Organization (SANCO) aligned with the political party African National Congress (ANC). Tensions between political parties can lead to tense power dynamics and violence in townships as well as attempts to grab power within governance processes. In this context, VPUU has designed the setup of SNAC to diffuse and balance party-­ political stakes.

DESIGN (GOVERN)MENTALITIES  021

Governmental arrangements VPUU and other such intermediaries operate precariously in between the state and

populace. The post-apartheid Constitution of South Africa promises housing and public services such as water, electricity, and sanitation for all, yet millions still await such provision. Early models of centralized and top-down ‘government provision’ has shifted to a complex set of ‘governmental arrangements’, while the same social groups continue to struggle, leading Amin and Cirolia (2018: 291) to argue that the ‘state violence of apartheid has given way to the violence of a neoliberal democracy.’ In this context, and foreshadowing Cape Town’s recent plan (2012– 2017), VPUU’s approach is incremental and in situ, i.e. step-by-step upgrading of infrastructures and services where people live rather than large-scale relocation and new build. However, and characteristic of incrementalism, the gap between promise and delivery can persist – for example, in Khayelitsha, the main water pipes stop short. Distant communal water taps have necessarily become a destination and default meeting place for women, a physical and symbolic site of state shortcomings. Stepping into this gap, as VPUU does, is risky, particularly given historical distrust and solidarity built up in opposition. Indeed, according to Brown-Luthango, Reyes, and Gubevu (2016: 490), delays have affected community participation in VPUU, ‘creating despondency and the feeling of failed delivery.’ The gap was lengthened by underestimation of tenure certification as a key step. VPUU was tasked with this in 2009 due to its ‘community-based design’, in the words of municipal department director Noahmaan Hendricks (quoted in ­Schreiber and Barry 2017: 5). In tenure certification, the city remains the sole landowner, but certificates of occupancy for shack tenants serve several functions. For residents, certificates strengthen protection against eviction and serve as proof of address for phone contracts, furniture store accounts, school enrollment, etc. For the electricity company that invests in building infrastructure, certificates provide security that service fees will eventually be paid by residents (or by the municipality in the case of indigent households). For the city, certificates signify participation in the upgrade and, as attached to specific geographic sites, enable the environmental assessment and zoning decision necessary prior to upgrading. Certificates thus function as a kind of social contract among diverse and potentially conflicting stakeholders within necessarily long-term ‘governmental arrangements.’ By 2013, 85–90% residents of the target area had acquired certificates, which reportedly had already increased trust and perception of safety amongst residents (Brown-­ Luthango, Reyes and Gubevu 2016). Mediating certification, however, is politically-charged work, and VPUU decisions unavoidably wielded power over different parts of the community, as unfolded in the study by Schreiber and Barry (2017). One starting point, the so-called ‘Book of Life’ informal register previously created by SANCO, a party-political association, raised questions about bias and equity. VPUU initiated an additional pro-

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cess, which was carried out by 30 field-workers recruited and trained through SNAC to use GPS devices and door-to-door surveys, to map 6,470 structures and their occupants. Further obstacles emerged in handling and interpreting the data, and occupancy evolved quickly: ‘People are born there, people die, people move, and people marry. We’re still struggling with causing the city to understand it’s not a static system’ (Krause in Schreiber and Barry 2017:12). Certificates are registered to the head of household, and VPUU made a decision to co-register women living in male-headed households, which changed the balance of power within the community (Brown and Gubevu 2014). Conflicts arose over intrafamily claims on the same structure. Along the way, the VPUU office was converted into a registry office with staff trained in conflict resolution, further cementing VPUU as a semi-governmental organization. The interactive and evolving process was one of several factors that caused delays and contributed to an impasse in 2013 when it became apparent that technical implementation of infrastructures that respected tenancy patterns in situ were prohibitively expensive. VPUU was caught in between, and city planner Marco ­Geretto (quoted in Schreiber and Barry 2017: 17) concluded that ‘the softer, social engagement process had gotten ahead of the harder, rezoning and physical-­developmentplanning process.’

Discussion and conclusions Spotlighted by the 2014 WDC Cape Town, VPUU signals several of the issues for design today. Design is embedded in national and municipal strategy and profiling policies. Increasingly employed and institutionalized within formal government, design is moving upstream in policymaking processes. In addition to more traditional and tangible forms of design, recognized as part of strategies to control and steer people and populations, design within government and doing governance beyond government also includes less tangible and as yet less scrutinized forms and forums. Tracing this expansion of design, concepts such as ‘governmentality’ can also be expanded for analytic purposes in order to better understand the role and agency of design in government and governance. Physically and politically functioning as ‘governing matter’, design policy, workshops, environments, infrastructures, organizations, and processes should be understood and studied not (or not only) as objects but as instruments or, in the terms of Amin and Cirolia (2018: 287), ‘agents of government.’ The term ‘agent’ elicits the dimensions of power latent within and wielded by design forms and forums that function as intermediaries or interfaces between the state and the people. As unfolded above, VPUU was set up and conducted in ways that recognized and responded to a specific and politically-loaded ­history and

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­context. It cannot be extricated from – indeed, as much development in South ­Africa, it is complicit with perpetuating – apartheid socio-spatial legacies. Post-­apartheid state pledges are even less straightforward to deliver through ‘governmental arrangements’ that are distributed and fragmented across local and global territories, at various levels of society and across societal sectors, and increasingly ­measured merely in terms of annual audits and short-sighted party politics. VPUU and its aims, such as ‘security,’ ‘health,’ ‘cohesion,’ and ‘enfranchisement,’ are instances among many that are ‘refracted through a variety of rhetorical, political, material and operational dynamics which cannot be easily boxed as ­Keynesian, neoliberal, neo-patrimonial or other similar political descriptors’ (Amin and ­Cirolia 2018: 275). As a case for my research purposes here, VPUU, its history, and context, throw into sharp relief some of the dynamics and tensions at stake when ­design claims and does the work of governance today. An example such as VPUU, in addition to revealing political dimensions relevant to design, also exposes potential limits. It cannot solve or even counteract long-term historical and deep-rooted socio-spatial problems, and it operates within the perhaps unending struggle of those social groups that continue to suffer the most. The setup of VPUU SNACs can be criticized for excluding some organizations and residents; yet it was only SNAC and its (even if only partly-representative) membership standing in a circle around the tenure registry office that saved the residents’ documents from fire and invasion by hundreds of homeless people affiliated with the Economic Freedom Fighters political party in the run-up to the 2014 national elections (Schreiber and Barry 2017). Forms and forums always in- and exclude, in different ways at different times; the case of Khayelitsha reveals that there may be no universally ‘right’ choices. Even if such examples cannot or do not affect macro-structural change, neither should they be used as excuses, glorifications, or apologies for the withdrawal of the state or for non-state governance. Just as previous and other forms and forums of governance wield power and, potentially, violence upon people and populations, so can examples such as VPUU. In Khayelitsha, for example, changes in the (gender) balance of power were effected, and ‘harder’ things could not be guaranteed by VPUU in the tenure certification process. The interfaces and intermediary roles of VPUU reveal that design within government and as governance is risky, and, indeed, it can also put others at risk. The particular example of VPUU also reveals a further political problematic for design. The critique of Barolsky (2016) and Barolsky and Borges (2019) raises questions about representation, discipline, tokenism, and suppression, which could be lenses through which to analyze committee organization and certificate registries as well as, more generally, (in)formal social contracts, community projects, and participatory and co-design processes. A complementary perspective is evident in a case study of another project in Khayelitsha by Massey (2013). Massey’s research reveals how associated governance models and practices do not recog-

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nize and, indeed, threaten women’s social networks, which operate both through formal groupings such as sewing groups, environmental advocacy, ‘stokvels’ (savings groups), burial societies, and community policing forums, and, informally, through friend, relative, and neighbor networks that share child and elderly care, food, and resources. These are generally relevant and important questions in political analyses of design forms and forums, which Massey clearly articulates in terms of conflicting ‘(govern)mentalities’. A further, and even more fundamental, critique is articulated by Barolsky and Borges. They point out that the paradigmatic (Western and Northern) notion of government is premised on a ‘contractarian’ imaginary of state and civil ­society, ­premised on an imaginary of the classic neo-liberal, self-governing, ‘responsible’ citizen. Barolsky (2016) argues that the UN-Habitat model, Cape Town­­municipality, and VPUU are steeped in a ‘managerialism’ discourse that ­presumes and idealizes rational and transactional relationships between ‘free agents’. Such paradigms and assumptions, argue Barolsky and Borges, can be fundamentally at odds with the realities, worldviews, and ‘indigenous’ imaginaries within ­Khayelitsha and South ­Africa. Their critique resonates with McDonald’s (2012) arguments concerning ‘(de)Africanization’. ‘World city syndrome’, McDonald argued, can be a post-apartheid and generally neo-liberal strategy for containing and de-politicizing uneven and unjust geographic development, socio-economic and spatial inequalities. This points to further political dimensions to consider in analyzing design and design policy, the WDO, and WDCs.

Conclusion Design organizations embedded in government and doing the work of governance mark a historical and categorical expansion in the role of design in society. ­Design, which arguably developed in the West as a discipline and service profession to the private sector during the Industrial Revolution, is arguably still mired in associated political-economic logics, ideologies, and worldviews. Indeed, reflecting on their ­extensive studies from within the UK Policy Lab, Jocelyn Bailey (2017) and Lucy ­Kimbell and Bailey (2017) articulate the dangers of further encroachment of private-­ sector, market logics into government through design. Design theory has not yet expanded toward increasingly relevant discourses such as political science, public administration, and critical theory of planning (wherein ‘governmentality’ and other useful concepts are developed). Specifically concerning design within government and ‘design for policy’, emerging and important theorization still typically takes place in terms of discourses of organizational studies and design management. This exposes an urgent gap between the rapidly expanded and globally-promoted professional practices of design and its rapidly outdated theoretical foundations.

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Acknowledgements My visit to Cape Town was part of the project Designing Social Innovation funded at Interactive Institute Swedish ICT by the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (VINNOVA), led by myself and carried out as a VINNMER Marie Skłodowska Curie research fellowship. Regarding Cape Town, I am grateful for the introductions and inspirational scholarship of Henrik Ernstson and for generous tips from Johanna Jarméus and Yvan Ikhlef (cf. Palmer and Nitsch 2012). Thank you to Jocelyn Bailey, Eeva Berglund, María Ferreira Litowtschenko, Guy Julier, Lucy Kimbell, Minh-Nguyet Le, Charlie Mealings, and Yemima Safra for profound recent discussions on design, policy, governance, and governmentality.

References Amin, A., and L.R. Cirolia (2018). ‘Politics/Matter: Governing Cape Town’s informal settlements.’ Urban ­Studies 55 (2): 274–295. Bailey, J. (2017). ‘Exploring the implications of design in policymaking.’ in Proceedings of the Nordic Design Research Society conference NORDES. Oslo. Jun. Barolsky, V. (2016). ‘Is Social Cohesion Relevant to a City in the Global South?.’ SA Crime Quarterly 55: 17–30. Barolsky, V., and D. Borges (2019). ‘Is Social Cohesion the Missing Link in Preventing Violence? Case studies from South Africa and Brazil.’ In Reducing Urban Violence in the Global South, edited by J. Salahub, M. Gottsbacher, J. de Boer, and M. Zaaroura. 104–132. London: Routledge. Bason, C. (2016). Design for Policy. London: Routledge. Bauer, B. (2010). ‘Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading: Experiences from financial cooperation.’ Frankfurt: KfW Bankengruppe Corporate Communication. Berglund, E. (2013). ‘Design as Activism in Helsinki: Notes from the World Design Capital 2012.’ Design and Culture 5 (2): 195–214. Brown-Luthango, M., and Gubevu, M. (October 30, 2014). ‘Summary of Inputs and Main Discussion Points: ‘Urban violence, safety and governance’.’ CityLab Meeting, African Center for Cities, University of Cape Town. Brown-Luthango, M., E. Reyes, and M. Gubevu (2016). ‘Informal settlement upgrading and safety: Experiences from Cape Town, South Africa.’ Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 32 (3): 471–493. Cape Town Partnership (2011). ‘World Design Capital Bid Book.’ https://issuu.com/capetownpartnership/ docs/question_43_no1. EC (2013). ‘Implementing an Action Plan for Design-Driven Innovation.’ Commission Staff Working Document. Brussels. Eliadis, P., Hill, M.M Hill, and M. Howlett (2007a). Designing Government. Québec: McGill -Queen’s University Press. Eliadis, P., Hill, M.M Hill, and M. Howlett (2007b). ‘Introduction.’ In Designing Government, edited by P. Eliadis, M.M. Hill, and M. Howlett, 3–20. Québec: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Foucault, M. (1991 [1978]). ‘Governmentality.’ In The Foucault Effect: Studies on governmentality, edited by G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1995 [1975]). ‘Panopticism.’ In Discipline & Punish: The birth of the prison, translated by A. Sheridan, 195–228. Vintage Books. Graham, A., C. Giles, M. Krause, and U. Lange (2011). ‘Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading in Khayelitscha, Cape Town, South Africa: Achievements and trends of a bilateral financial cooperation programme.’ In Proceedings of the International Crime Prevention. Forum Mönchengladbach, DE: ­Verlag Godesberg GmbH. Julier, G. (2016). Economies of Design. London: Sage.

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Keshavarz, M. (2016). ‘Design-Politics.’ PhD Diss., Malmö University, Malmö, SE. Keshavarz, M., and R. Mazé (2013). ‘Design and Dissensus: Framing and staging participation in design ­research.’ Design Philosophy Papers 1: 7–29. Kimbell, L., and J. Bailey (2017). ‘Prototyping and the New Spirit of Policy-Making.’ CoDesign 13 (3): 214–226. Ley, A. (2009). ‘Housing as Governance: Interfaces between local governance and civil society organizations in Cape Town, South Africa.’ PhD Diss., Technischen Universität Berlin, DE. Lloyd, S., and R. Matzopoulos (2018). ‘Preventing Violence in Cape Town: The public-health approach.’ In ­Reducing Urban Violence in the Global South, edited by J. Salahub, M. Gottsbacher, J. de Boer, and M. Zaaroura, 183–207. London: Routledge. Massey, R. (2013). ‘Competing Rationalities and Informal Settlement Upgrading in Cape Town, South Africa.’ Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 28: 605–613. McDonald, D.A. (2012). World City Syndrome: Neoliberalism and inequality in Cape Town. London: Routledge. Palmer, H., and K. Nitsch (2012). ‘Commons in Cape Town.’ Stockholm: Royal Institute of Art. Piper, L. (2012). ‘Development Trustees Not Rent-Seeking Deployees: The designed meaning of community participation in the Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading Project (VPUU) in Cape Town, South Africa.’ unpublished paper. Republic of South Africa (1976). Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Matters Relating to the Coloured Population Group. Pretoria: Government Printer, RP 38/1976. Shearing, C., and J. Wood (2003). ‘Nodal Governance, Democracy, and the New “Denizens”.’ Journal of Law and Society 30 (3): 400–419. Schreiber, L. and M. Barry (2017). ‘Land Rights in the Township: Building incremental tenure in Cape Town, South Africa, 2009–2016.’ Innovations for Successful Societies. Princeton University. http://success­ fulsocieties.princeton.edu/. Sloterdijk, P. (2005). ‘Atmospheric Politics.’ Making Things Public: Atmospheres of democracy, edited by B. Latour and P. Weibel, 994–1003. Cambridge, US: MIT Press. Tunstall, E. (2007). ‘In Design We Trust: Design, governmentality, and the tangibility of governance.’ In Proceedings of International Association of Societies of Design Research IASDR conference. Hong Kong, CH. Ug˘ur, L.K. (2014). ‘Beyond the Pilot: Towards broad-based integrated violence prevention in South Africa.’ MSc thesis, Technische Universität Darmstadt, DE. UN-Habitat (2001). Cities in a Globalizing World. London: Earthscan. van der Post, L. (2014). ‘Cape Town: World Design Capital 2014.’ Financial Times, March 28, 2014. https:// www.ft.com/content/e8abc21c-b371-11e3-bc21-00144feabdc0. WDO. ‘Design Policy Conference.’ http://wdo.org/programmes/wdc/past-cities/wdctorino2008/. WDO. ‘Open Design Cape Town’ http://wdo.org/programmes/wdc/past-cities/wdccapetown2014/. Winner, L. (1980). ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?.’ Daedalus 109 (1): 121–136. Winner, L. (1995). ‘Political Ergonomics.’ In Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies, edited by R. Buchanan and V. Margolin, 146–170. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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2  DESIGN FOR POLICY: LOOKING FOR THE NEXT STEP DESIGN FOR POLICY: THE TIME OF MATURITY Laura Pandelle, Julien Defait, Stéphane Vincent (The 27e Région)

Within two decades, a growing number of designers have progressively entered into public bureaucracies: no less than 800 UX designers have been hired by the British government, world-class cities like LA or Helsinki have created new positions of design CEO, and all over the world several hundreds of local and national governments have launched internal innovation teams with professional ­de­signers at the core of it. Their ambition is to take part in the transformation of governments and administrations. The demand is high, due to the growing mistrust towards governments, and their difficulties to improve the lives of people and to tackle major challenges such as climate change. Even if many inspiring experiences have been developed during those years, is design ready to satisfy such a level of expectations? In this paper we try to analyze the situation of the field in our country, we raise a few barriers and controversies that we have identified, and we suggest a few directions for the future. It has been inspired by our eleven years of experience, both as practitioners, advocates, and observers here in France and at the international level. We did it as a contribution to ‘Les assises du design’, a national debate about the future of design in France launched in 2019.

Design for policy: is success really accomplished? Last October, the French magazine Telerama published a paper titled ‘Long life to participatory design!’, a vibrant acknowledgment of what was described as a new area for designers, e.g., designing user-driven hospitals, participatory libraries, or social housing. Yet the emergence of designers in the fabric of public policies is not new: the design of the public space, in particular, has seen the development of urban design in a large number of cities. In the 2000s, experiments such as RED (Design council, UK), Kafka Brigade (Kennisland, Netherlands) or the government laboratory MindLab (Denmark), then the 27th Region (France), have shown how design could contribute to go further and to renew more broadly the ways of conceiving, implementing, and managing public policies. After the Weberian administration of the ’30s and the ‘new

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­ ublic management’ of the 90s, from 2010 the movement of public innovation saw p the development of dozens of innovation trends which design was part of. In a decade, several branches of design have developed in administrations and communities all over the world: service design, UX design, speculative design, design thinking, design management, etc. Every day, design is applied on an ever-­ greater variety of topics: not only co-designing future public equipment, but also improving administrative processes, and now addressing systemic issues such as ecological and social transition in a period of climate change. Of course, design is far from being adopted by all administrations, but all types of administrations have adopted design: local governments such as cities, counties, and regions, public institutions, many national governments, but also supra-national institutions like the European Commission or the United Nations. From Chile to Canada, South Africa to Scandinavia, and Singapore to Bangladesh, ‘design for policy’ is is everywhere to some extent. Design is now seen as one of the disciplines that could contribute to reframe governments, in a period where institutions suffer from massive mistrust and are seen as unable to solve most of the social, ecological, and economic challenges of our society. However, what does this apparent success tell us? Beyond speeches and success stories, a certain number of signals indicate that there is a risk that design for policy remains a flash in the pan. Our contribution to the French ‘Assises du design’ gives us the opportunity to take a step back, and to point to some controversies on the current development of design for policy. These concerns in particular are the evolution of the professional practice of design, its reception by public actors, the role of schools and design institutions in the structuring of this sector, and, finally, the political dimension, more or less shared, of public policy design. Finally, it will be a matter of suggesting some orientations that seem desirable to us so that this discipline, which claims again and again to be of general interest, is not reduced to a fashion effect.

A lack of visibility on impact For a decade, the design effort in the public sector has multiplied, and a number of projects have had a tangible impact on the lives of many citizens but also civil servants. The goal of the present paper is not to glorify these numerous – and often unrecognized – successes, but to focus on failures and to explore how to reduce them. Why do so many design approaches fail to go beyond experimentation and stop before implementation, at the risk of amplifying the phenomena of frustration, disappointment, and collective exhaustion that already decays our public organizations? Why does design still often appear as a window-dressing, a kind of new mascot for change management, condemned to create animation on the

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surface but struggling to leverage structurally? This difficulty to produce impact, which many professionals deplore, is for us the sign of a glass ceiling with shared responsibility.

New world, but unchanged practices A first observation comes from the professional practice of public policy design ­today. In confronting the public sector, designers are not facing just a bureaucratic version of private companies that would look familiar to them. Instead, they discover an entirely different world, with many different galaxies, its own history, ­rituals, and culture, where challenges with high level complexity need to be tackled. Doing so, it’s necessary for the practice of design to evolve in contact with the public sector, and that a new modus operandi is invented. While some actors have resolutely taken this turn by specializing and developing new, prospective, or radical approaches, others are integrating design as a ready-made toolkit, without challenging significantly the questions asked by the public sector. If design is supposed to renew in-depth the conduct of public projects, then running systematic methodological loops or using ‘tips and tricks’ will never be enough. This points, we believe, to the need to orchestrate a subtle, cultural, and artfully staged meeting (a kind of ‘crossroads of knowledge’) between the know-how of the administration and the know-how of design.

Governments have no strategic vision of design On the other hand, the responsibility is also on the side of public authorities who struggle to leave a solutionist vision of design. In a public sector often represented as ‘routed’, we want to point out the risks of semantic confusion, methodological fetishism, lack of expertise, and even problems of ethics and professional responsibility on both sides. For the design of public policies to be effective, it must be part of real and systemic transformation strategies, with strong political support. The multiplicity of low-budget and low-ambition public services, confining design to a limited and very experimental scope of action, hardly going beyond the stage of creative workshops, user-research, and prototyping, is an alarming signal. In addition, the development of many training sessions to design thinking for civil servants can also be seen as a way of moving the design of public policies towards an ‘internal consultancy’ type of practice, and therefore … without professional designers.

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Too few debates on responsibility and ethics Finally, the scarcity of the contradictory debate on the practice, the methods, and the conditions of exercise of the design of the policies (except some events, tribunes, and publications), and the quasi absence of the schools of design in this place, confirms us in the idea that the design of public policies remains a relatively immature discipline. Where do we discuss the deontology of design in this area? Where are the methods for evaluating the impact of design on public services discussed? How to strengthen the research and documentation begun on this? How to provoke debate, criticism, and controversy within the professional community, but also within the public sponsors? If the demand for design is today increasing, the risk seems to us strong that the craze of the administrations for design does not exceed the ambitions of the design towards itself. Faced with this, the stakes posed by public transformation, whether at the national or local level, are steadily increasing, leading to a real political debate in public action. It is therefore high time for design to cease to respond to the demand to fully participate in the formulation of questions (see our last paragraph on the design policy project). Moreover, it is up to the community of designers to give itself tools of collective professionalization, by documenting the projects realized, by seizing spaces of discussion and debating fundamental issues (the measurement of impact, modalities of implementation, implementation, and the influence of public order), and by having a critical and constructive view on the evolution of the discipline. Initiatives are to be welcomed but remain too isolated.

Design schools are lagging behind Design schools and design institutions have a major responsibility in the capacity – most of the time incapacity – of young designers to address public sector challenges. Apart from a few pioneering schools, the minimum prerequisites for ­creating student vocations in terms of educational programs are not provided. Few design schools put emphasis on social and political sciences, including sociology of organizations, history of govnerments, and even political philosophy, which are indispensable for understanding the forms of contemporary institutions. Comparatively, the connections between the arts, sciences, and design are much more nourished, both in initial training and in the field of research. When will we see new design PhDs in subjects such as commons, social innovation, and public transformation? The risk of this underinvestment in initial training would be to limit design to repetitive methodological approaches, modeled on the ­demand and inspired by private sector R&D units, and confined to i­nvariant

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­subjects (­redesign of administrative reception areas, new digital interfaces … ) l­eading ultimately to an impoverishment of the professional offer. In parallel with the deployment of a new generation of young public policy designers, it’s important to encourage a rise in the quality of the sector, in terms of risk-taking, ambition, and methodological innovation.

Public designer, the next bullshit job? At the same time, the flourishing of design must be accompanied by a consolidation of professional careers. The dynamics around public innovation labs and units, which are multiplying in France, as well as public innovation programs (­Territories in Residences, Carte Blanche, Designers in residence … ), are a real step for young professionals, but design is still struggling to be promoted to strategic positions, be it integrated within public organizations or external consultancy. The case of internal designers is emblematic. Many local or national governments continue to create design positions in apprenticeship contracts, i­ nternships, or fixed-term contracts, reflecting a moderate ambition towards the discipline, confined to a technical and application (or even recreational) role. Of course, here and there a few cities are hiring design CEOs, but these cases remain rare and their role is often focused on urbanism.

The risks of design without professional designers In addition, during the last years, a very diversified offer of training sessions for civil servants has flourished. The initial promise was based on a simple equation: For design to be infused internally, and to create real changes in the administrative machine, then civil servants must be contaminated and become ‘double agents’. But today, the frustration of these design ambassadors is expressed in many ways: First, it is not enough to have tasted design to become a designer, and second, thinking like a designer is not enough to move the lines internally. Clearly, the renovation of public institutions cannot be solved by the training of an army of agents-designers, and even this scenario can generate managerial violence, isolation, and frustration. The evolution of public agent training, if it now incorporates design, must, therefore, go hand in hand with enhanced cooperation with professional designers both at operational and strategic levels. The combination of the rising expertise of designers on public issues and the professionalization of civil servants in design raises complex questions, notably about cooperation frameworks: Beyond traditional design external consul-

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tancy and internal designers working in innovation units or labs, what’s next? If the ambition of design is to be the ambassador of a vision and of a certain philosophy of public policies, then design must access top-level responsibilities (like ­Artistic Direction or Design Management in a private company) and then infuse ­alternative visions and strategies at every level of the organization. This goes hand in hand with the definition of new initiatives and continuing training paths for civil servants, in order to vary the profiles, the experiences, and the influences in the ­administrations.

A need for more political visions We believe that design is never neutral, since it’s always put at the service of an implicit or explicit political project. Just as the Good Design of the ’30s was an invention directly linked with the revival of consumption, design for policy must name the objectives it serves, and for those to be thought of as an intellectual, artistic, and political current. But at present, the conversation about the political dimension of the transformation of public sector is done without the designers. In France, design for policy appeared under the era of MAP (Modernization of Public Sector), a governmental vision defending a functionalist approach to public service, and greater attention to users. Today, design for policy stands somewhere between social innovation approaches and the development of state startups. Over the past ten years, the lines of tension within public transformation have moved, whether they address the future of public services, their presence in rural territories or their digital transformation, or the very status of civil servants that are in question. These multiple issues are the new facets of a public sector ‘in crisis’ that were diagnosed at the beginning of this contribution. And in front of them, designers cannot just plead for user-friendly public service. It is high time for designers to focus on the transformations taking place in the public area – whether in cities, universities, hospitals, or in the countryside. Unlike their counterparts in the business innovation sector, public policy designers operate in flexible forms – small businesses, cooperatives, associations, collectives, research units, laboratories … Their disparity could lead to a lack of collective reflection on their common object – the public sector. It is therefore urgent to invent spaces and methods of politicizing design for policy. This challenge goes with the responsibility of public sponsors, who must seek design in ambitious projects, and not in surface work just to soften the symptoms, with no ambition for structural transformation.

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So, what could be done now ? If we want design for policy to maintain its ambition, then there is a need for new strategic directions for the sector. First of all, we must realize the incredible value of what has been done in 10– 15 years of design for policy in France, Europe, and all over the world. This sum of projects, publications, skills, and experiences does not lead today to a rigorous work of capitalization and analysis. Let’s invent a framework to do it, with cooperative governance to overcome the competition between actors and private i­ nterests. It seems to us that a network of schools, in combination with a resource center and new post-graduate courses, could play a key role in fostering critical debate in and outside the professional community, promoting more responsible and ethical practices, developing the reflexive, militant, and subversive nature of design in the public sector. A second direction could be the self-referral capacity of design on priority public policy topics: Social justice, ecological transition, and democratic renewal seem to us the new fields of action for public innovation where the design, by its creative force and its sensitivity to practices, can and must intervene. Positioning on these subjects – for instance through a new generation of call – could also be a lever of activism for the new generation of designers, and bring about new cooperations with other actors, including participative urban planning, popular education, social and solidarity entrepreneurship, or civic and GovTechs. Finally, a third direction would be to diversify the fields of application of design. Today there is a gap growing between public innovation as it is promoted by the state, and the one carried in multiple forms by local authorities and communities. It looks like a priority to value local initiatives, to plug them with new investment budgets, and to make sure that design is not reserved for the richest regions but also that it can empower remote areas. This goes with supporting initial training outside major cities, in a logic of ‘local ecosystem’ and to promote access and interest for these courses to the greatest number, so that design is culturally rooted to the places he serves. In 1985 the visionary designer Victor Papanek said that ‘if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive, then design must be revolutionary and radical’. For the designers who want to change the system from within, one could add that it will also require a lot of trials and failures on the ground, a serious level of humility, and a much deeper understanding of the government’s mechanics and empathy for those who run it.

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3  DEMOCRACY BY DESIGN Agustin Pereyra Decara

Democracy, the big picture Do we understand democracy? Nowadays when we talk about democracy we tend to understand it from a narrow view. When someone is asked what it is, people relate it with the mere fact of voting. Some link it with wider realms such as laws and citizen’s duties, but just a few get the full picture and connect all the activities we perform as citizens, from consensus to contestation, as Disalvo (2010) exemplifies. If we do some quick research or we simply look it up in the dictionary, the result of a scientific definition of democracy leads us towards ‘the power of the people’. The word derives from the junction of the other two Greek ones ‘Demos’ and ‘Kratos’, meaning ‘people’ and ‘power’ respectively. Even though the definition is historically accepted, it has been differently appropriated and broadly understood, generally reducing its meaning to a political realm. Larry Diamond refers to it not only to the voting stage. According to his paper  ‘How to Make Democracies Work’, ‘if people can choose and replace their leaders in regular, free, and fair elections, there is an electoral democracy’ (Diamond 2008). He understands that the ballots are an important but slight portion of the bigger and broader realm of democracy. Choosing the citizens who represent us and are supposed to reflect our wills as community participants is definitely a way to participate. While on one hand electoral democracy issues social values such as freedom, equality, transparency, and justice, among other basic ones, on the other hand, it only contents and approaches the political system. ‘It simply means that if a majority of the people want a change in leaders and policies, and are able to organize effectively within the rules, they can get change’ (ibid.). As far as democracy is concerned, it touches every step we make on our citizen path, linking it with the realm of freedom. Freedom must be understood as Charles Frankel describes: ‘(it) is not the absence of external constraints on their behavior, but simply the chance to live under restraints they (people) find intelligible rather than senseless and demeaning’ (Frankel 1962). Putting this differently, electoral democracy address values related to freedom, as described in the previous paragraph, but it is actually making them more achievable not ensuring them. For the scope of this paper, we will understand democracy as a wider view, as ‘the condition that citizens who wish to live within a political system of intelligible restraints seek to achieve and sustain’ (Margolin 2012).

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The recent trustworthiness shortfall Since 2016, we have been experiencing, as world inhabitants, important events that put democracy on the spot of discussion. We are talking about mainly two events as the most tangible examples of traditional representative elections and recently popular referendums, both ballots under the respective constitution regulations: the 2016 United States elections and the Brexit referendum, respectively. To begin, it is important to understand the way Americans vote. Trump’s election showed a usually undisclosed face of ballots; his victory was due to the number of states that voted for him and not because of the number of real people that actually supported Republicans. Obtaining a 46% of total individual v­ oters, Trump seems to have won by a small margin, but when we see how many voters actually vote for his opposition the number rises to 48%. This indicates that from a country of 326+million inhabitants, where 58% of the eligible voters actually voted, only 87 million people support Republicans, less than 27% of the ­total population. Everything indicates that the population is tending to miss participation, and as Laura Haynes puts it, ‘a portion of the electorate has lost faith in the democratic process and trust in its leaders. This is problematic for two reasons: politically, it means an ever-dwindling political base and therefore ever-closer election results with no outright winner; and socially, a disengaged electorate is more likely to become a disenfranchised population’ (Haynes 2015).

Participation, a worthwhile condition Even though the decision-making field (political institutions) is constitutionally chosen it does not always respond to democratic patterns. As we see from previous paragraphs, participation is losing its precious importance in places where democracy should be. According to a report by The Economist Intelligence Unit, ‘not only are participation rates low, but the highest levels of disengagement have occurred in 16 out of the 20 countries classified as “full democracies”’ (The Economist, 2015). When we talk about engagement rates around 60% in ballots, we are not only referring to a very low interest in participation but mostly to a lack of interest in reducing the heteronomy (Bonsiepe 2006). Also, as Gui Bonsiepe writes in his article entitled ‘Design and Democracy’, the imbalance between the centers of power and the people submitted to them uphold a lack of participation. Hence ‘treats human beings as mere instances in the process of objectivization (Verdinglichung) and commodification’ (ibid.). Therefore, a lack of participation closes the gate of self-determination, undermining freedom (Frankel 1962). This compromises democracy at its roots, whilst it should be fostering a critical consciousness not yet taken into account.

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Public sector innovation Bottom-up democracy Despite the fact that we are used to thinking about democracy as a direct relation with power, hence strictly linked with the political class or decision-making sectors, we tend to describe what top-down democracy is. To understand both these opposite meanings we must refer to participation and power flow. If the decisions are made by the political institutions overtaking the importance of people’s participation then we are talking about top-down flows of power. On the other hand, if the decisions are being taken by shared conjunction between politicians and ­citizens, then we are talking about bottom-up power flow. While in top-down flows citizens experience domination, in bottom-up ones they experience democracy, liberty, and liberation.1 Nowadays, while the borders between flows of power are blurry, it is important to understand how left aside we are as citizens. Nick Hurd puts this in words in the foreword of Supporting a Stronger Civil Society (2010): ‘We want to end topdown initiatives that filter spending through multiple layers, and we want to make the support you receive more relevant, simpler to obtain’ (The Economist 2015). What he refers to the multiple layers, is the different public agencies we go through in our citizen path. While in some of them we experience citizens’ decision-making such as in locally managed schools, the decision-making is usually taken from the top down.

Engagement, deliberation, and empowering Previously we explained that participation is a lot about engagement; therefore, we need a deeper enquirement on what engagement is. To do so we could quote the OECD’s Innovating the Public Sector from Ideas to Impact (2004) paper, in which ‘Engagement is often defined in conjunction with motivation, commitment, and job satisfaction, and is significantly correlated in multiple studies to improved organizational outcomes including performance and innovation’ (Daglio 2015). In addition, the same report highlights that motivation is a key value in achieving commitments. Making a difference between a direct and an indirect motivation according to the outcome sought, on one hand, intrinsic motivation compels people to act for a reward that is gained by the activity itself (Frey and Osterloh 2002). And on the other hand, ‘extrinsic motivation compels people to act for a reward that is separated from the act itself – the most common example is financial payment for services rendered’ (McLean et al. 2009). While in both descriptions the fact of ‘act for something’ can be understood as decision-making, for further appreciation we will take ‘intrinsic motivation’ as the logical link between engagement and empowering.

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As engagement fosters participation, emphasizing the fact of deliberation for a reward, it is the actual feeling of making things change what we have to foster. ­McLean and Andersson describe empowerment as: ‘when people have a personal sense of agency and the state provides meaningful opportunities through which to channel that agency’ (Selloni 2006). The same authors recognize three different types of empowerment according to the link between feelings and outcomes. The actual control or influence over an outcome or a decision can be understood as de facto (objective) empowerment; subjective empowerment, instead, is the feeling of being able to influence over outcomes and decisions. A third type, de jure empowerment, focuses on the opportunities and rights provided through law. (McLean et al. 2009) Even though de facto empowerment is a concept that draws nearer democracy, in our own citizenship sphere we only tend to feel we are able to influence decisions without having real control. McLean and Andersson express that there is some evidence indicating that subjective empowerment has the potential to deliver real ‘de facto’ empowerment, depending on the context in which the activities are operating (ibid.). What is important to highlight is that, depending on where people are subjectively empowered, it could easily trigger an objective – hungry for results – empowerment.

The overlapping with design, co-design Daniela Selloni and Daria Cantù, at their co-design experiments, realized that the sessions held by Creative Communities reached something they named ‘pre-­ empowerment’. ‘They perceive themselves as a collective actor able to get in touch with institutions and stakeholders, in order to take the project forward’ (Selloni 2006). The fact of being in touch with stakeholders fosters the feeling of being able to produce improvements into the surroundings, hence boosts empowerment. Meanwhile joined solutions drafting implies, necessarily, designing together. Therefore, to grasp the importance of co-design, we must refer to what Meroni understands for Creative Communities is: ‘people who cooperatively invent, enhance and manage innovative solutions for new ways of living’ (Meroni 2007, p. 30). As we can see from the desk research and explorations led by Selloni and Cantù, when citizens are engaged and committed, the collective awareness achieved drives to coproduction. While co-design acts as a precondition preparing the ground for further development (Selloni 2017), democracy shows up as the experimental decision-making process people go through. Amartya Sen argues there is little evidence that, given the chance, people prefer to reject democracy (Sen 1999); and that is what the Creative Communities – boosted by co-design techniques – showed as an outcome.

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The role of design Design thinking on public services Design is one of the most important drivers of the quality of experience for users of services. For governments to remain credible to their citizens, they must treat the design quality of their services as seriously as the best businesses. (Tim Brown, 2016).

While the private sector has well established the design capabilities in its organizations for many years already, the public one, probably because of bureaucratic timing, is slowly following these steps. More recently, we are seeing governments taking similar paths. Regardless of where in the world we talk, there are several motivations making design thinking become a valuable methodology for civic society. Nowadays citizen trust in governments continues to decay. People believe their governments have lost sight of who they are and what their needs are. Design thinking is a human-centered approach; this means that it begins with people’s needs, considering both citizens and civil servants. This approach places people back in balance with their activities while both citizens and civil servants feel they are being led by processes and regulation, rather than enabled by them. Financial issues are making struggles in many countries then cost-cutting measures are taking part more often in different nations. Many governments need to rethink how they deliver the services, and this is a big motivation to put innovation into hot topics. Design thinking is an innovative approach and its tools and techniques can lead to significant changes in both policy design and service delivery (Kershaw et al. 2016).

Boundary objects Design, broadly understood as the product forecaster, has objects as outcomes. Boundary objects are of explicit relevance in organizational innovation processes, described as ‘objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs ( … ), yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites.’ Boundary objects have the intrinsic ability to merge different social worlds in order to converge perspectives and give them meanings. As introduced by Susan Star and James Griesemer, any object that is part of multiple social worlds facilitates communication and links between them; it has a different identity in each realm it inhabits. As a result of this vision, boundary objects must be figured as simultaneously concrete and abstract; fluid and well-­ defined. Star and Griesemer write: ‘Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites’ (Griesemer et al. 1989).

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In different communities, some objects are adopted, appropriated, and resignified. They are often used by members of a community in such a way that their function becomes naturalized, meaning that its presence or functioning is taken for granted by members of the community. Hence, these naturalized objects work as touchpoints of belonging within diverse social worlds. In this context, boundary objects can be understood as objects that are not fully naturalized by any one community of practice. Instead, they arise from situations where ‘two or more differently naturalized classification systems collide’. As the authors explain in the article mentioned before, the interesting thing to highlight on these boundary objects is the inherent capacity to connect and bridge gaps between different social realities. Thus, it is on the way these objects are projected where design should take action, making social worlds get closer.

Co-design in real life Field grasping For a better understanding of how these practices regarding democracy are becoming meaningful and – each one in their way – impactful for society, it is important to cluster and differentiate real activities being developed in the real field. When we analyze organizations regarding social issues, participation and the leading source are some of the most important aspects to look up to, a concept string attached to democracy. These institutions mostly involve civic society, both citizens and groups with a common goal, but rarely include all the actors on the spawn of the stakeholders. Even though the organizations have been chosen by the social impact they have – according to the objectives they propose themselves – it is necessary to highlight the leading source. The organizations on the field vary from citizen-led, hence real people working for common interests, to governmental or private decision-making. In all the cases we can trace the approach they have according to the goals they pursue, from deeper and shared empowerment to active and open advocacy. To reach their goals, some of these organizations have either adopted or developed toolkits to communicate and keep track of their activities. They vary from classic design thinking tools to complex and personalized tools projected for a particular scenario. In the first case, we could mention on one hand the Civic Service Design by the New York City council, a design methodology materialized in a toolkit ready to apply for public servants. On the other hand, a good example could be Helsinki’s Participation Game, a set of playable guidelines for city employees. These institutions tackle their commitments by adopting different strategies, taking into consideration how they approach engagement. As we have seen in many of

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the case studies nowadays, the common wall to overcome is one of the ‘first touch’ with the activities. We are talking about engagement. As we explored before, engagement – either political or civic – is desperately decreasing, and it is here where the development of boundary objects gains increasing importance, creating an empathy bridge between two opposite shores. Usually, engagement can be achieved while participation is effective and common goals are reached; things that can be simplified for a better understanding using specific guidelines.

Levels of engagement When we talk about institutions that work with several actors of civic society, we mean not only government and citizens interactions, but also companies, universities, think tanks, and TSOs. It is in this last one where we find the highest ­levels of engagement. The third sector organizations (TSOs) include voluntary and community organizations that run independently from the government and have as a scope to advocate on citizens’ issues. They interact directly with citizens and ­government but without the strings of a two-sided relationship, enriching the ecosystem linking other actors as well. In order to better understand how these interactions are developed, we can cluster these institutions into three different groups, according to the type of activities they implement: Neighbourhood Centres, spaces whose scope is to gather the community; holding activities, bringing support, and delivering information. More clearly, as Chatterton puts it: ‘Spaces that are dedicated to people rather than profit’ (Chatterton 2002). We could mention the activities held at the Cohub, located in a working-class condominium at the heart of Milan, which is a place capable of welcoming and collecting the needs of the territory in which it is located and finding collaborative solutions getting in touch with the actors needed. Community Hubs, spots where a network of organizations devotedly co-work for a common goal. In the range of organizations we can find in this cluster, we could highlight the participation of non-profitable stakeholders and the connections created within topic related startups. A good example is Amplify, situated in New York; it draws on research regarding social innovation done at the Parsons D ­ ESIS Lab at The New School. They mainly aim to create successful alternatives to the standard commercial and government services and help those initiatives become easier and more enjoyable through service design. Social Labs are a safe space for exploring unconventional ideas within an organization. Organizations must be understood as a group of people with a common goal. From this point of view, the Civic Design Lab from the City of Oakland is worth mentioning: it is a collaborative working space where government experts and community members can come together to work, organize, and share. The

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Lab helps to bring together people from all over Oakland with teams from multiple city departments to take part in, their activities range from public sessions to workshops and events. While nowadays all the organizations usually deal with plenty of stakeholders and objectives many times overlapped with each other, it is the leading source, as we mentioned before, that is the key factor that rules the direction they take. While advocacy must be understood as having the voice to change things, empowerment is ­related to the real feeling of being able to generate change.

Conclusion The field research gives the vision of the actual panorama in a particular situation. Although we are not always aware of how different social changes are shaping our everyday life, they might be occurring right around the corner. In the same way, we mention at the beginning, the organizations acting daily take place as an answer on how civic society is nowadays behaving. Lack of trustability, mainly promoted by an absence of citizen empowerment, meaning people are actually not able to modify – socially – their immediate environment, is pushing people to take a step forward and raise self-awareness regarding their own immediate scenario. What is important to understand from the previous examples is how different sources of guidance contour the activities taking place in the organizations, hence the path they walk. The objectives are not always clear among them, but certain methods and tools are always present. While some rely on traditional – taken from the book – canvases and maps, others propose interesting ways of tool appropriation or even toolkits developed in-house or in order to tackle a particular activity. The role of design is in continuous evolution. While a few years ago strategic decisions were mainly taken by professionals from other areas different from design, nowadays we find that to foster participation, using the design process could be a good answer. Design thinking methods are quickly spreading in the private sector as we have mentioned before, but we can see that they are also reaching ­governments or, at least, the civic society. Connectivity is playing a key role in this scenario, shortening the gaps between different social realities. It is here where design should take action, in the development of fair and clear rules for everyone to enable participation fostering. On its portfolio, we can find plenty of tools to tackle lack of empowerment; methodologies, gamified guidelines, or literally a board game are just the beginning. While design thinking was born to serve human needs, we are patiently learning the real democratic potential it has.

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1

Buechi, R. (2012). ‘Two views on democracy.’ Retrieved from http://www.activatingdemocracy.com/topics/concept/two-views-on-democracy/.

References Bonsiepe, Gui (2006). ‘Design and Democracy.’ Design Issues Volume 30. Brown, Tim (2009). Change by Design. PA, USA: HarperCollins. Cantù, Daria, Marta Corubolo, and Giulia Simeone (2012). ‘A Community Centered Design approach to developing service prototypes.’ Service Design & Innovation Conference, Helsinki. Cantù, Daria, and Daniela Selloni (2013). ‘From engaging to empowering: a set of co-design experiments with a service design perspective.’ Conference Social Frontiers: the next edge of social innovation research, London, NESTA. Chatterton, Paul (2002). ‘Squatting is still legal, necessary and free: A brief intervention in the corporate city.’ Antipode, 6 Daglio, M, D. Gerson, and H. Kitchen (forthcoming, 2015). ‘Building Organisational Capacity for Public Sector ­Innovation.’ OECD Conference ‘Innovating the Public Sector: from Ideas to Impact’, Paris, 12–13 November 2014. Diamond, Larry (2008). ‘The Spirit of Democracy: How to Make Democracies Work.’ Centre for International Private Enterprise, 3. Disalvo, Carl (2010). ‘Design, Democracy and Agonistic Pluralism.’ Proceedings of the Design Research ­Society Conference, 1. Duggan, Kelly, Sonja Dahl, and Isobel Roberts (2016). Designing for Public Services, 4. Dunleavy, Patrick (2008). ‘The Future of Joined-up Public Services.’ Economic & Social Research Council, 10. Frankel, Charles (1962). The Democratic Prospect. New York: Harper Colophon books, 38. Haynes, Laura (2015). ‘Designing Democracy: How designers are changing democratic spaces and ­processes’, 34. Hurd, Nick (2010). ‘Supporting a Stronger Civil Society.’ Office for Civil Society, 3. Kershaw, Andrea, Sonja Dahl, and Isobel Roberts (2016). ‘Designing for Public Services.’ Knapp, Jake, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz (2016). ‘Sprint: how to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days.’ Simon & Schuster. Luma Institute (2012). ‘Innovating for people handbook of human centered design methods.’ Margolin, Victor (2012). ‘Design and Democracy in a Troubled World.’ Carnegie Mellon University. McLean, Sam, and Edward Andersson (2009). Activating Empowerment: Empowering Britain from the bottom up, 29. Osterloh, Margit, Jetta Frost, and Bruno S Frey (2002). ‘The dynamics of motivation in new organizational forms.’ Journal of the Economics of Business. Selloni, Daniela, and Daria Cantu (2006). From engaging to empowering people, a set of co-design experiments with a service design perspective, 13. Selloni, Daniela (2017). ‘CoDesign for Public-Interest Services,’ 183. Sen, Amartya (1999). ‘Democracy as a Universal Value.’ Journal of Democracy 10.3: 3–17. Star, Susan, and James Griesemer (1989). Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. The Economist Intelligence Unit (2015). ‘Democracy Index: Democracy in an age of Anxiety.’ https://www.eiu. com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=DemocracyIndex2015.

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4  DEMOCRACY BY MAKING – A FAILED ­RENDEZVOUS OF DESIGN AND PRAGMATISM? Laura Popplow

Designers, along with other makers creating artifacts, have used an intriguingly simple formula to connect what they do with democracy: ‘[D]emocracy means doing things together.’ This quote is from the Black Mountain College Bulletin (1941). The liberal art college founded in 1933 and closed in 1958 has become famous after all as an – if not maybe the – American avant-garde community (Duberman 2009). It has been framed as a successor of the Bauhaus, which closed the same year it was founded, but also as one of the first colleges to apply John Dewey’s educational and democratic philosophy in practice, connecting it directly to artistic and designerly practices which were taught at Black Mountain by nobody less than Anni and ­Josef Albers. Along with some other of the most influential creative personas of the 20th century like Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Walter Gropius as regular visitors of the college, Black Mountain College became a unique melting pot of European and American avant-garde thinking and making in the arts and beyond, dedicated to serving the project of democracy in times of political crisis and (financial) loss – a quality many of the émigré teachers experienced quite literally. One project conducted by all Black Mountain faculty and students exemplifies the above mentioned democratic program of the college may be like no other: the Studies Building. In 1940, shortly after the US went into war, the faculty was confronted with a difficult situation: The college was not able to renew the lease of the complex it had rented, neither was it able to finance the building of a college on a nearby site that had been acquired in 1937. The planning of the new buildings had been commissioned to the architectural partnership of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer – but their plan turned out to be too ambitious and costly at the same time. The faculty had a difficult decision to make, confronted with the forthcoming move out of their former campus, and the reality of lacking funding, a condition the college suffered its whole existence, sharply increased now due to war times. ‘[W]e realized that we would either have to build ourselves an adequate college plant quickly […] or must give up the College because there was no other place where we could go’ (Dreier 1946). The only option was to build with whatever resource they had at their disposal: timber and stones from the grounds and labor from everyone, faculty, administration, and students.

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Fig. 1  Brochure for fundraising, advertising the building project at Black Mountain College, summer 1941 (Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina)

The Building Project: A study in community building The Building Project was an ambitious and risky undertaking and a solitary experience: What would have happened if the community would not have succeeded with the Studies Building? It was not allowed to fail, not only because the college would have had no space otherwise, but also because the college had to prove its educational concept of a practice-based, democratic education: the brochures advertising the work-camps emphasize the coherence of the building project with Dewey’s educational approach of learning by doing. Although the ‘Work Program’ at Black Mountain College put physical work at the heart of the educational program of the college from the beginning, the uniqueness of the Building Project and its symbolic gesture of a Studies Building, built by the whole college as a study, is still ­significant. The close connection of physical work, learning through artistic and ­material experiments (e.g. Albers teaching), and the community as a place to learn democracy was present in all of the colleges’ publications, but the brochures advertising work-camps for external students emphasized the physical workout: Men are working shirtless, shoveling earth in wheelbarrows; women in shorts are hammering

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timbers (Figure 1). This heroization of workmanship was not without frictions especially during the period of the building project, when students and faculty were supposed to spend one to three afternoons each week at the building site: The jolly folk songs to and from the work site, the communion of the committed, angered two of the disaffected to the point where they tacked up a notice on the bulletin board one night, reading “WANTED: ZOMBIES FOR THE WORK PROGRAMM” – an act that produced much clicking tongues and “frothing at the mouth” (Duberman 2009, 158).

This anecdote from the Building Project reveals friction inherent to collaborative making-practice in general, but especially if set in a community where collaboration is both a (financial) necessity and part of a democratic experiment – what if not everyone is happy to participate? We will leave these questions unanswered here to connect them to another, actual anecdote of making framed as democratic ­practice.

DIY democracy – pragmatism revisited? During the last fifteen years, we have witnessed a revival of making. No longer only a leisure time activity, making became framed as a critique of the global production industry, mixing counter-hegemonic practices like hacking, crafting, and tinkering with digital fabrication technologies. While this revival has developed fast into a niche-market of suppliers, professional YouTube-channels, and magazines, it has also triggered reflection of the political potential in ‘Doing-it-Together’. Practices like DesignBuilt (Lepik 2013), architects and designers not only designing and planning but also building with the community of future inhabitants, have become a more common part of academic education, and have been also become more common in cities in which the global financial crisis of 2008 hindered public infrastructure building, like Madrid (Rubio and Fogué 2015). Citizens there started to create their own community gardens and meeting places while asking also for more open governance structures and procedures. Simultaneously practices stemming from engineering and hacker communities have become part of politics: Hackathons for Open Governance or HackDays for Sustainability apply tinkering and the production of demos to issues of a broader political agenda. This arguably not new, but still different agenda of making beyond hobbyist practice has gained public interest – and was synchronized with a new academic interest in pragmatism and forms of ‘material participation’ (Marres 2012). The exhibition ‘Making Things Public’, curated by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour (2005), marked this material turn, answering the question ‘Do artifacts have politics?’ (Winner 1980). Things were reframed from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’

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(Latour 2008), to gatherings forming around issues. This debate was adapted in design research through the notion of design things (Binder et al. 2011), and a renewed interest in the Dewey-Lippmann debate, which emphasized the role of material making not only as an epistemological project (Ratto 2011; Knorr-Cetina 2009) but a political project of ‘publics-in-the-making’ (Lindström and Stahl 2014). But, this renewed political agenda of making and design, of a ‘DIY citizenship’ also raises new questions: Is it okay not to participate (Blauvelt 2011, 101; Miessen 2010)? What if not everyone is a maker? Is everyone equally skilled to make as a citizen? I will, therefore, introduce another vignette from my own research that was challenged by these very questions and also raised the more general question of how to think through these experiences with Dewey’s pragmatism.

When CycleHack becomes ‘CycleFrack’: A staging of making In 2015, I organized a Hackathon with the students of my interaction design class in Wuppertal (Figure 2). As part of my PhD research (Popplow 2020), I was interested in the difference between activist and designerly political practices. So, we worked with the approach of the CycleHack (We are Snook 2016). The aim of this 48h design event, which runs at the same weekend in cities around the globe, is to collaboratively work on the question: ‘How can we reduce the barriers to cycling?’. The barriers in Wuppertal seemed to be many: A hilly geography, rain, a car-centered infrastructure, and a financially tense city household. For some years, ­Wuppertal was awarded as the least bike-friendly city in Germany. But since 2013, these issues had been addressed both by cycling activists and the city council ­itself. The event was therefore conceptualized as a co-making platform for these different stakeholders. When I invited the cycling activists to the first seminar meeting (via social media), I hoped that these groups would be willing to introduce their projects to the students and could even become part of organizing the event. Their response suggested that this seemed to be a rather idiotic proposal to them (Popplow and Duque 2017). They warned us not to go on with the organization of the event: ‘We are already working on the most pressing issues regarding cycling in the local context’ and ‘it would harm our and your own ambitions to work on parallel issues’ (personal message on Facebook, translation by the author). The main argument from the opposition was that most of the students were not cyclists. As non-experts to the issue of cycling our endeavor as designers was framed as ‘naïve’. Although in the end, the students organized a collaboration with the local Fablab, the murmurings of the activists group went on. They never really appeared in person to discuss the issue, but shared their disagreement in talks with the collaborating members of the Fablab or online – also during the CycleHack weekend itself (Figure 3).

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Fig. 2  Participants during the CycleHack 2015 in Wuppertal (Laura Popplow/Anne Bönemann)

It was never clear who and how many persons were behind it, but this non-manifest absence clearly led us to Other ‘them’ (Law 2004, 84–85). They became an entity that constructed the ‘us’. I was bothered as a designer and organizer of the CycleHack because they clearly aimed at making us look incompetent. I was intrigued as a researcher by their framing of us as naïve non-experts, interfering in ‘their’ problem space. It made ‘us’ think about our roles as designers and at some point, we accepted the framing of being outsiders to the consensual way the issue of cycling was presented. It made us focus more consciously on our expertise as Non- or Not-anymore-Cyclists and the group of other Not-Yet-Cyclists in the city.

Democratic participation by making together? One could frame the reaction of the invited cyclists as a ‘misbehavior’ of participants (Michael 2013, 76) or simply ignore their interactions – also because they were hardly traceable or recordable and even not influential for the general success of the CycleHack. But their reactions and the murmurs stuck with me and made me reconsider my role as a researcher, as someone who consciously or unconsciously

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Fig. 3  Tweets commenting on the CycleHack 2015 in Wuppertal (Twitter, anonymized by the author)

sets certain parameters for ‘good’ participation. To think the CycleHack along the lines of Dewey’s publics as a gathering through issues helped me frame the event not as a necessarily collaborative making of solutions, but as a staging of the ‘­articulation of issues’ (DiSalvo et al. 2011; Stahl and Lindström 2016). The making helped to invite for other articulations of barriers to cycling – articulations which were probably normally silenced in the local discourse through those who were acclaimed experts for the issue. Still, the dissensus we encountered, the construction of antagonism between expert activists and non-expert designers was also a resistance contra the event, creating frictions outside the event-space. How to frame non-participation in the design event? Why did the proposal of a Hackathon create such a fuzz? And – why did I assume that participation by making is necessarily more democratic? First of all, we could say that the invitation to a civic Hackathon is ‘by no means innocent’ (Stahl and Lindström 2016), but invites for a very distinctive form of action, which could be framed as a ‘rehearsing of entrepreneurial citizenship’ (Irani 2015). Hackathons do not only favor a certain type of collaborative, workhard, sleep-less attitude known in the IT industry but establish also a very rigid temporal regime, excluding participants who for example have to care for relatives or have another job they need to attend (ibid.). Apart from that specific characteristic of Hackathons, I assumed that everyone would not only be willing to spend the time but also that the making activities would open participation to other groups of participants, creating a more diverse, more democratic public. But I was challenged not only through the frictions of the outsider-participants but also through the differentiated consideration expressed by one of the

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co-organizing members of the local Fablab, who had also been a member of the r­ egional parliament for some years: I think the current generation simply wants, uh, to participate more in society, they want to participate in the design, no matter in what form and, uh, there it becomes in my opinion very political, because this freedom to design, to give form must also be ensured. You can ensure that by having a city that is broke, then the city as administration cannot design things itself and then there is freedom for each individual to design, but that is very undemocratic, because then the individual also has much more power to participate, to design in that area, without necessarily having democratic legitimacy to do so (Interview R., 22.07.2015).

This aspect of legitimation through making, especially in fields which have been probably neglected by party politics is a very powerful, but seldomly criticized, narrative of design practices especially in arenas where politics are not able to handle a situation, due to austerity politics or simply because an issue has not yet been ­articulated to become part of an official agenda. Here, my interview partner questioned a matter of politics inherent to design and making – a matter of design-­ politics (Keshavarz 2016). If designers and other makers make public things happen, the legitimation of such projects is not necessarily gained through a democratic process with democratic decisions, but is often dominated through hidden agendas like funding agencies or project-time, placing much power on the shoulders of the facilitating designers (cf. Bratteteig and Wagner 2014).

Necessity, locally adapted solutions, or democratic legitimation? At this point, we need to take participation in and through design as an issue. We will need to set aside here the discourse of Participatory Design, which has found a distinct way to mix both participation in design and through design, in the argument of creating simultaneously situated solutions and democratic empowerment. But if we regard the above examples only as matters of participation through design, as matters of a democratic project, we will have to ask: How did the Black Mountain faculty frame the collective building of their college as a democratic endeavor? Why did I assume that the making or hacking activities at the CycleHack would invite participants to articulate political issues? The first impulse is probably to say: There is simply no other democratic way to solve an issue despite involving the community that is affected. An effect of conceptualizing legitimate participation by a community of affected (Marres 2012, 34) is the often unexpressed assumption in design that participation is not needed as a necessary democratic legitimation of certain designs and design

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decisions, but that participation, mediated by the designer-facilitator, helps the community of affected to solve the communities problems by themselves. By making the communities problems ideally become ‘fixed’, rendering an involvement of (formal) politics less necessary, or even obsolete: the citizen becomes an entrepreneur, solving formerly public issues through often privately funded and organized activities. In my opinion, this is an adaptation of Dewey’s pragmatism in design, which significantly reduces his central political argument of the democratic ­necessity of experience. There is a need to rethink participation through design especially in times of austerity politics and a neoliberal tendency to outsource services to competent ­social entrepreneurs and unpaid labor, covered as voluntarism. Only if we read pragmatism as modes of acting despite, but aware of the complexities of political practice – especially in times of crisis – will we be able to grasp the two frictions which I have introduced above: the disaffected community members at Black Mountain, resisting to work as ‘Zombies’ and the CycleHack’s outsider-participants, resisting the proposal of the design event, declaring it a ‘CycleFrack’.

How to deal with conflict and contingency: The political difference Both anecdotes could be interpreted as difficulties to deal with conflict and contingency, two characteristics of what has been described in political theory through the distinction of the political from politics (Marchart 2007). Introduced originally by Carl Schmitt, whose political philosophy became infamous through his direct involvement with the NS party in Germany, the distinction is not only still one of the most discussed issues of political philosophy, but has influenced also planners and designers practice, especially those concerned with questions of participation. Here, the notion of agonistic pluralism introduced by Chantal Mouffe (cf. 2013) has been most influential as an alternative to the consensual deliberative approach based on Habermas’ communicative theory. Consequently, the notion of participatory design projects as agonistic design things has been coined (Björgvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2012). The point I want to make here is that Mouffe’s concept does not help to think with the frictions I introduced with the anecdotes, but that her concept advocates ’a taming of antagonism in agonism’ (Roskamm 2015), which is based in her specific reading of the distinction between politics and the political. I argue along the lines of Roskamm here, who does not only critically review Mouffe’s reading of Schmitt but also proposes an alternative: the antagonistic thinking of her long-term partner and collaborator Ernesto Laclau. While Mouffe follows Schmitt in his problematic definition of the political through the antagonism of friend and enemy, Laclau has developed another way to frame experiences of conflict and contingency. His

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argument is based in the thesis that all relations are contingent power relations, not determined through any objective reason: ‘If social relations are contingent, it means they can be radically transformed by struggle [ … ]’ (Laclau 1990, 35). But struggle, conflict, antagonism there is because contingency is nothing other than the impossibility to fix any identity: think of the students calling for zombie workers, disaffected from their identity as ‘democratic makers’. But would it not be for the disaffected to create frictions, the identity of the others as an affected community solving their own problem would not be affirmed either. The contingency is ‘nothing other than this connection between prevention and affirmation of identity’ (Roskamm 2015, 9), a contrast to what Laclau criticized in modern thought, the elimination of all contingency by necessity (Laclau 1990, 20) – a thought which became most famously subsumed in the so-called TINA doctrine: ‘there is no alternative’ (introduced by Margret Thatcher). Laclau’s antagonism, in contrast, calls for a ‘constitutive outside’ (ibid. 26), a necessary or ‘radical other’ (Marchart 2010a, 193). We could say: there is necessarily an alternative. To think of antagonism as a principle, if not the principle of the difference between ‘sedimented practices’ of politics and the happening of the political as ‘event’ (Laclau 1990, 35ff, 84), helps to understand how students at Black Mountain are calling for a necessary but still impossible alternative to their own labor for the community: zombies. A wish for a fictional, radical other to challenge the sedimented politics of necessary participation in the college’s work program; a call for contingency in a setting where the necessity to build a college and a community was ruling the game. The example of the tweets of cycling activists commenting on the CycleHack and questioning the legitimation of us as designers handling issues of ‘cycling, ­advocacy, and mobility’ (Figure 3) is different because here there are two lines of antagonism that can be drawn and that had been emphasized throughout the process. First is the line drawn between us (the designers) as non-experts on the issue of c­ ycling and them (the activists) as issue-experts. Second is the distinction between participation inside the designed event of the CycleHack and outside through social media and untraceable talks and interactions. Laclau’s notion of the constitutive outside becomes especially helpful here because it prevents us from the shortcut of Schmitt to construct a personalized antagonism and the consequentially tamed agonistic pluralism of Mouffe (Roskamm 2015). If we look closely, the antagonism here is a difference of practices and their political argumentation, an antagonism that is both producing political subjects as well as it is a ‘mutual subversion’ (Laclau 1990, 27). Our position as designers became through that antagonism: We produced contingent articulations of the local issue of cycling, as outsiders to the local cycling community and non-experts on the issue of cycling. This was provocative to the cycling activists insofar as we used our designerly expert skills to stage the Hackathon as a public event. This triggered both the identification of some activ-

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ists with their practice as a form of skilled expert practice as well as it challenged their ways of articulating the issue and creating public. The second level of that antagonism was a difference of temporal qualities or characteristics: The activist’s long-term engagement and ongoing responsibility to deal with the local issue were set in contrast to our short-term, designerly intervention. While our form of design activism was arguably able to involve a public of mediated outsiders in the local issue, designerly activism (ours included) seldomly aims to involve in the lengthy negotiations of Realpolitik. Laclau’s distinction of politics as sedimented practices, not necessarily institutionalized politics, versus the political as the unplannable happening of antagonism, producing and displacing identities, helps to not shortcut to the conclusion that we as designers actually produced a political event by organizing the CycleHack. Here, as the comment of my interview partner revealed, the assumption that making would inherently allow a broader, more democratic participation was idealistic, hoping for a consensus in making, an alternative mode of material issue-articulations. It reveals a flaw (not only) in Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism: If we conceptualize the political as an alternative to democratic politics aiming at legitimation, if we perceive political practice as plannable, manageable activities, our participatory practices are reduced to a matter of procedures – and the political turns into politics (Roskamm 2015). The political as a difference to politics, in contrast, is a happening, not something that can be designed or ‘workshopped’ (Keshavarz 2016, 105). The antagonism of different temporal qualities, between sedimented practices – the activists as skilled practitioners articulating the issue of cycling, we as designers as skilled practitioners mediating and staging making – and the moment of antagonism which displaced or disrupted the ongoing production of identities through these practices was a happening of the political difference, possible only through the relation between politics and the political as necessarily different qualities (cf. Marchart 2007). Our designerly, interventionist approach was the necessary outside of the long-term engagement of activists’ practice and their dissent with our practice of designing a mediated making event interrupted simultaneously by our own conception as problem-solvers. This mutual disruption of ongoing practices revealed the politics inherent in every sedimented field of practice, a political moment emerging in difference to my assumption of co-making as a necessarily more democratic issue-articulation.

Pragmatism and the political difference The entanglement of the political difference, of politics as sedimented practices and the political as an event, a happening that cannot be intentionally designed (Popplow 2020), is the reason to critically review the current use of pragmatic

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­concepts in design research and design practice. If we understand the relation of politics and political as a necessary difference, a necessary antagonism, we will need to reconsider making as a democratic practice. If we think of making as an alternative to formal procedures of participation in a democracy like public engagement processes, as an alternative way to articulate issues through non-verbal means, we are contributing to democratic politics – not the political. Sometimes, as in the case of the CycleHack, in these designed making events, an antagonistic moment could emerge, necessarily challenging also the sedimented making practices of designers! Arguing for a critical re-reading of Dewey’s political philosophy, I regard his project of pragmatism as a differentiation of experience qualities. Richard Senett’s clarification of the conceptual depth of the term experience in pragmatism helps to map the political difference in Dewey’s terms: Philosophically, pragmatism has argued that to work well people need freedom from means-ends relationships. Underlying this philosophical conviction is a concept that, I think, unifies all of pragmatism. This is experience, a fuzzier word in English than in German, which divides it in two, Erlebnis and Erfahrung. The first names an event or relationship that makes an emotional inner impress, the second an event, action or relationship that turns one outward and requires skill rather than sensitivity. Pragmatist thought has insisted that these two meanings should not be divided (Sennett 2009, 288).

In contrast to Sennett I suggest reading Erlebnis not only as an emotionally and inner event, but to read it with Dewey as a growing experience (Dewey 1938, 36), a situation that somehow became ‘problematic’ triggering learning (Dewey 1998, 130). An experience that demands reflection, that transitions the experience from a moment to a process, transforming our very practice, becoming experience in the sense of Erfahrung, which could be translated also as skill. The necessary, relational difference between politics and the political is mirrored in the inseparability of experience as both sedimented, learned, skilled practice and the necessary events of struggle and challenge of these practices through antagonistic forces, through problematic situations. Instead of this alternative understanding of (political) making vs. politics, I would suggest considering making differently: Making is never just a way of working for democracy (means-end relationship) but produces excess, overspill, contingency. Simultaneously, there is a necessity to re-make, re-invent the state, to set apart people who are not directly affected by an issue, but take care that all, also the ‘indirect consequences’ of an issue are taken into account (Dewey 1927, 15–16). This is the seldomly considered other level of Dewey’s democratic experience, his ongoing consideration of politics, of better democratic legitimation procedures as well as the question of politics in all practices. Making, if we want to turn it into a democratic experience, therefore should consider both notions of experience –

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a disruptive event questioning our ways of doing as well as the long-term becoming of seasoned, reflected experience needed to (re-)invent the best possible democratic procedures. It would mean to co-make contingent articulations of issues and re-design democratic legitimation processes. The experience of contingency is necessary to understand why the legitimation of design decisions is also needed. The frustration with exhaustive democratic legitimation processes is understandable, but it cannot be avoided simply by making without democratic legitimation – just because one has ‘made it happen’ does not mean it is the best solution for all parties.1 Democracy indeed needs both frictions of making with necessary different others: events of experiencing Others (people, living beings, materials, different articulations of issues) as well as creating experiences that challenge not only the formal procedures of politics but disrupt all forms of sedimented practices and make us reconsider the politics in our own practice. Designers aiming for democratic practice consequently need to consider a threefold logic: democratic design experiments (Binder et al. 2015), the redesign of democratic procedures in Realpolitik, and the trouble to invent mechanisms to ensure that also indirect consequences of our design decision are taken into account – our own practice is not necessarily more democratic than others.

A pragmatic proposal for design: Cultivating hesitation The democratic project of pragmatism, after all, is to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016) of never fulfillable democratic legitimation. To not avoid confrontation in practice, to make despite the knowledge that what we produce is contingent, that there is no objectivity grounding our political everyday (design) decisions, nor simply necessity a situation marked as crisis might suggest. Democracy is nothing that can be or should be fixed by making – to the contrary, by ‘fixing’ it, we deprive it of its inherently needed quality of constant movement. The only and possibly most democratic option of design is therefore to keep moving as well, not as a movement towards making the next thing, but as cultivation of hesitation in practice. It means to make with and in the presence of others who might not be able to articulate themselves or articulate in ways that are beyond our epistemological frames. The pragmatic cosmopolitical proposal (Stengers 2005) invites us to become ready and attuned (Akama and Light 2018) to the necessary Others challenging our own hegemonic practices as designers and to ask: ‘What are we busy ­doing?’ (Stengers 2005, 996). We need to come into friction with these Others and our own sedimented practices – and we also need to look at democratic politics as sedimented practices and understand where we, as designers and citizens, can contribute to opening up new ideas of what it means to practice democracy.

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1

The danger in ‘making things happen’ without democratic legitimation. The frustration of d ­ emocratic ­legitimation processes is understandable but cannot be simply circumvented by making without ­democratic legitimation.

References Akama, Yoko, and Ann Light (2018). ‘Practices of Readiness: Punctuation, Poise and the Contingencies of Participatory Design.’ 1–12. Binder, Thomas, Eva Brandt, Pelle Ehn, and Joachim Halse (2015). ‘Democratic Design Experiments: ­Between Parliament and Laboratory.’ CoDesign 11 (3–4). Binder, Thomas, Pelle Ehn, Giorgio de Michelis, Guilio Jacucci, Per Linde, and Ina Wagner (2011). Design Things. Edited by Ken Friedman and Erik Stolterman. Design Thi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Björgvinsson, Erling, Pelle Ehn, and Per-Anders Hillgren (2012). ‘Agonistic Participatory Design: Working with Marginalised Social Movements.’ CoDesign 8 (2–3): 127–44. Black Mountain College (1941). ‘Black Mountain College Bulletin 6, 1940/41.’ Ashville, NC: Black Mountain College, Courtesy of Western Regional Archive, State Archives of North Carolina. Blauvelt, Andrew (2011). ‘Andrew Blauvelt.’ Participate. Designing with User-Generated Content, edited by Helen Armstrong and Zvezdana Stojmirovoc, 100–101. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Bratteteig, Tone, and Ina Wagner (2014). Disentangling Participation: Power and Decision-Making in Participatory Design. Springer International Publishing. Dewey, John (1927). The Public and Its Problems. New York: Holton [Swallow Press].  — (1938). Experience and Education. New York: Macmillan Company.  — (1998). ‘Does Reality Posses Practical Character? (1908).’ In The Essential Dewey, edited by Larry A. ­Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander, 124–33. Indiana University Press. DiSalvo, Carl, Thomas Lodato, Laura Fries, Beth Schechter, and Thomas Barnwell (2011). ‘The Collective ­Articulation of Issues as Design Practice.’ CoDesign 7 (3–4): 185–97. Dreier, Theodor (1946). ‘Letter to Miss Earlene Wight, March 21, 1946.’ Western Regional Archives, State ­Archives of North Carolina. Duberman, Martin (2009). Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. New York: Dutton. Haraway, Donna (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Irani, Lilly (2015). ‘Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship.’ Science Technology and ­Human Values 40 (5): 799–824. Keshavarz, Mahmoud (2016). ‘Design-Politics – An Enquiry into Passports, Camps and Borders.’ Malmö ­University. Knorr-Cetina, Karin (2009). Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laclau, Ernesto (1990). New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso. Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel (2005). Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, ­Massachusetts: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno (2008). ‘A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special ­Attention to Peter Sloterdijk).’ Design History Society, 2. Law, John (2004). After Method – Mess in Social Science Research. New York: Routledge. Lepik, Andres (2013). ‘Think Global, Build Social!’ ArchPlus, no. 211/212: 4–10. Lindström, Kristina, and Asa Stahl (2014). Patchworking Publics-in-the-Making. Malmö: Malmö University, School of Arts and Communication K3. Marchart, Oliver (2007). Post-Foundational Political Thought. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marres, Noortje (2012). Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. ­Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Michael, Mike (2013). ‘The Idiot.’ Informática Na Educação: Teoria & Prática 16 (1). Miessen, Markus (2010). The Nightmare of Participation. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Mouffe, Chantal (2013). Agonistics: Thining the World Politically. London: Verso Books. Popplow, Laura (2020). ‘Co.Making – Design Participation in Transformation?’ University of Art and Design Linz.

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Popplow, Laura, and Melisa Duque (2017). ‘Engaging with Ghosts, Idiots & ___________________– Otherness in Participatory Design.’ In No 7 (2017): Nordes 2017: DESIGN+POWER,. Oslo. Ratto, Matt (2011). ‘Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life.’ The ­Information Society 27 (4): 252–60. Roskamm, Nikolai (2015). ‘On the Other Side of ‘Agonism’: ‘The Enemy,’ the ‘Outside,’ and the Role of Antagonism.’ Planning Theory 14 (4): 384–403. Rubio, Fernando Dominguez, and Uriel Fogué (2015). ‘Unfolding the Political Capacities of Design.’ In What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design,Nature and the Built Environment, edited by Albena Yaneva and Alejandro Zaero-Polo. New York: Routledge. Sennett, Richard (2009). The Craftsman. London, New York: Penguine Books. Stahl, Åså, and Kristina Lindström (2016). ‘Politics of Inviting: Co-Articulations of Issues in Designerly Public Engagement.’ In Design Anthropoligical Futures, edited by Rachel Charlotte Smith, 183–98. London, New York: Bloomsbury. Stengers, Isabelle (2005). ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal.’ In Making Things Public, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 994–1003. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. We are Snook (2016). ‘CycleHack: Designing a Global Movement for 25 Cities – We Are Snook – We Are Snook.’ 2016. https://wearesnook.com/projects/cyclehack/. Winner, Langdon (1980). ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ Daedalus 109 (1): 121–36.

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5  DESIGNING DEMOCRACY1 OR MUDDLING THROUGH? – A CAUTIOUS PLEA FOR REFLECTION AND MORAL DISARMAMENT IN SOCIAL/ TRANSFORMATIVE DESIGN Wolfgang Jonas

I would prefer not to. (Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener 1853)

This reflection on the potentials and limits of designing better futures is inspired by the experience while working on a recently published anthology: ‘un/certain ­futures – roles of design in social transformation processes’ (Förster et al. 2018). It is meant as a discussion piece in the context of the emerging field of transformative design theories, methodologies, and practices such as Transformation Design, Transition Design, Social Design, etc.2 The topic of ‘un/certain futures’ arose from the ongoing debates in the MA program Transformation Design3, which has been running at Braunschweig University of Art since 2015. See Jonas et al. (2016). The discussion raised questions of the kind: Can futures be designed for the better in a sustainable manner at all? Or will the effects of well-intentioned creative design interventions into otherwise independently evolving autopoietic systems4 always be internally determined reactions that appear more or less random to external observers? Do we have consent about what is actually ‘the better’ that we are aspiring to? Should the concept of design perhaps even be completely reconsidered? Heinz von Foerster (1995) argued that, in a culture open to learning, the only legitimate questions are those that cannot be answered. So, we cannot expect definite answers to these big questions; we should even be sceptical if someone claims to provide them. But we expect lots of preliminary, half-baked, and contradictory answers that might contribute to a more comprehensive – albeit fuzzy and dynamic – picture of the new field.

Calculation or design – prediction or projection? It is one of the myths, adopted from the ‘hard’ sciences, that the future is predictable, a matter of calculation, based on algorithms and data. Future states of trivial machines might be predictable, but socio-techno-cultural systems are n ­ ontrivial

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machines. They definitely do have a history (no ‘end of history’) and their future behavior depends on this history. Even more disturbing, they proceed evolutionary, irreversible in time. Seemingly causal explanations can at best be delivered ­afterwards. Attempts at generalizing these post-hoc explanations frequently lead to a kind of ‘feedbacked present’, in which tendencies are frequently intensified or subdued. Thus future will be hedged and immobilized. That’s what we are experiencing today, even in the most trivial case of personal reading/shopping recommendations from Amazon: Trajectories of path-­ dependency are projected into the future. In its banal stupidity, this sometimes seems offensive to a self-thinking subject. Even the most comprehensive data resources and the most ‘intelligent’ algorithms will not be able to produce a ­Laplacean Demon: ‘The map is not the territory’. The success of Big Data and AI is necessarily based on the belief of continuous trajectories. So they do not predict futures in a ‘scientific’ way, but they suggest, direct and manipulate futures based on this soporific belief in continuity. In a sense, the algorithms present design options, which appear plausible (based on the data) and desirable (with respect to the companies’ interests). We have a strange, toxic mix of science and economic/ political strategy. Any evolutionary or even revolutionary aspects of socio-cultural-technical development have to be carefully hidden and denied in this game/project.5 I would argue (aware of the danger of succumbing to a conspiracy theory) that this is done so as not to question the prevailing political and commercial neo-liberal concept of globalization. Outcomes of these manipulations (they call it ‘analyses’) are presented as ‘scientific’, i.e. without reasonable alternative. With this barely noticeable shift from prediction to projection, we have arrived at design, though in a rather problematic understanding of the term. As soon as we accept that history, human and social development, does not proceed along stable trajectories but rather evolutionary, then we have to think more thoroughly about the conception of design. Two issues are essential: • The problem of control: dealing with irreducible complexity? System/context distinctions, boundary judgements d ­ etermine what we can control and what we cannot. • The problem of prediction: the impossibility of prediction in a scientific sense? Futures are an issue of power relations and hegemonic struggles on value orientations. ‘Everything that is said is said by an observer’ (von Foerster 1981) – and some observers are more powerful than others. Abraham Lincoln is said to have said that ‘the best way to predict the future is to create it’. Richard Buckminster Fuller repeated the slogan. So, if we do not want to accept the suggested trajectories, we depend on the design way: we c­ reate

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­ ptions, futures on stock, in order not to be taken by surprise too much. And ‘we’ o choose what ‘we’ prefer. The central question in design is: How do we want to live?6

Contextualizing the Transformation Design concept This reflection is about contextualizing and thus, in a way, de-mystifying the mega project – at least it appears as such – of Transformation Design. In my view the project is not about introducing or defining a new sub-discipline (such as product, automotive, or fashion design). This would imply the ambitious intention to create a new radical design movement, one associated with highly moral claims to know better how to guide mankind on its long and risky way towards a more sustainable future7. Looking back, we realize that most of these radical movements have failed or have been replaced by the next big design hype. So, Transformation Design is not a new discipline, it rather describes an attitude of being fully aware of the factual and ethical implications of living and designing in an accelerated, dramatically fast era of risky change. The concept reminds us that we should permanently reconsider what it means to actively intervene in our evolving social, cultural, and natural environments. Herbert Simon’s Sciences of the Artificial (1996), one of the few basic and substantial contributions in design, address two important aspects that complement the two above-mentioned: • The interface concept, meaning that design creates the interfaces between artefacts (the ‘inner systems’) and the contexts (the ‘outer systems’) in which they have to function and survive (Simon 1996: 6). We need methodologies that help us deal with systemic complexity and issues of boundary judgment8 in order to properly define and represent the scope of our design task. • The broad definition that design means ‘to devise courses of action that aim at transferring existing situations into preferred ones’ (Simon 1996: 111). We conceive futures based on value judgments about these futures. In epistemological terms this implies that we do not act as distant, ‘objective’ observers any more but as situated participants who hold a specific stake in the situation. We are at the same time designing, are being designed, and have to carefully reflect upon our respective roles and positions in the inquiring system. Our stance must be made explicit.

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The concepts of scope and stance in Transformation Design Again (Findeli and Bousbaki 2005, Findeli 2010), we have to consider the scope of our subject matter, which is a complex mix of material and immaterial ­entities and actors. And we have to consider the stance of the designing/inquiring s­ ystem, which once might have been an individual author designer or the disembodied Cartesian observer9, but is now a hybrid mix of individual and collective knowledges, motivations, intentions, interests, and power constellations. Statements of objective truths are, at best, replaced by negotiations in a situation of ‘epistemic democracy’ (Dewey 1916), which defends the capacity of the educated and informed ‘many’ to make correct decisions and seeks to justify democracy by reference to this ability. More realistic, or, typically, truth claims are replaced by conflict and fierce struggle. Both the definitions of power regarding scope and the freedom of decision regarding stance are issues of power relationships: They determine what can be considered as changeable in a problem situation. And they determine which goals are acceptable and enforceable. Against this background we have to reflect and decide whether, in transformative processes, we consider the widest possible boundaries as negotiable or as fixed. Taking them as negotiable implies questioning the dominant regime of market society with the paradigm of continuous growth by means of production and consumption, no matter what to produce and consume, and the paradigm of the one-world world model of global development: The Global North determines the rules; the Global South has to adopt them (Escobar 2018). Questioning these beliefs may appear as designers’ hubris. On the other hand, if we take these conditions for granted, we will be mentally and discursively caught in the trivial, technocratic commonplace rhetoric of ‘change’, which tells us to adapt our values and our ways of living and working to the supposedly ­unavoidable ‘challenges’ of global economic competition. Actually, this aims at nothing else but stabilizing business as usual as long as possible and prevents any fundamental change in our ideas of global futures. Just when we assume that design does not actively change the world (even if some see themselves and act as design activists) but that it rather creates and offers options and images and narratives that present possible and desirable changes of the world, then we should avoid self-imposed thinking restrictions of any kind. Herbert Simon characterized design as a kind of ‘mental window-shopping’ (Simon 1996: 164): purchases do not have to be made to draw benefit from it. In other words, visions are unlimited. It is our task to propose and put them to the discussion. It is not our task to realize them.

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The delicate tightrope walk of Transformation Design Coming back to the above question: Are we considering Transformation Design as a new sub-discipline? No, we are not introducing a new discipline, but we are re-considering design activities under the challenging conditions of the Great Transformation (Polanyi 1944). Some may know the hypothesis (Jonas 2010) that there is no progress in design, meaning that design, as the interface-building discipline, operating in the co-evolutionary space between systems and their contexts, has to struggle hard in order to keep abreast with the dramatic changes around us. On that note I think it is time to turn things upside down and argue that Transformation Design is the most general, the overall, the basic concept. All more specific ‘tastes’ of design (dealing with products, cars, fashion, etc.) are sub-fields, limited in scope and stance, which can be derived from the basic concept: Transformation Design is the new normal design. But how is this compatible with Horst Rittel’s call for ‘a certain modesty in ­design’ (Reuter and Jonas 2013) and with Heinz von Foerster’s reminder to keep ethics implicit (von Foerster 1993, 1995)?10 A strange paradox seems to arise here. If we claim that Transformation Design is the new normal, could it be that we are even more susceptible to the hubris and mystify design’s potential even more? Maybe a ‘modest hubris’ has to be cultivated in order to transform established mindsets? Only unanswerable questions are legitimate! In any case the debate around Transformation Design raises the question: How radical should design be? How political can/should design education be and is it permitted to be? And how does it work in practice? See e.g. Herlo et al. (2017). It seems we are performing an exciting tightrope walk between modesty and hubris, especially when dealing with political topics. Maybe this is what Bruno Latour means when he asks (Latour 2013: 23): ‘… why not transform this whole business of recalling modernity into a grand question of design?’

Deficits and blind spots of Transformation Design Projects like those presented in the ‘uncertain futures’ book reveal theoretical deficits. Although we love to talk about multiple futures and options and potentialities, the debate is often narrow-minded and moral and very normative, obviously suffering from the burden of world rescue, which seems to be a kind of tacit consensus in the community. As if we knew better than others what should be achieved by means of our ­interventions. And as if it were our own responsibility to implement these options. The MA Transformation Design at Braunschweig University of Art explicitly claims ‘to reflect, initiate, design change processes’, which clearly touches the ­political:

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• To reflect: This is unproblematic, because harmless (as long as it does not dangerously radicalize thinking). • To (co-) design: According to Simon (1996), ‘To design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.’ To devise courses of action does not necessarily mean to implement them. So, also rather unproblematic, if taken seriously (design activists reject this restriction, yet). • To initiate: This is perhaps the most delicate term, where one comes closest to the misunderstanding of designers doing practical politics (living labs may be considered as – always revisable – initializations). Designers tend to overestimate the effects of their contributions. Reports on social design projects often show a naïve worldview in tackling the problems and a frightening triviality in the results; fashionable catchwords like sharing, collaboration, participation, empowerment, etc. are used too inflationary. Subsequent robust evaluations of the alleged improvements achieved through design interventions are mostly missing. In their sometimes blind search for harmony and world salvation, designers frequently ignore the complex nature of the human psyche and of social communities with all their stupidity, selfishness, hegemonic struggles, and power conflicts (Mouffe 2005). They seem to take for granted that humans are basically good, which they are obviously not. Human beings are good and bad and mostly mean (in both meanings of the term). And societies are complex and full of paradox and conflict. My critique can be summarized as the missing of an advanced and appropriate systemic social theory, which complements the delicate normative stance. Therefore, I propose to relate the considerations regarding transformative design to Niklas Luhmann’s sociological systems theory, with a special focus on three topics: systems in an autopoietic understanding, communication as a process of triple selection, and evolution as the contextual condition. Furthermore, I suggest adopting more realistic concepts of the political.

Systems theory as societal theory Luhmann (1995) argues, disturbing for many, that humans are not the basic e­ ntities of the social, but that humans consist of a hybrid conglomerate of three types of causally de-coupled autopoietic systems: bodies (living systems), c­ onsciousnesses (psychic systems), and communications (social systems). ‘Causally de-coupled’ means that they cannot specifically influence or even control each other, but they just irritate each other, reactions being determined by the respective systemic

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structures. Social, psychic, and living systems are operationally closed in that while they use and rely on resources from their environment, those resources do not become part of the systems’ operation. Psychic and social systems are structurally coupled by means of language. Functioning communication is unlikely, therefore consensus and harmony are rare phenomena in social situations. Even more disturbing in Luhmann’s theory, societies do not consist of humans but of communications. Design’s function in this context is to establish interfaces that pretend to bridge the gaps between those incompatible systemic entities.

Communication theory Designers often describe communication mainly as interaction between participants who are present in a situation, which is the ideal mode of mutual reciprocity. Pask (1980) elaborates on ‘The limits of togetherness’ under the conditions of unlimited communication. He differentiates conversation (concept sharing, aiming at agreement) and communication (signal transfer, aiming at true/false attributions). The possibility of communication, in the technical understanding, is undoubtedly the necessary condition for conversation, but the possibility of communication is not at all the sufficient condition for functioning conversation. Luhmann (1995) asserts that social systems consist of communications, and society is the most encompassing social system. Communication is characterized as a circular pattern of three basic steps, each of them a selection: information, ­utterance, understanding. Ego, the sender, selects a piece of information and transfers it into an utterance of his/her choice. Alter, the receiver, is responsible for his/her understanding, i.e. s/he understands or misunderstands the utterance and eventually continues the communication. The criterion according to which information is selected and processed is meaning (in German: Sinn). Both social systems and psychic systems operate by processing meaning, whether based on understanding or misunderstanding. The autopoietic closure of social and psychic systems results in the delicate phenomenon of double contingency: ego as well as alter find themselves in the situation of contingency regarding their further acting in the communicative system. Convergence t­ owards some stable Eigenvalue or even towards consensus is not the normal case. Jürgen Habermas, the other great German social philosopher, with his friendly normative concept of power-free public discourse, is much more popular in the Anglo-Saxon community than Niklas Luhmann, with his ‘cold’ descriptive theory. Habermas’ position (1981), however, seems more and more to be a desperate appeal to reason, rather than a realistic description of social interaction. Critics argue that a public sphere as a place of purely rational debate never existed. Evolutionary theory elements seem to be helpful for further understanding.

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Evolutionary theory Socio-cultural development may be conceived as a blind, evolutionary process without a goal, consisting of the three circular steps: variation, selection, restabilization. Social systems can change their own structures only by evolution, which feeds upon deviations from normal reproduction. Such deviations are in general accidental but in the case of social systems may be intentionally produced/­designed. Design interventions can be characterized as evolutionary variations. Yet, conscious design activities are short episodes within this ongoing process. There is only limited control over the selection- and re-stabilization processes, which means that the longer-term success of a design intervention is highly uncertain. Evolution normally operates without foresight. It may bring about systems of higher complexity; it may in the long run transform improbable events into probable ones and an observer may see this as ‘progress’, if his/her own self-referential procedures persuade him/her to do so. Only the theory of evolution can explain the structural social transformation in history from segmentation to stratification to functional differentiation, which has led to present-day world society. And again, observers may see this as progress. Systemic complexity and evolutionary unpredictability as the basic c­ onditions of any kind of design heavily challenge any well-intentioned and goal-­directed designerly endeavours. I have formulated this fundamental reservation in various publications as the problem of control and the problem of prediction (Jonas 2012, 2015); see above.

Design and the political The above discussions question the goal-oriented problem-solving potential of transformative design. If we consider transformative design as a theory and methodology and an attitude to change things in society for the better, then we have to go further and thoroughly reflect and debate design’s agencies at the intersection of bottom-up processes, public institutions, and formalized politics. Political theory distinguishes between politics – Politik – la politique and the political – das Politische – le politique. The German political theory discourse uses the notion of the ‘political difference’, which explicates the distinction: Politics means a narrow operational concept and refers to politics as a social functional system (e.g. state, government, parties, parliamentary routines, etc.) dealing with the question of how to organize politics and how this organization can be justified. On the other hand, the broad concept of the political points to philosophical questions about the nature of the political and deals with the political dimension of the social. Therefore, the political is an essential category for reflection on transformative design.

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Two tradition lines can be distinguished in the concept of the political (Mouffe 2005): the associative and the dissociative line, which can be related to Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt, respectively. Arendt formulates an associative theory of the political, which defines the political as a free, communicative space of cooperation, whereas Schmitt emphasizes the dissociative aspect, which conceives the political as an area of power and conflict. The autonomy of the political as opposed to other areas of the social is central in the associative concept. Arendt finds this authentic character in communicative moments of ‘acting in concert’ and ‘acting together’, which can easily be related to normative concepts of transformative design. Schmitt’s dissociative concept is based on the notion of antagonism, which describes a struggle for dominance in a friend – enemy relation. Design thinker and critic Tony Fry (2010) refers very much to Schmitt. Building on Schmitt, Chantal Mouffe developed the concept of agonism: ­Instead of a friend–enemy relation, the relationship is formulated by the principle of the adversary or the opponent. Opponents recognize the legitimacy of the opponents, without aiming at agreement or consensus. This agonism is particularly ­evident in the struggle of incompatible hegemonic projects. The goal here is not the destruction of the opponents as with Carl Schmitt, but the implementation of their own projects. Since the political consists of agonisms, the hegemonic character of social order must be recognized. Obviously human societies are trapped in a perpetual dynamic of conflict and crisis, with modernization at a standstill. The deeply rooted ideology of competition operates as a mode of rationality that underpins the order of domination. The concept of a domination-free discourse (Habermas) seems naïve meanwhile. And the neo-liberal notion of the post-political, as put forward by Ulrich Beck and ­Anthony Giddens, appears to be equally inappropriate.

Who is the client? And where is the designer? Herbert Simon’s question: ‘Who is the client?’ in Chapter 6 of the Sciences of the ­Artificial, ‘Social Planning: Designing the Evolving Artifact’, refers to ‘society as the client’ and the illusion of a conflict-free world (1996: 153): It may seem obvious that all ambiguities should be resolved by identifying the client with the whole society. That would be a clear-cut solution in a world without conflict of interest or uncertainty in professional judgement.

But:

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The members of an organization or a society for whom plans are made are not passive instruments, but are themselves designers who are seeking to use the system to further their own goals.

One may object that in our progressive notion of design, plans are not made for but with people. This simplistic notion of involvement is what Valerie Brown et al. (2010) address and elaborate in their reflections on the power relationships ­between the researcher and the community. They thoroughly reflect the spectrum between complete separation and entire involvement of the observer, or between first and second order cybernetics, and thus contribute to make the designers’ role explicit. They distinguish six relational states, which directly affect the quality of the conversational setting in transformative design: • • • • • •

to work on a community: observer, external planner to work for a community: employee to work on behalf of a community: delegate to work with a community: partnership to work within a community: sharing (their values and aims) to work as a community: belonging to the community

This series opens a continuum between the one extreme of the expert designer or Cartesian inquirer (to work on a community from the position of an external ­observer) and the other extreme of the inquiring community (to work as a community, being inseparable part of the design situation). The latter comes close to John Dewey’s ideal of ‘epistemic democracy’ as a collective exercise in practical intelligence (Dewey 1916). In the first case we have design as a consultant, contractor or advisor of politics, developing options, narratives, and moderating and facilitating decision-­ making processes for others. But not deciding. Value conflicts are likely to occur with the professional expert, which is well-known in the profession: Can I still agree with my conscience? In the second case the individual design researcher acts as a politically and socially responsible individual. Role conflicts between professional and citizen are likely to occur, which is new and has to be reflected. New role models show up: the ‘citizen designer’ or the ‘designing citizen’, which are re-enacting utopias of the 1970s about the vanishing of expert cultures in the digital age. John Chris Jones’ (2000) narrative of the ‘creative democracy’, which he sees possible with the emergence of the internet, is an example. The traditional designer ­vanishes.

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Conclusion 1: Transformation Design is political, but does not make politics Design’s unquestioned task seems to be to develop options, increase the variety of choices, cultivate the role as scout, agent provocateur, jester, etc. Designing is ­always oriented towards a future that cannot be known, thus we do not want to restrict but we want to enrich the future. It is up to future humans to decide whether what we create is an enrichment in the sense of being aesthetically potent. It is not for us to decide. Which is – surprise! – very close to Herbert Simon, the notorious positivist (1996: 162): A paradoxical, but perhaps realistic, view of design goals is that their function is to motivate activity, which in turn will generate new goals. […] Our essential task – a big enough one to be sure – is simply to keep open the options for the future or perhaps even to broaden them a bit by creating new variety and new niches. Our grandchildren cannot ask more of us than that we offer to them the same chance for adventure, for the pursuit of new and interesting design that we have had.

Back to the present, back to the political. I fully agree with Carl DiSalvo (2010) who relates design activity to Chantal Mouffe’s (2005) political theory of agonism, as ­described above. All of this perfectly corresponds with Rittel and Webber’s earlier concept of ‘second generation design’ as an argumentative process (Reuter and ­Jonas 2013). Di Salvo (2010): Simply stated, the purpose of political design is to do the work of agonism. This means first and foremost it does the work of creating spaces for revealing and confronting power relations, i.e., it creates spaces of contest. This occurs both in and through the objects and processes of design: the objects and processes of design are both the site and means of agonistic pluralism.

Thus, my hypothesis for the moment: Design is political, but does not make politics! Design’s main tasks are to develop options, to increase the variety of choices, to cultivate its role as agent provocateur for the public (Dunne and Raby 2013). Design scientist, AI pioneer and famous economist Herbert Simon (1996: 163, 164) argued quite early: One desideratum would be a world offering as many alternatives as possible to future decision makers, avoiding irreversible commitments that they cannot undo. […] The idea of final goals is inconsistent with our limited ability to foretell or determine the future. The result of our actions is to establish initial conditions for the next succeeding stage of action. What we call ‘final’ goals are in fact criteria for choosing the initial conditions that we will leave to our successors.

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And he continues: The act of envisioning possibilities and elaborating them is itself a pleasurable and valuable experience. Just as realized plans may be a source of new experience, so new prospects are opened up at each step in the process of design. Designing is a kind of mental window shopping. Purchases do not have to be made to get pleasure from it. [… ] One can envisage a future, however, in which our main interest in both science and design will lie in what they teach us about the world and not in what they allow us to do to the world. Design like science is a tool for understanding as well as for acting.

In my own words: It is necessary to rethink the balance between reflecting and ­acting in design.

Conclusion 2: Designing as ‘happily muddling through’? Sociologist Dirk Baecker (2000) called design the expert discipline for dealing with not-knowing. His more recent, slightly paradox dictum of design as a means of ‘­Uncertainty Absorption in the Next Society’ (Baecker 2015) points in a promising direction. His argument is that today we know about the irreducible complexity of problematic situations, and, at the same time, the contingency of all options that we are facing. Design does not obscure this uncertainty but makes it explicit and reflective. Precisely because of this transparency it contributes to uncertainty absorption. One can speak of a kind of ‘muddling through’, which is in no way a negative or pejorative concept. It is taken from Management Sciences (Lindblom 1959, 1979). The starting point of Lindblom’s reflections is the finiteness of any holistic view of a social system. Overall plans therefore necessarily lead to unexpected and undesirable (secondary) consequences in the case of direct implementation. He argues for incrementalism, gradualism, muddling through as a process of negotiation11. My two programmatic hypotheses address this issue: 1) Re-conceptualize and broaden the understanding of design. From shaping artefacts to creating dialogical/agonistic ­processes of exploring and conceiving possible/preferable futures. Call this activity design or politics or muddling through or whatever (what actually happens is usually muddling through anyway). 2) Turn from technocratic prediction/planning/problem-solving to designerly projection (Futures Studies have taken this turn already). Establish experimental, iterative cultures of curiosity, introduce playfulness and create smaller-scale playgrounds

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and arenas of trial and error. Be radical on the playground – i­ ncremental in the real world. Isabelle Stengers (2011) is talking about ‘the divorce between capitalism and the great tale of progress’. And she states the emergence of ‘knowledge economies’, the already mentioned questionable but powerful hybrids of science and economy. So, the big normative core of this project, in the most general meaning (aware of the danger of falling victim to the blind spot of ideological hubris), is the task of re-­ embedding the markets, i.e. to transform our present market society into a society with markets (Polanyi 1944). Following Bruno Latour, design may be conceived as the appropriate sub­ stitute for the ambitious and meanwhile obsolete modernist mega-projects of ­technological progress, social revolution, and ultimate modernization. Let’s call it ‘happily muddling through’.

And finally a plea for more serenity, playfulness, and (self-) irony So, instead of regarding design as strained social activism I suggest to conceive it as the discipline, or the un-discipline, of playing with un/certainty: certain certainties, uncertain certainties, certain uncertainties, uncertain uncertainties, critical uncertainties … My explicit plea is: Let’s play with supposedly fixed realities, with supposedly fixed epistemic standards that we sometimes take too uncritically of the sciences, with our own roles in design situations. For example, cultivate the role as jester (John Chris Jones). Overcome the strained fixation on desired utopias or dystopias to be avoided in favor of the playful design of mind-opening heterotopias, which can be discussed publicly (Foucault 1990). This may relieve design (at least a bit) of the moral burden of world salvation. And, finally, it allows us to do some good for ourselves. Otl Aicher (1991: 195, my translation): ‘In design, man realizes him/herself. Otherwise he remains a civil servant.’ (im entwerfen kommt der mensch zu sich selbst. anders bleibt er beamter.)

1 2 3

In the following I consider this political claim as an aspect of the broader concept of Transformation ­Design. Part of it has been published in the Journal of Design Thinking, University of Tehran, 2019: https://jdt. ut.ac.ir). See http://www.hbk-bs.de/studiengaenge/transformation-design/ and http://transformazine.de.

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The term autopoiesis (from Greek αὐτo- (auto-), meaning ‘self’, and ποίησις (poiesis), ­meaning ‘­creation, production’) refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. The term was introduced in 1972 by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells. Since then the concept has been also applied to the fields of cognition, ­systems theory and sociology. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis. 5 By the way, evolution and revolution are not that different in this context – evolution can be very ­disruptive. 6 So far I have not elaborated on the big challenges (climate change, global injustice, etc.) we are facing. All this, including the allegedly compelling remedies against it (growth, competition, technological progress, more of the same) is the background against which I argue. 7 The Transition Design project at Carnegie Mellon University appears to be of this kind. See http://transitiondesign.net. 8 Boundary judgement or Boundary critique (BC) is the concept in critical systems thinking that, according to Ulrich (2002), states that ‘both the meaning and the validity of professional propositions always depend on boundary judgments as to what ‘facts’ (observation) and ‘norms’ (valuation standards) are to be considered relevant’ or not. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_critique. 9 In Western scientific ontology all human perceptions are referred to a viewpoint of Cartesian positional identity. This observer has been traditionally treated as real, the viewer of external objective reality. In many Oriental systems based on introspective techniques of producing ‘oceanic’ experience, it is regarded as virtual and the objective/subjective antithesis as contingent. 10 Von Foerster formulated the following rule: ‘For any discourse, I may have – say, in science, philosophy, epistemology, therapy, etc. – to master the use of my language so that ethics is implicit. What do I mean by that? I mean by that to let language and action ride on an underground river of ethics, and to see to it that one is not thrown off, so that ethics does not become explicit, and so that language does not degenerate into moralization.’ See https://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html, accessed 04 Sept. 2018. 11 Charles E. Lindblom was one of the early developers and advocates of the theory of Incrementalism in policy and decision-making. This view (also called Gradualism) takes a ‘baby-steps’, ‘Muddling Through’ or ‘Echternach Theory’ approach to decision-making processes. In it, policy change is, under most circumstances, evolutionary rather than revolutionary. He came to this view through his extensive studies of welfare policies and trade unions throughout the industrialized world. These views are set out in two articles, separated by 20 years: ‘The Science Of ‘Muddling Through’’ (1959) and ‘Still Muddling, Not yet through’ (1979), both published in Public Administration Review. Together with his friend, colleague and fellow Yale professor Robert A. Dahl, Lindblom was a champion of the polyarchy (or pluralistic) view of political elites and governance in the late 1950s and early 1960s. According to this view, no single, monolithic elite controls government and society, but rather a series of specialized elites compete and bargain with one another for control. It is this peaceful competition and compromise ­between elites in politics and the marketplace that drives free-market democracy and allows it to thrive. However, Lindblom soon began to see the shortcomings of polyarchy with regard to democratic governance. When certain groups of elites gain crucial advantages, become too successful and begin to collude with one another instead of compete, polyarchy can easily turn into corporatism. In his best known work, Politics And Markets (1977), Lindblom notes the ‘Privileged position of business in Polyarchy’. He also introduces the concept of ‘circularity’, or ‘controlled volitions’ where ‘even in the democracies, masses are persuaded to ask from elites only what elites wish to give them.’ Thus any real choices and competition are limited. Worse still, any development of alternative choices or even any serious discussion and consideration of them is effectively discouraged. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_E._Lindblom. 4

References Aicher, Otl (1991). ‘die welt als entwurf.’ In die welt als entwurf, Otl Aicher. 185–196. Berlin: Ernst & Sohn. Baecker, Dirk (2000). ‘Wie steht es mit dem Willen Allahs?.’ Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie 21 (2000), Heft 1: 145–176.

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Baecker, Dirk (2015). ‘Design Trust: Uncertainty Absorption in the Next Society.’ Merkur 69(799) December 2015: 89–97. Brown, Valerie A. (2010). ‘Collective Inquiry and Its Wicked Problems.’ In: Brown, V. A.; Harris, J. A.; Russell, J. Y. (Eds.) (2010) Tackling Wicked Problems through the transdisciplinary imagination. 61–83. London, Washington DC: Earthscan. Dewey, John (1916). Democracy and Education. New York: The Macmillan Company. Di Salvo, Carl (2012). Adversarial Design. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. ­Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Escobar, Arturo (2018). ‘Farewell to Development.’ http://greattransition.org/publication/farewell-to-development, accessed February 23rd 2018. Findeli, Alain, and Rabah Bousbaki (2005). ‘L‘éclipse de l‘objet dans les theories du projet en design.’ The ­Design Journal, Volume VIII, Number 3: 35–49. Findeli, Alain (2010). ‘Searching for design reseach questions: Some conceptual clarifications’. In Questions, Hypotheses & Conjectures, edited by Chow, R., W. Jonas, and G. Joost. Xlibris Corp. Förster, Marius, Saskia Hebert, Mona Hofmann, and Wolfgang Jonas, eds. (2018). un/certain futures – Rollen des Designs in gesellschaftlichen Transformationsprozessen. Bielefeld: transcript. Foucault, Michel (1990). ‘Andere Räume.’ In: Barck, Karlheinz u.a. (Hrsg.) Aisthesis. Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik. 34–46. Leipzig: Reclam. Fry, Tony (2010). Design as Politics. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Habermas, Jürgen (1981). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Herlo, Bianca, Andreas Unteidig, Wolfgang Jonas, and Idil Gaziulusoy (2017). ‘Perspectives on socially and ­politically oriented practices in design. A discussion-based workshop.’ Proceedings of EAD2017, Rome, ­Italy. Jonas, Wolfgang (2010). ‘Designwissenschaft als Netz von Theorien und Akteuren – 10 Anmerkungen.’ In Positionen zur Designwissenschaft, edited by F. Romero-Tejedor and W. Jonas. 79–85. Kassel: Kassel University Press. Jonas, Wolfgang (2012). ‘Exploring the swampy ground. An inquiry into the logic of design research.’ In ­Mapping design research, edited by Simon Grand and Wolfgang Jonas, 11–41. Basel: Birkhäuser. Jonas, Wolfgang (2019). ‘On futures, un/certainties, design hubris and morality – or: a cautious plea for ­reflection and moral disarmament in Transformation Design.’ Journal of Design Thinking, University of Tehran, 2019. https://jdt.ut.ac.ir. Jonas, Woflgang, Sarah Zerwas, and Kistof von Anshelm, eds. (2016). Transformation Design: Perspectives on a New Design Attitude. Basel: Birkhäuser. Jones, John Christopher (2000). the internet and everyone. London: Ellipsis. Latour, Bruno (2013). An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge: ­Harvard University Press. Lindblom, Charles E. (1959) ‘The Science of ’Muddling Through’.’ Public Administration Review Vol. 19, No. 2 (Spring, 1959): 79–88. Lindblom, Charles E. (1979). ‘Still Muddling, Not yet through.’ Public Administration Review Vol. 39, No. 6 (Nov. – Dec., 1979): 17–526. Luhmann, Niklas (1995). Social systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mouffe, Chantal (2005). On the Political. London, New York: Routledge. Pask, A. (1980). ‘The limits of togetherness.’ Information processing 80. Edited by Simon H. Lavington. ­Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing, 999–1012. Polanyi, Karl Paul (1944). The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. Rittel, Horst (2013). Thinking Design. Transdisziplinäre Konzepte für Planer und Entwerfer. Edited by Reuter, Wolf D. and Wolfgang Jonas. Basel: Birkhäuser. Simon, Herbert A. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial. 3rd edition. Originally published in 1969. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Stengers, Isabelle (2011). In Catastrophic Times. Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Open Humanities Press. Von Foerster, Heinz (1981). Observing Systems. Seaside, Cal.: Intersystems Publications. Von Foerster, Heinz (1993). KybernEthik. Berlin: Merve Verlag. Von Foerster, Heinz (1995). ‘Ethics and second-order cybernetics.’ Stanford Humanities Review, volume 4, ­issue 2: Constructions of the Mind.

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6  DESIGN AND THE POLITICS OF THE EVERYDAY Tom Bieling

Democracy1 and design form an interwoven relationship that is difficult to separate. Just as design comes into its own through use (Brandes et al. 2009), a democratic society without a public sphere is hardly conceivable. And both are all the more true if one considers democratically conditioned design aspects such as ­access to information, participation, codetermination, and the associated negotiation processes between the collective and individual. There is reason to believe that design takes (or can take) an important role in the social fabric by affecting, motivating, arguing, or even preventing social forms of behavior and role distributions through its artifacts – in the form of products, services, or interventions (Bieling 2020a). Consequently, a central responsibility of designers lies in the fact that they inevitably create social2 contexts. In other words: Design influences the form(s) in which a society arranges its coexistence. The source of strength for the continued existence of democratic communities lies not least in the permanent reinterpretation and further development of the concept of ‘the public’, and not least in the appropriation and bordercrossing of public spaces for discourse and action by changing actors (cf. Hoidn 2019). This applies even more against the background of numerous attacks on democracy, which are currently increasing in many places, even where democracy has long seemed unshakable (Margolin/Manzini 2017). But how can the pressure to act, which the conditions inevitably impose on us, become a positive call for departure, a protest against and visions for something? And in the best case scenario, make us want new utopias?3 What shape do we want to give to the future? How can we create the world instead of consuming it? And, how political can, should, or must design be?4 Especially in times in which complexity often seems to be overwhelming on the one hand, and (fake) oversimplification, fear, and superficiality in hyper-accelerated media on the other, threaten democracy (Krois 2019). From this perspective, the implications of everyday politics also reveal the potential for what Manzini calls ‘Project-centered Democracy’ (Manzini 2019), in which the projective and pragmatic nature of design is exploited in order to initiate ideas for a better future (‘making things happen’) and at the same time to prototype such futures, which means to take them a bit closer into the present in order to develop a sense of what the future might actually look like, or even better, how it might feel. This may not be enough to catapult the world (and with it the fragile concept of democracy) out of its vulnerable condition, but we can see it as a kind of precondition for making it possible at all. Society as immersive user

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­experience? More than that. As Manzini states, we need to ‘create a mesh of design actions and activities operating in different ways on different scales. All this together can be seen as a new form of democracy, or more precisely, as a new ramification of participatory democracy; a project-centred democracy in which the ­everyday-life policies […] have a role that gives a voice to the life projects of people and communities and at the same time embraces and consolidates their transformative capabilities.’ (Manzini 2019, 96). This applies even more, as it is ‘design’s ability to operate through ‘things’ and ‘systems’ that makes it particularly suitable for dealing with contemporary societal, economic and environmental issues.’ (Fuad-Luke 2009, 2). Thus design is an effective force in shaping not only material culture, but also societal values and ­human behavior (Ericson/Mazé 2011, 12). Design as a ‘critical practice’ appears for instance in the context of social engagement, political activism, or civil disobedience (Magrini 2014, 144). Manzini describes the necessity for cultural change that can be propelled by a new awareness in society and by establishing new models of behavior (Manzini 1997, 43–51). Design can play an important role here, in that its artifacts can create awareness and can motivate alternative patterns of behavior. As such, design is required to reflect on the scope of its actions and on the responsibility of the designed artifact’s possible effects (Bieling et al. 2013, 35). A ‘socially active design’, as Alastair Fuad-Luke has called it, focuses on society and its transformations toward a more sustainable way of living, working and producing (Fuad-Luke 2009, 78). Against this backdrop Unteidig et al. diagnose ‘a break in today’s discourse about the political agency of design: While historically ­designers have attempted to induce social change by designing objects, today (social) design understands itself as a change agent in a much more direct relation to the social.’ (Unteidig et al. 2017). This raises the questions, what role can activism play in design, and vice versa, what the benefit is of using design in activism?

Designing as activism Over the last decades, the number, diversity, and vigour of popular movements has increased (Harding 2001, 5) and the world has witnessed a global rise of a comparably new activism, in which political protest often takes the form of ­impulsive, non-institutional, mass action (Weibel 2014). Frequently empowered by networked communication, these social protest movements (and individuals) manage to succeed in interrupting established systems of power (ibid).5 The increasing use of designerly tools, ‘creative’ methods, and artistic expressions by these movements sometimes culminates in a kind of ‘artivism’6 (Ullrich/Bieling 2016) or what Peter Weibel calls ‘performative democracy’7 which he considers to be perhaps the 21st century’s first new art form (Weibel 2014).

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In recent years, under the banner of design activism, an emerging and increasingly popular approach to the intersection between civic engagement and various facets of sustainability8 is being pushed into the foreground. Assembled under this concept are various activities that share the outlook that design can and should create socially, politically, economically, and ecologically sustainable processes. Ann Thorpe defines activism as ‘taking intentional action to instigate change on behalf of a neglected group’ (Thorpe 2008, 1524). Social change should be supported here in that challenges to society can be addressed within a community and can thus receive more public attention. As such, existing norms of the (consumer) society are put into question and renegotiated to develop new solutions through design activism (Markussen 2013). This perspective on the social sustainability9 of design makes use of methods that do not touch upon the societal consensus but are rather often disruptive and provocative, to make some of the social wrongs clear by other means. According to Ann Thorpe, design directly borrows techniques from activist practices and develops them further (Thorpe 2008). Design activism wishes to develop a ‘counter narrative’, to demonstrate alternative proposals for the future and to furthermore provide impetus for their implementation (Bieling et al. 2014). In doing so, as Sara Hendren states, design activism uses the ‘language of ­design to address, provoke and create political debate. Instead of solving problems in the manner of industrial design, or organizing forms as in graphic design, activist design might create a series of questions or proposals using artifacts or media for unresolved ends: to provoke, or question, or experiment in search of new political conditions. It might use and enrich different tools located in the field of visual communications, material cultures or practices of social, political and campaigning movements and organisations. The point of these artifacts is contestation, discourse and action, not a tidy fix.’ (Hendren 2015). Besides raising awareness, changing perceptions, and behavior (Fuad-Luke 2009, 86), the objectives of a socially and politically engaged design obviously ­depend on the context and its particular perspective. Design is not activism and ­activism is not design. But the common ground, the shared space, is large and growingly important (Malzacher 2012). It might be considered to be a space that offers a chance for design to be ‘engaged, connected and relevant. […] a space that offers activism a chance not to get stuck in ideology, routine and functionarism, a chance to stay unpredictable and sharp.’ (Ibid.) Because activism is a dynamic process: ‘It starts when groups within society call for change, and society responds – ­either resisting, or incorporating the values encapsulated by activism.’ (Thorpe 2008, 1524).

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Political expression and collaborative approaches There is of course a difficult position that minorities, the socially weak, p ­ eripheral regions, and people or topics that ‘have no lobby’ are often confronted with. ‘­Democracy aside, they remain underrepresented in a dual sense, because their concerns are not sufficiently visible, and they lack representation of their interests. […] The first step for mobilizing the public consists of drawing attention to a topic’ (Heissenbüttel 2014, 474). Designerly (sometimes artistic) use of methods, tools, products, and materials might help people in expressing themselves, communicating with a wider public, and building up as well as supporting networks inside and outside social movements (cf. Zik 2014, 536). Some popular examples we find in the distinctive images of resistance – posters, graphics, stickers, t-shirts, memes, street art, paintings, murals on walls, hold a prominent place in the world’s visual heritage. Yet, the visual culture seems a bit like an obvious, almost classic design field of operation. Of course design engages not only with graphic or physical forms, but also architectural, speculative, explorative, or strategic, among other forms. It encompasses not only visual or tangible objects, but also user interfaces, information architectures, communications protocol (Antonelli/Hunt 2015, 7), public spaces, or service structures. Amongst these fields, design has the potential to provoke strong, controversial, or subtle social reactions, covering a broad range of expression. We have seen many of these more recently, in the protest movements from Occupy to Gezi, from Tahrir to G20, from Artúr van Balen/Tools for Action’s ­Inflatables to the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement. A prominent feature of many of these actions and movements is the ­extensive use of design strategies and artistic practices – on a rhetorical level often combined with humor, satire, and irony, and on a technical level operating with state-of-theart (social) media, documentation, and distribution channels. This obviously embraces more functions than a mere communication strategy. Another characteristic feature of these movements is the collaborative approach. Often ‘professionals’ and ‘non-professionals’ (e.g. in terms of political or design-professional experience) act together and learn from each other; sometimes not least driven by designers providing appropriate tools and formats. With the design-activist (as well as with the ‘artivist’), the field of actors has broadened. This can be regarded as both a social and technological phenomenon. As Peter Weibel states, the participation of the audience in art and design ‘has morphed into the participation of the citizens in the sphere of politics.’ (Weibel 2014, 25). This goes along with a general tendency, the rise of the ‘citizen artists’, the ‘citizen scientists’, and probably the ‘citizen designers’ too. ‘Scientists as well as ordinary citizens can become artists, just as citizens and artists can participate in scientific projects, and artists and scientists can participate as citizens in politics.’ (Weibel 2014, 26 f.) Precisely because design is so massively involved in our everyday lives, and precisely because our everyday lives – directly or indirectly – are so massively influ-

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enced by the question of which society we want to live in, and precisely because design is implicitly embedded in this question, all design can be considered political (cf. Fuad-Luke 2019). This is all the more true if one assumes that design has a fundamentally transformative potential.

Transformative potential of design Against this background, one of the central potentials of design is to develop concepts for sustainable, resilient, inclusive, and socially equitable processes and, at the same time, to make them accessible, comprehensible, and experienceable (as prototypes or ‘real products’) (cf. Bieling 2019a, 2019b). For behind the visible things that surround us there is an invisible, social dimension (cf. Burckhardt 2012), and we are inevitably involved in shaping this, too – whether consciously or unconsciously. Thus, we have a mirror situation: On the one hand, we have an ­effect on the environment; on the other hand, the changed environment has an ­effect on us. Here, reciprocal processes of transformation can be identified. This is, not least, the initial position for the concept of Transformation Design. Transformation design (Jonas et al. 2015; Sommer/Welzer 2016; Yee et al. 2017) focuses on recent social developments towards a more sustainable, socially fair, and inclusive way of life, work, and production. It questions both the consumption and production patterns of late-capitalist growth societies from a cultural, ­social, technological, and ecological point of view and initiates ­corresponding processes of change from the perspective of consumers or users. It describes the search for new ways of changing behavior and thus provoking a change in society on the basis of new forms of design discourse and design practice. Not least, it underlines a kind of paradigm shift, that runs as follows: get rid of a user-centred (or even worse, consumer-centred) design, and focus on a rather community- or society-centred design instead (Bieling 2019c). A tendency, which has been identified by some protagonists from within and beyond design research as a ‘social turn’10 – with a broad variety of labels such as social design (Banz 2016; Sachs 2018), ­design for social innovation (Manzini 2007), transition design (Irwin 2015; Irwin et al. 2015), or what Bazon Brock and Lucius Burckhardt discussed as socio-design in the 1970s (Brock 1985, 446). When considering transformation in societies, it is possible and necessary to identify overriding topics such as technology, politics, social issues, economics, and ecology. Chiara Welter points out, however, that the concrete problem areas can hardly be categorized by these abstract concepts. Rather, the transformation design – understood as a form of reflection on social change – can reveal the multiple interrelationships and dependencies of our reality(s) (cf. Welter 2019). For example, a transformation in the economic system through crypto currency can

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hardly be conceived without the technological requirements and changes or the political aspects of the democratization of payment systems. Further ecological and social impacts can be thought of that would be reflected in this example. It is inevitable that design is oriented towards a certain canon of values. Such a value-oriented design has the potential for change, which sees itself precisely not as the executive branch of marketing (cf. Koop 2019), but as a motor for transformation processes. This surely also raises the question, what roles the ‘personal value systems of designers play in the design process and its methods. Should they be suppressed in favor of enabling the widest possible range of diverse perspectives?’ (Jonas 2015), which – as Herlo et al. observe – might be in itself an ideological program (Herlo et al. 2018, 228). Or is a ‘conscious reflection and application of moral and political positions a prerequisite for design to understand itself as being political?’ (ibid.) Obviously, what exactly political design is, what it wants and can accomplish, is always an object of a wider social negotiation (Hoffmann 2014, 178f). In reference to art, Anke Hoffmann states that ‘politically committed art can only be described as articulating and taking a critical stance towards the dominant systems of power. In this respect, it sees itself nowadays also as a counter movement against the advance of neoliberalism and the established art system. Political art seeks to be art beyond representation and description by conveying a different form of effectiveness and visibility, and therefore particularly chooses strategies of active participation in shaping the world and in criticizing society.’ (Hoffmann 2014, 178f).

Speculative spaces of democracy In urban contexts, this can often be localized in public urban space; a space that continues to be the venue for protests and that is currently in an increasing hybridization with virtual space, which in turn brings with it its own mechanisms for ­disseminating information and at the same time adopts practiced strategies and viewing habits. Protest, resistance, and political agitation are centrally related to the power of (not frequently visual) messages (cf. Bieling 2019d). They live from symbols and strong images that confront, appeal, and challenge us to confront. From resistance to war, poverty, human rights, feminism, and climate protection, to the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, criticism of globalization and consumption – subjects have always been developed to formulate resistance that have sometimes been deeply imprinted in our collective memory. Design and its conceptual, functional, aesthetic, speculative, and interventional concepts can assert an oppositional public sphere (cf. Hoffmann 2014, 184); it can actively interfere in common definitions, understandings, and opinion making, and it can create effective outrage through critical, alternative, and interrogative concepts, thoughts, and prototypes (Bieling 2020b). Here, it becomes obvious

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how many (different) actors have to sit at the same table in order to really be able to take action against the multiple crises of our time. Plus, it is not about style, not about typology, but about the general approach and attitude. The grassroots movement alone is not enough; new alliances are needed. Bottom-up and top-down must cross. Municipal governments, non-profit companies, and NGOs must work together with citizens’ initiatives and activists. There is no doubt that terms such as ‘collaboration’ and ‘participation’ are becoming the focus of interest here at the latest. Of course, new challenges also arise from this.

Design and dissent Manzini demands a creation of an environment as ‘enabling system’ here, meaning that design not only provides things, but also creates framework conditions for people and communities to be able to work on their own solutions that lie beyond direct intervention by designers. He calls this ‘Improving the Space of Possibilities’. A kind of help for self-help, a design as infrastructure, as Pelle Ehn would call it (Ehn 2009). Such systems of empowerment can exist, for example, in the form of digital or analog platforms, hybrid forms of knowledge exchange, personal ­networks, or the like. Another point that could be of significance here would be the attempt to support people in their individual or collaborative projects, which also involves teaching them design skills (‘Skill Empowerment’). And not least, other forms of direct or indirect participation, such as citizen participation platforms, are important here. All this inevitably raises questions. How do designers currently assess the significance of their work for the state and prospects of democratic development? Who formulates the requirements for this? And what effects does this have on the self-image of the design disciplines? For this, it will be necessary to understand the fields of expertise in design in such a way that it is not necessarily a ­matter of ­addressing and designing this field of experimentation (in terms of rethinking democratic principles, opening up spaces of articulation, and participation), or to support it through symbolic or communicative objects, but perhaps also to actually accept that democratic debate also means that there are different positions that legitimately communicate their interests.11 Design can be understood as an actor in agonistic12 spaces, here (cf. Mouffe 2019).13 Dissent, of course, is an essential part of keeping democratic societies alive. As Milton Glaser states: ‘Our ability as citizens to voice our opinion is not only our privilege but our r­ esponsibility. Without this dialogue, the backbone of what we have fought so desperately for could easily crumble.’ (Glaser/Ilic 2005). Perhaps the task for designers is to actually ­focus on such concrete conflicts and controversies. Recognizing, involving, and ­acknowledging them in the process of democracy also means to make an ­essential

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­contribution to ensuring that democracy does not only function as a structure, but r­ emains an ­evolutionary, vibrant process. One that provokes and ­requires practical conflicts and positional disputes, as well as an epistemic (e.g. visual, informative) representation of both. Undoubtedly this is what design can deliver. And technological progress opens up completely new possibilities here (and at the same time poses dangers). But to what extent design (activist) projects should be rather classified and valued as design projects or political action, is not always easy to say. In fact, this can be regarded as part of their strategy, too, because eventually they are both (Ullrich/Bieling 2017). This becomes even more obvious in the context of mass digitalization, artificial intelligence, and the increasing importance of information and communication technologies.

What role technology can play? As technology has infiltrated the world in which we live, ‘societal development and its political mobilization takes place with and through technology. It defines a space for political intervention.’ (Bunz 2014, 187). But how can we conceive of political intervention with technology today? To regard a design project or activist object as political just because it addresses precise political topics and local political difficulties would be simplistic (cf. Magrini 2014, 150). Digital technologies and electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, computers, self-driving cars, or smart watches, need to be viewed and reclassified in a broader political context ‘to ensure that the circumstances of their consumption and their meaning for our society are correctly understood [and to] invite the consumers to actively participate in the political, economic, and cultural system in which they live. [Thus] unmistakably, the [artists/authors/creators/designers] affirm the responsibility of the individual in shaping our society and the moral values upon which it is based.’ (ibid.) Therefore, testing possibilities as well as using design as a means of analyzing social processes and power structures, making them public, and helping to rethink them (Holten 2013, 106) is merely one aspect of design (activism). Here we begin to understand what Carl DiSalvo means when he describes political design as something that occurs when the object or processes of design activism are used to reveal and contest existing configurations and conditions of society (DiSalvo 2010). Actually, this one goes even a little step further, as it clarifies that design activism is something that enables people themselves to take action.

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Conclusion Understanding and applying these mechanisms, logics, and activities of design offers opportunities for ideological engagement – in a good or in a bad sense. This has to be considered especially against the background that the potential of design/ activist mechanisms have meanwhile also been recognized and practiced in rightwing populist, anti-democratic movements as a necessary instrument of political struggle.14 Examining the fields of action in which design practice meets forms of political radicalization will help us to better understand the rituals, structures, and meanings of both design and activism, as well as the possibilities and limits of political design decisions. And it shall help us to derive arguments and e­ xamples for the transformative potential of future design activism. Achieving this, however, also requires a rethinking of the traditional under­ esign standing and application of design. As Manzini argues, this is the task of the d community itself. Today, it is essential to develop a strong standpoint and actively represent it. A position against the ongoing processes of de-democratization. ‘The development of democratic forms and processes has always involved design, and should continue to do so.’ (Margolin/Manzini 2017). But with far more areas of application and options for action for designers. And precisely because global challenges such as the future of work, social inequality, or ecological sustainability are interdependent, there is a chance for design to develop new, dynamic forms of ‘proactive resistance’.

1

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Etymologically the term democracy (ancient Greek démos = ‘people’, krátos = ‘power/violence/rule’) goes back to the principle of power emanating from the people (rule of the people). A term that is in turn closely linked to three other terms – freedom, equality and justice. Although the concept of justice is very complex in itself and a question of viewpoint (e.g. liberal vs. socialist understanding of justice), it also b­ecomes clear how closely these concepts are linked to the understanding of social innovation. The concept ‘social’ is understood here in its general sense as concerning what is common and related to aspects of cohabitation and coexistence. Five hundred years ago the English statesman and diplomat Sir Thomas More invented a new word by describing the distant, ideal society ‘Utopia’ (and by the way created a world classic in the field of social philosophy): literally translated as ‘non-place’, in the figurative sense it is what is not, but should be. In this context, ‘political’ refers to action that influences the community. Not only in the recent ­design discourses, there has been failures to distinguish between the political and politics. As Toni Fry states: ‘Politics is an institutionalised practice exercised by individuals, organisations and states, while the ­political exists as a wider sphere of activity embedded in the directive structures of a society and in the conduct of humans as ‘political animals.’ Politics effectively takes place in the sphere of the political wherein the agency of things – material and immaterial – is determined and exercised as they are perceived, and become directly or indirectly influenced, by a political ideology. There has been a general societal perceptual failure to distinguish between the political and politics, in large part because, as Claude Lefort has pointed out, the latter acts to conceal the nature of the former‘ (Fry 2010, 6). At least for a short moment in history, as Peter Weibel states. A combination of the words art and activism. Currently most well-known representatives are artist/­activist-groups such as Zentrum für politische Schönheit (‘political beauty’), Tools for Action, Peng

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7 8 9

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11 12 13

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­Collective, Enmedio, Etoy, Jody, Dashndem, the Yes Men or some of the works by John Jordan, James ­Bridle, Artúr van Balen, Liam Young, and Ai Weiwei. ‘A new form of public art is emerging, namely public politics. We are witnessing the evolution of a “performative democracy”.’ (Weibel 2014, 25). Here I refer to the cultural, political, social, ecological and economic dimensions of sustainability. Design activism is occasionally used as a synonym for socially sustainable design (Markussen 2019), with the objection to create ‘long-lasting prosperity and well-being for human and ecological systems’ (Thorpe 2008). The term Social Turn was coined by the art historian Claire Bishop in her essay The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents (Bishop 2006), to describe the recent return to socially engaged art that is ­collaborative, often participatory and involves people as the medium or material of the work. During the ‘Basislager Demokratie’ (2018/19) this has been pointed out by Jesko Fezer in the context of the exhibition ‘Politics of Design – Design of Politics’ at Pinakothek der Moderne (Borries 2018). Carl DiSalvo builds his concept of Adversarial Design (DiSalvo 2012), when examining design through the lens of agonism, a political theory that emphasizes contention as foundational to democracy. Chantal Mouffe has discussed several perspectives on the relations between art/design and politics in terms of two separately constituted fields: the aesthetic dimensions in the political, and the political ­dimensions in art (Mouffe 2019). ‘The emergence of New Right movements challenge the design disciplines in ways that were previously ­unfamiliar, because the political success of the New Right is to a large extent based on purposeful design achievements: On efficient communication design in social media; on the subversive aestheticization of protests; and finally, on the creative coding of entire spaces.’ (DGTF 2019).

References Antonelli, Paola and Jamer Hunt (2015). Design and Violence. New York: MoMa. Banz, Claudia (Ed.) (2016). Social Design – Gestalten für die Transformation der Gesellschaft. Bielefeld: ­Transcript. Bieling, Tom (2019a). Inklusion als Entwurf. Teilhabe orientierte Forschung über, für und durch Design. Board of International Research in Design. Basel: Birkhäuser. Bieling, Tom (2019b). ‘Design and Inclusion – An Approach to Aspects of Integrative Design.’ In Integrative ­Design: Essays and Projects. edited by Ralf Michel. Board of International Research in Design. 97–112. Basel: Birkhäuser. Bieling, Tom (2019c). ‘Designing Utopia – Designers as Catalysts for Transformation.’ In: DESIGNABILITIES Design Research Journal (05) 2019. https://tinyurl.com/y6ampxfr [accessed: 11th August 2019. Bieling, Tom (Ed.) (2019d). Design (&) Activism – Perspectives on Design as Activism and Activism as Design. Milano: Mimesis International. Bieling, Tom (Hg.) (2020a). Gender (&) Design. Theorien und Praktiken zur Geschlechterkonstruktion und -­gestaltung. Milano: Mimesis. Bieling, Tom, Florian Sametinger, and Gesche Joost (2013). ‘Social Dimensions of Design Research.’ In ­ Baltic Horizons, No 21 (118), II. Social, ethical and political Aspects of Research in Design; October 2013: 35–40. EuroAcademy Series Art & Design, Euroakadeemia, Tallinn, Estonia. Bieling, Tom (2020b). ‘Fact and Fiction – Design as a Search for Reality on the Circuit of Lies.’ In: Flusser ­Studies 29 (Centennial Vilém Flusser Birthday Edition), May 2020, Lugano. Bieling, Tom, Gesche Joost, and Florian Sametinger (2014). ‘Die soziale Dimension’. In Die Geschichte des ­nachhaltigen Designs, edited by Fuhs, Brocchi, Maxein & Draser. 218 – 229. Bad Homburg: VAS. Bishop, Claire (2006). ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents.’ International Art Forum, Feb. 2006, Vol. 44, No. 6. New York. von Borries, Friedrich (2018). Politics of Design, Design of Politics. München, Pinakothek der Moderne, edited by Angelika Nollert, Die Neue Sammlung. König, Köln. Brandes, Uta, Stich, Sonja, Wender, Miriam (2009). Design by Use: The Everyday Metamorphosis of Things. Board of International Research in Design. Basel: Birkhäuser. Brock, Bazon (1985). Ästhetik als Vermittlung – Arbeitsbiographie eines Generalisten. Ostfildern: DuMont.

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Bunz, Mercedes (2014). ‘Technology as Political Intervention.’ In Political Interventions, Edition Digital Culture 1, edited by Dominik Landwehr.186–196. Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag. Burckhardt, Lucius (2012). Design ist unsichtbar: Entwurf, Gesellschaft und Pädagogik. Berlin: Schmitz. DiSalvo, Carl (2010). ‘Design, Democracy and Agonistic Pluralism.’ In Proceedings of the Design Research ­Society Conference 2010. Montreal. DiSalvo, Carl (2012). Adversarial Design. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. DGTF (2019). ‘Lechts und Rinks: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Design, Populismus, neue Rechte und Engagement.’ Tagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Designtheorie und -forschung. 15. – 16. November 2019, Kunsthochschule Kassel. Ehn, Pelle (2009). ‘Design Things and Living Labs. Participatory Design and Design as Infrastructuring.’ In Multiple Ways to Design Research – Research cases that reshape the design discipline, Proceedings of the Swiss Design Network Symposium 2009. 52–64. Lugano. Ericson, Magnus, and Ramia Maze (2011). Design Act – Socially and politically engaged Design today – critical roles and emerging tactics. Berlin: Sternberg. Fry, Tony (2010). Design as Politics. London: Berg. Fuad-Luke, Alastair (2009). Design activism: beautiful strangeness for a sustainable world. London: ­Earthscan. Fuad-Luke, Alastair (2009). ‘Beautiful Strangeness revisited – Generative, disruptive, fabulative, design-led Activism.’ In Design (&) Activism – Perspectives on Design as Activism and Activism as Design edited by Tom Bieling. 173–188. Mimesis International, Milano. Gee, Tim (2011). Counterpower: Making Change Happen. London: World Changing; Edition Unstated edition. Glaser, Milton, and Mirko Ilic (2005). Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics. Beverley, MA: Rockport. Harding, Thomas (2001). The Video Activist Handbook. London: Pluto. Heissenbüttel, Dietrich (2014). ‘Protests everywhere?.’ In Global Activism – Art and Conflict in the 21st Century edited by Peter Weibel. ZKM Karlsruhe. 462–482. Cambridge, MA; London, England: MIT Press. Hendren, Sara (2015). ‘Notes on Design Activism.’ Accessible Icon. Herlo, Bianca, Andreas Unteidig, and Gesche Joost (2018). ‘Community Now? Conflicts, Interventions, New ­Publics’. In Unfrozen – a Design Research Reader by the Swiss Design Network. 215–230. Zürich: Triest. Hoffmann, Anke (2014). ‘Tactics of Appropriating Reality.’ In Political Interventions; Edition Digital Culture 1, edited by Dominik Landwehr. 176–185. Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag. Hoidn, Barbara (2019). ‘Demo:Polis – The Right to Public Space.’ In Design (&) Activism – Perspectives on ­Design as Activism and Activism as Design edited by Tom Bieling . Milano: Mimesis. Holten, Johan (Ed.) (2013). Macht der Machtlosen – Power of the Powerless. Staatliche Kunsthalle BadenBaden. Köln: Walther König. Irwin, Terry (2015). ‘Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study and Research.’ Design and Culture Journal 9/2015. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. Irwin, Terry, Gideon Kossoff, and Cameron Tonkinwise (2015). ‘Transition Design: An Educational Framework for Advancing the Study and Design of Sustainable Transitions.’ 6th International Sustainability Transitions Conference (8/2015), University of Sussex, UK. Jonas, Wolfgang (2015). ‘Social Transformation Design as a form of Research Through Design (RTD): Some historical, theoretical, and methodological remarks.’ In Transformation Design: Perspectives on a New Design Attitude, edited by Wolfgang Jonas, Sarah Zerwas, and Kristof von Anshelm. Board of International Research in Design. 114–133. Basel: Birkhäuser. Jonas, Wolfgang, Sarah Zerwas, and Kristof von Anshelm (2015). Transformation Design – Perspectives on a New Design Attitude. Board of International Research in Design. Basel: Birkhäuser. Koop, Andreas (2019). Schön und gut. Basel: Birkhäuser. Krois, Kris (2019). ‘Make Transformation tangible’. By Design or by Disaster Conference, 11–14 April 2019, Bolzano. Magrini, Boris (2014). ‘Beyond mere Tools.’ In Political Interventions; Edition Digital Culture 1 edited by Dominik Landwehr. 140–151. Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag. Malzacher, Florian (2012). ‘Truth is concrete. Theorie zur Praxis – Reader in Progress.’ Opening Introduction for the 24/7 Marathon camp on artistic strategies in politics and political strategies in art. 21.– 28.09.2012 at Steirischer Herbst, Graz. Manzini, Ezio (1997). ‘Leapfrog – designing sustainability.’ Domus, 01: 43–51. Manzini, Ezio (2007). ‘Design Research for Sustainable Social Innovation.’ In Design Research Now edited by Ralf Michel. Basel: Birkhäuser.

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Manzini, Ezio (2019). Politics of the Everyday (Designing in Dark Times). New York: Bloomsbury [not published yet]. Margolin, Victor, Manzini, Ezio (2017). Open Letter to the Design Community: Stand Up For Democracy. ­Chicago, 5 March 2017. Markussen, Thomas (2013). ‘The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism: Enacting Design between Art and Politics.’ Design Issues Vol. 29, No 1 (2012). Markussen, Thomas (2019). ‘The impure Politics of Design Activism.’ In Design (&) Activism – Perspectives on Design as Activism and Activism as Design edited by Tom Bieling. 35–46. Milano: Mimesis International. Michaelsen, Marcus (2014). ‘Beyond the ‘Twitter Revolution’: Digital Media and Political Change in Iran.’ In Global Activism – Art and Conflict in the 21st Century edited by Peter Weibel. ZKM Karlsruhe. 384–395. Cambridge, MA; London, England: MIT Press. Mouffe, Chantal (2019). ‘Artistic Strategies in Politics and Political Strategies in Art.’ In Design (&) Activism – Perspectives on Design as Activism and Activism as Design edited by Tom Bieling. 53–59. Milano: Mimesis International. Sachs, Angeli (Ed.) (2018). Social Design – Partizipation und Empowerment. Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers. Sommer, Bernd, and Harald Welzer (2016). Transformationsdesign – Wege in eine zukunftsfähige Moderne. München: Oekom. Thorpe, Ann (2008). ‘Design as activism: A conceptual tool.’ In: Proceedings of Changing the Change Conference, Turin July 2008, 1523–1535. Thorpe, Ann (2019). ‘Design Activism in the Context of Transport and Mobility.’ In Design (&) Activism – Perspectives on Design as Activism and Activism as Design edited by Tom Bieling. 189–204. Milano: Mimesis International. Ullrich, Wolfgang, and Tom Bieling (2017). ‘Die Kunst als fünfte Gewalt im Staat? – Ein Gespräch über Artivismus.’ DESIGNABILITIES Design Research Journal, (9) 2017. https://designabilities.files.wordpress. com/2017/09/designabilities_wolfgangullrich_tombieling_artivismus_sept2016-17.pdf. [Full version of a shorter text initially published in Ullrich/Bieling 2016]. Ullrich, Wolfgang, and Tom Bieling (2016). ‘Die Kunst als fünfte Gewalt im Staat? – Ein Gespräch über Artivismus.’ Die Referentin – Kunst und kulturelle Nahversorgung; Referentin #5, September 2016. 10–13. Linz, Österreich. Unteidig, Andreas, Blanca Dominguez Cobreros, Elizabetth Calderon-Luning, and Gesche Joost (2017). ‘­Digital commons, urban struggles and the role of Design. Design for Next.’ EAD12, Rome. Weibel, Peter (Ed.) (2014). Global Activism – Art and Conflict in the 21st Century. ZKM Karlsruhe. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press. Welter, Chiara (2019). ‘Wie Wien wirklich zur lebenswertesten Stadt der Welt werden kann.’ DESIGNABILITIES Design Research Journal (08) 2019. Accessed: August 14, 2019. https://tinyurl.com/yyqeryaa. Yee, Joyce, Emma Jeffries, and Kamil Michlewski (2017). Transformations – 7 Roles to drive Change by Design. Amsterdam: BIS. Zik, M. Ragip (2014). ‘Raising Resistance: Reinterpreting Art within the Gezi Movement.’ In Global Activism – Art and Conflict in the 21st Century, edited by Peter Weibel. ZKM Karlsruhe. 535–543. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press.

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7  DESOCRACY – CONTRADICTIONS AND ­POSSIBILITIES WITHIN AND BETWEEN ­DEMOCRACY AND DESIGN Michael Erlhoff

General ideas are always Generals’ ideas Virginia Woolfe

First of all In the first instance, this essay will endeavour to briefly discuss the complexity and conflicts of both democracy and design. In doing so, concepts will be presented that are certainly not new and will therefore seem somewhat familiar; however, this is inevitable seeing that it is essential to deal with these difficulties with an extensive discussion, far from naïve enthusiasm or any form of euphoria. At first, it may almost sound desperate to merely denominate unavoidable problems and to first of all question any kind of initiative. However, despite possible frustration, this is exactly why it is necessary to continue reading the text, as possibilities or even necessities for intensive activities and actions only accrue from all these conflicts and their definition. Particularly in view of the fact that in the second part of the essay, democracy and design are brought together in their potential and in their requisite context. Here we go.

‘We are the people’ Hopefully, it can be agreed that any autocratic and thus invariably inhuman systems such as dictatorships, oligarchies, aristocracies (which also exist within religion), monarchies, and the like must be radically criticized and opposed since they not only contradict any form of reason but also give rise to wars, corruption, and economic catastrophes. So one relies quite justifiably on democracy, on the power of the people. However, what happens in the process is what always happens when such simple structures as autocracies are negated: complex questions crop up i­mmediately. For example, the question of the definition of the ‘people’. Of course, it refers to

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the (human) inhabitants of a territory, a region – but possibly also to social or cultural groups. It certainly cannot be specified more precisely; it rather becomes even more curious considering the ‘European Union’, or comparable international agreements, or even the very real economic globalization that prevails against any form of regionalization in the context of economy and culture. Consequently, one can only act on the assumption that in each case a people must be defined and contoured anew for certain activities. A further complex question is how such power of the people can be articulated. Usually, this happens in elections, referenda, and similar processes. This is the only imaginable basis for such articulation of power of the people but at the same time, it is a very restricted one. It is no coincidence that one can ascertain the fact that forcibly abstract opinion research can predict election results pretty precisely as this is always purely quantitative and reflects merely opinions. As early as the 19th century, the philosopher Hegel rightfully pointed out that opinions are of a mere private nature. They are not what he calls ‘Deinungen’ (a portmanteau word made up of ‘Dein’ [your] and ‘Meinung’ [opinion]) and are not generalizable, being a priori altogether arbitrary, opinions suddenly change from time to time and are thus hardly suitable for long-term decision making or the development of a political perspective from a different point of view. We are reminded that the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau discovered this to date irresolvable, indeed, antagonistic contradiction at the end of the 18th century, describing it along the lines of, as he called it, ‘volonté générale’ and ‘volonté de tous’. With which this ‘will of all’ clearly paraphrases what is usually asserted through elections or so-called referenda, or occasionally also in revolutionary processes if these are conducted by a clear majority of the people within one territory or culture. Clearly, the ideal would be not only a question of majorities but of the participation of absolutely every inhabitant; however, one has resigned oneself quite practicably to majority decisions. Namely, as a substantial dimension of democracy. In this introductory wording, several problems of such perspectives already become drastically obvious, i.e. the making of any decisions on the basis of all. Thus, it is complicated to determine the terrain for such elections. Would it suffice, for example, if the people of one region decided with a possibly vast majority to break free from a larger collective? This can be considered geographically as well as socially or culturally. In the meantime, we have the experience at our disposal that it also depends upon who conducts these elections or surveys in which way and at what location and how the respective interviewees or electors are influenced. Perchance, design plays a significant role here: advertising, typography, social media, and so on. A certain scepticism has thus crept into the results of this type of democratic activity – in the past centuries, revolutionary movements have also proven very problematic in their results, seeking heroes of their own within the revolution who were then again reluctant to step down following the success of a movement, all too often renouncing any further democracy.

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However, Rousseau assumed – in a sense still far removed from these experiences – a far more fundamental conflict, as he surmised that the vote of the masses sometimes, or even often, did not conform to the morals or ethics or the categorical imperative that Immanuel Kant would demand as a form of fundamental principle for a living existence. This can be very quickly proven historically, seeing that the NSDAP in Germany, for example, and thus the National Socialist regime, was almost majority-elected in 1933 (at least with about 45%, which then only required the coalition with a party very close to the NSDAP to ‘seize power’), whereby design was substantially involved. More recently in the USA, the majority elected Donald Trump contrary to any category of reason, and there are similarly authoritarian structures in Hungary, Poland, and Turkey. Which is why one sometimes questions the seemingly democratic ‘will of all’, and on the level of morals, ethics, the categorical imperative or even intellectual concepts, one should, or even must, probably legitimately oppose such majorities. A simple yet hypothetical example may clarify this: if we assume – which will hopefully never happen – that a child is murdered in a city in a short space of time, and if you were to immediately start a survey, there would be a danger of the majority of interviewees strongly advocating the death penalty. Needless to say, this would radically oppose all criteria of reason and humanity and would thus need to be condemned. Even so, the problem remains which arguments should be implemented to explain such a contradiction between ‘the will of all’ and the ‘general will’. Moreover ethics or morals and humanity change historically and are in permanent discourse. Likewise, such contradiction requires public justification aiming for the public to see reason. This endeavour often fails – particularly since some religions, ideologies, and other instances, which consider themselves authorities, constantly strive to assert their respective views of what is imperative in the world in word and deed, and by whatever means. In this respect, it is also very difficult to determine what can be considered valid as a ‘general will’ and in which instance. Certainly, this also proffers a completely confusing context and requires constant analysis and discussion. Whereby yet again, it is possibly the ‘will of all’ or at least the view, or better still, the empirical analysis of this that can help to work it out. A further aspect in this context regarding the ‘will of all’: in the current social context, the constitution of a majority can also very well be observed in the market. Obviously, there are always so-called trends of what people wish and hope to buy – at least within a community, but increasingly also globally. For the market thrives from the same abstraction as opinions, and these are shaped by market measures in various forms. Naturally, design again plays a very important role because in this context, design is used or misused in a variety of ways by different companies precisely for the purpose of communicating the goods to the buyers and to enhance their longing for these products.

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Without a doubt, it is not easy to acquire an understanding of democracy as it rather branches out into endless complications. However, there is no reason to despair.

‘Design, design, design’ A very brief look at the involvement of design and the market: In the pre-industrial era, there was still a direct relationship between the clients and the ­manufacturers, but through industrialization, the very abstraction that characterized the market came into being. So once upon a time you went to a craftsman, explained that you needed a chair or a table or a lamp for a certain space, and described what you ­envisaged; so in conversation with the craftsman and through his action, a direct relationship arose and you possibly even acquired new insights into one’s own desires through the advice of the craftsman – until that very product was completed and stood in the house. The market, on the other hand, produces what people want on the basis of assumptions, and on the basis of enforcing what a company itself wants to sell. As is well-known, initially, this led to a catastrophic product quality, usability, and also social competence, as only the technical development rather than the design of the products was considered. On the other hand, handicraft came into being in the second half of the 19th century, and gradually also emancipated itself as a competence in its own right or as an idiosyncratic one. At the end of the 1920s at the latest, the relevance of these new working methods within design became evident. This is due to the fact that companies increasingly employed – initially only male – designers with regard to all printed matter, including advertising, as well as for the design of industrial series, such as automobiles, trains, furniture, and the like. In this context, it should be pointed out that design, in radical contrast to art, only exists if it is at least potentially needed and used; in other words, if it is indispensably involved in the social structure. So this is how design is considerably interlinked with democracy – and it gradually becomes discernible how significantly human life is influenced by design, at least within economically developed countries. For nearly everything that encompasses human life is a result of design: It does not merely form the attraction of things and processes, but rather entireties of, for example, any vehicles, roads, signposts, any communication, institutions, work places, tableware and cutlery, fonts, publications, clothes, computers, new media, and much more. Which in fact, when considered in reality, leads and has led to design dictating how people should drive, walk, eat, write and read, sit and work, communicate, sleep and love, dress and move. Inconspicuously or ostensibly, defined simply as attractive or unattractive, design intensively determines all forms of life and its social context.

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In actual fact, design thus acts in a vehemently normative manner. Virtually as a legitimation of such comprehensive authority, design established substantial categories early on in order to declare itself de facto as the ‘general will’: function, ergonomics, environmental constants, or social conditions – and design has so seriously surmised this for itself and for society that it has largely refrained from taking the ‘will of all’ into account at all, in other words, from attentively pursuing qualitative empiricism. To be more precise: With regard to democracy in terms of the ‘will of all’, for a long time design exclusively pursued its own categories and the abstraction of market research and opinion forming, and this happened all the more explicitly because the contractors of design are mostly companies that expect greater market success through design. Thus, for a long time, the indispensable social obligation of design has been declared to be extremely questionable, onesided, and only ideologically legitimized by general categories. However, the problems within design are even more complicated, but strangely enough, they are rarely articulated so clearly. For design is certainly equally involved in the creation of weapons and weapon systems, regarding its ­advertising and the maximization of attractive packaging as well as in national and racist symbols and events. This becomes very evident in all its consequences considering – what has hardly happened to date – to what extent design had already been exploited during Italian Fascism and even more so during German National Socialism. It is truly shocking how cleverly the national socialists applied design after 1933 as it was not merely implemented for weapons but aimed to shape the whole of German society into a desired form. Although the Bauhaus was prohibited, several of the former Bauhaus professors – particularly Herbert Bayer and Mies van der Rohe – worked for the Nazi government for the first years at least, designing exhibition pavilions, for example, the floor plan of which formed a swastika, or extremely racist posters. The Bauhaus journal ‘Die neue Linie’ [the new line] was published until the beginning of the 1940s, furthermore, Bauhaus alumni such as Ernst Neuffert in particular and also other designers such as Wilhelm Wagenfeld were very much recognized during National Socialism and there was the directly adapted and very active ‘Evangelical Cultural Circle’ under the direction of Gotthold Schneider. However, what is even more tragic is the fact that the true complexity of design was somehow understood and implemented within the social context during National Socialism. What was later called ‘corporate design’ or ‘branding’ was actually invented exactly during that time. Everything was meticulously designed: the uniforms, the posture, the language, the documents and publications, the torches as well as the lamps in the streets, the entire military appearance, the buildings and urban planning, even the coordination of people as masses for the enhancement of party congresses, for example – horrifyingly enough, even the Nazi law that Jewish people had to wear the Star of David was a result of design, and even the design of the so-called concentration camps was undertaken by designers and architects. In addition, there were

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high-ranking developments for automobiles, other technical devices, radios, telephones, cameras, and everything else. Naturally, it could equally be found in the media available at the time, notably within film – Leni Riefenstahl can be quoted vicariously to this end along with her convincing concept of angling the camera slightly upwards from below in order to emphasize the heroes; but the knowledge of design went so far that even at the end of the war, the national socialist government still ordered ‘newsreels’, exactly those documentary reports, to always depict the German army in a movement from left to right, even during retreat from the ­Soviet Union – because that is how conquerors move in western culture. Almost inevitably, this complex implementation of design had consequences even after Italian fascism, the German national socialist government, and the war: indeed to be expected, with regard to the manufacturing of automobiles, Italy and Germany were the most successful nations in Europe during the first decades following the Second World War, and it becomes equally evident that Italian as well as German design is vital in Europe to date. The fact that this correlation has scarcely been reflected publicly is equally peculiar as well as understandable. Thus, regarding design, the insight remains that this cannot simply be considered neutral, on the contrary, it is utterly conflicting. The manifold avowals by designers regarding humanity and sociality are of no help here as it still solely influences their pretence to be part of the ‘general will’ and thus to be obliged to act in a normative manner in order to further society in doing so. Only today has design at last understood that it must deal with itself self-critically, to consecrate itself to democracy in an open way, and to more or less find its way in its antagonism. That is the content of the following chapter, namely to combine the quality of democracy and design.

‘Destroy what destroys you’ Confronted with both the antagonism between ‘volonté générale’ and ‘volonté de tous’ as well as the contradiction between the aspiration and the reality of such purely normative design, from now on, it is obviously a matter of detecting further possibilities behind this antagonism. This is worthwhile as democracy is essential for human life and for the so justified call for honesty and humaneness whilst the influence of design is so considerable. In this way, the category of ‘democracy’ has to first be liberated from its seemingly inevitable relationship with power, majority, elections, parliamentarianism, and large-format institutions; no doubt, these are essential for general democratic processes and equally for the image of democracy, but at the same time – as described above – they are largely victims of the abstraction of opinion formation. ­Instead, the focus is on what is usually referred to as ‘normality’ and what must

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be exempted from these standards. So it is about smaller units, about neighborhoods, about shared interests (which can be transnational in nature), about work teams and more precisely about irritating normality, thus enabling people to perceive their real experiences and thereby recognize their true interests. For the real substance of democracy is the organization of experience-led and orientated interests and then to organize these. Which requires, however, first to track down these experiences and to bring them to people’s attention. Admittedly, this sounds very complicated; however, only abstraction can simplify everything – but here it is design, which in itself formulates a large part of the standards and may help to make those standards transparent and to partially ­dissolve them. A simple example of this is the observation that, for example, when designing furniture, equipment, or new media, design aims and likes to believe that its implementation is precise and mandatory. Upon closer observation, however, it can be seen that people very often, if not habitually, carelessly disregard the normal methods of use associated with the design of products and media. For example, chairs were not designed to be used as a ladder or a coat rack or as storage but people like to climb up on chairs and very often use their backs to hang their jackets or handbags on. From time to time, people use paperclips to clean their fingernails, cardboard boxes as stools, newspapers as sunscreens or to kill mosquitoes, and so much more. You just have to observe closely what they do with all that designed stuff. Thus, computer screens and other things within are also figured independently and occasionally games are interconnected. Everything completely different to how the design was intended. It is therefore all the more astonishing that people who change the function of things in such a way on a daily basis are usually not aware of it, i.e. they do not intend to change the design and thus deny it, they just act impulsively. This is why it is so important to observe this closely, to explain it, and to communicate it to these very people – namely to unravel to them that they are truly creative in their actions. Last but not least, for the sake of democracy, it is worthwhile giving people the self-confidence to be permanently active in shaping their own lives. This reveals another perspective that is indispensable for democracy: Influenced by habit, it is hardly understood or even put into practice that putative states such as living, furnishing one’s home, dressing oneself, driving, and the like are not passive states, but verbs crying out for and demanding activity. Habits are nonsense; normality suppresses the idea that people should consciously take control of their own lives and social structures and consider these. In this respect, observations of these constant changes of designed objects in everyday life by people who are unavoidably active at all times help to reflect upon the reality of experiences and to develop an interest in a sociable future. As it is fundamental to democracy. As far as design is concerned in this context, these observations and their publications are just as important because they would make it clear to those who

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practice design how little their authority is actually worth, how hollow and simply rhetoric it is, and in particular that, instead of defining faithfully finished products and methods, they should design possibilities for potential spaces in which freedom (democracy) exists, in which they can sensibly furnish themselves with objects and media. The ‘general will’ must learn to consider itself as a stimulus and no longer adhere to the belief of being able to dictate everything; the ‘will of all’ needs thoughtful observation of what we experience and how we act. Moreover, this insight requires that design should work out and offer as many fields as possible, that it should simultaneously tear people out of the comfort zone of believing in normality, of all too often submitting to the norms, and sensualize the dreary grip of the normative. So we are in need of projects that create transparency in this regard. For example, two or three of those red and white plastic cones that are used, for instance, to secure construction work in public spaces, can be placed in a road junction in such a way that all vehicles can turn in only one direction – and we will be amazed at how everyone, possibly even a police vehicle, will follow this new directive. In another project, the central exit of a Cologne underground station was supposedly blocked with thick rubber bands; of course, one could have easily moved these rubber bands to walk through, but everyone was looking for alternative exits. It is enough to demonstrate that signs of authority are fictional and thus criticize normality and create transparency, even to break the power of design. Discourses would have to pursue this in order to reflect on experiences. A few years ago, for example, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong showed just how intensively design can offer opportunities for action since design was very vehemently involved: not only in the design of the symbol of these protests, the umbrella, or parasol, but also in the transformation of the wide main street into work spaces, media platforms, and meeting places, in the modified use of various normal objects as barriers, or for ways to cross these barriers in an insightful way. Unfortunately, the recent Hong Kong protests radically changed and bursted out into violence and despair. By the way, this is symptomatic of design, because design plays an important role in all intelligent forms of protest: in the design of posters and banners, in the use of acoustics, in the clothing of protesters if necessary, and in the planning of the route of such demonstrations. Admittedly, however, this also applies to anti-democratic manifestations, since these, corresponding to the era of Italian fascism and national socialism, also require clear organization, demonstration, and uniformity. All the more important is the precise analysis of what has been designed; Since with sensitive design, it quickly becomes apparent that the democratic public is also profoundly critical of uniformity and conformity, i.e. makes possibilities visible again, always demanding discourse on the subject, and by no means sealing itself off. However, it is precisely this that demands permanent self-criticism on the part of design and those who use it and maybe even a new ­approach.

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Design can considerably accomplish what democracy urgently requires: the deconstruction of power and the destruction of desolate myths. This is the only way to recognize experiences for what they really are and to implement them for qualitative new perspectives. Design is so important in this endeavor as it can also indicate the way to dismantle them with the same competence that it uses to predefine the rules. Interventions are – as shown above – a very helpful means here: just put up road signs in the wrong place or place a sofa on the street and perceive how fast it will be used by people to sit on; one can cause chaos with screens in order to unmask the media and make them ponder, or assign new meanings to words or ratify them through differently sized typesetting. Due to design being so mundane and normal, it is very well-suited for intervention and provocation. A vehicle, for example, could have a completely different sound to it and thus draw attention to itself and to the problem of vehicles in general; an electronic timetable, instead of fixed data, could, where appropriate, reassure those seeking such information with statements such as ‘probably running late’, ‘is uncertain’ or ‘prolonged waiting time’; a chair could wobble irritatingly without tipping, cups could be soft but still usable, knives could constantly retract to impede cutting, and devices could require a completely new method of handling. Provocation also becomes very prominent within the fashion industry where designers or even manufacturers very often use it to attract attention under any circumstances. The possible means are almost infinite, which in itself as an extremely orderly social system certainly imparts attention, irritation, and insight into the inner order of such systems as well as into the systematics of the market. In other words, it can support democracy. However, in doing so, we always need to take into consideration that advertising and unfortunately also authoritarian initiatives sometimes exploit such forms of irritation now and again in order to attract attention. Therefore, with every such provocative action, one must pay close attention that it actually attains a meaningful radicality, that it gets to the root of the categories and behaviors that are taken for granted thus making experiences possible. The same applies, perhaps even more drastically, to any form of subversion. Especially since one could argue that any such measures that obliterate the true contradictions and potential for the sake of clear objectives are, so to speak, automatically part of the designed normality, blurring everything on a daily basis and asserting themselves in an imperceptibly authoritarian manner. In this respect, subversion is a rather inevitable component of design as it conceals directives and constraints. If subversion is to be applied as a form of resistance, then it is mandatory that it be aimed at creating stumbling blocks and rough edges that in turn open up new insights and perspectives – in other words, they do not transpire in ­secret simply for the sake of secrecy, but rather because they are surreptitiously uncanny, unsettling, and affront normality. Therefore, design also needs to implement these forms and formulations against itself and concurrently must nevertheless always be careful not to be or

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­ ecome part of authoritarian, inhuman, and undemocratic reality. This, in turn, b calls for a ‘general will’ and, accordingly, a discourse on democracy and on all activities in order to support it vehemently.

What is to be done Transparency, openness, and thus also the choice of options obviously create central criteria for the correlation between design and democracy. For it is always a matter of endowing quality upon the ‘will of all’, enabling it with that competence of experience-derived interests. At the same time, this means dismantling all forms of normality and presenting the respective inherent possibilities. Instead of any directives and norms, in the context of democracy, design is clearly required to offer options on the basis of qualitative empiricism. Design can do this because in its inevitably intensive sociality it is pre-eminently suited to observe, perceive, and publicize the application of experiences and the inherent concealed desires and realizations – and thus to transform them into possibilities. Admittedly, this does not sound very precise and is far from being a clear set of instructions on what to do. However, in the context of design and democracy, precision would be a completely unsuitable category anyway and it is important to discuss an openness that cannot be described in advance as a realistic perspective. Nevertheless, this requires further exercises, experiments, interventions, and discussions.

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8  HOW TO ACT? Saskia Hebert and Andreas Unteidig

Introduction ‘Digital Revolution’ or ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ are just two terms that stress the ground shifting qualities of transformations we experience in present times. In their sensational boldness, both seem to describe the inevitable and, at the same time, represent a call to action: The former questioning not only our tools but also, in the long run, how we relate to each other and our world; the latter trying to shake awake all those who still think that global warming and the loss of biodiversity are happening in some sort of ‘environment’ outside their own lifeworld. Given the complexity of ongoing change processes, it is quite easy to get lost. (Young) individuals today, particularly in postindustrial societies, are increasingly expected to deliberately design their lives, careers, and futures. Meanwhile, those very futures (as open spaces that can be inhabited when the time comes) look increasingly insecure and worrisome. The harder we try to plan, control, and predict ‘the future’, the more it looks like it is acting out on us, questioning everything that we took for granted only yesterday. Finding contingency where we have been conditioned to expect certainty and plannability, of course, questions not only individual biographies. As communities or even societies, we are increasingly forced to think and act beyond established, disciplinary boundaries. We have to take into account both growing and diversifying bodies of knowledge(s) with regard to the direct and indirect consequences of our (or our discipline’s) actions. We must query our professions – just as other forms of acting – as to whether they contribute to, or hinder, the construction of ‘futur-able’ societies. Given the significance of these overarching shifts in public discourse, it comes as no surprise that the upheaval of traditional and well-established ways of thinking and doing also seems to have fundamentally changed the academic design/­design research debates of the last few decades, which were previously marked by constant processes of expanding what is regarded as the object of design. Initially and firmly tied to market logics, designers subsequently emancipated themselves from these constraints and claimed political significance with approaches such as participatory design, design activism or speculative and critical design in order to work in incomparably broader fields. With the steady illumination of sociopolitical agency, recent developments take up a strand in the genesis of design that has been unfolding since the reform movements of the late 19th century. Instead of pursuing social change through the reification of a belief in progress of any kind though (e.g.

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through architecture, commodities, or propaganda), today’s protagonists of socially engaged design (such as transformation or transition design, social design, and design activism) are seeking to develop approaches that accept systemic interdependencies and contingencies and join forces with others who are working toward more sustainable, resilient, just, or simply agreeable, liveable futures. Thus, while we appreciate the trend for designers around the globe to finally rediscover and entertain not only the possibility but also the imperative to understand themselves as political actors and to apply design towards more sustainable, just, and resilient futures, we also perceive numerous reasons for concern (a certain kind of paternalistic hubris being just one of them). Current debates are full of ambivalence and theory-practice gaps. Systemic and wicked problems involving many protagonists, interests, and agencies can’t be addressed in a logic of right ­or wrong, nor can the diverse ways of inducing change to them be reduced to a ‘by ­design’ or ‘by disaster’ dichotomy. In our opinion, it is therefore important to learn how to navigate contradictions in order to understand and practice design as an ‘Art of living on a damaged planet’ (Tsing).

(Not) Acting as dilemma In light of some of the major problems we see ourselves confronted with today (such as a crisis of representative democracy in many parts of the world, our gradually growing understanding that existing modes of human dwelling transgress planetary boundaries, etc.), we are experiencing a significant paradigm shift: ‘growth’ and ‘progress’ – and with them, our western societies’ (and hence globally adopted) modus operandi – are no longer leading us towards an ever better future but, instead, to the brink of systemic collapse. Changing this operational mode, unfortunately, encounters not only great resistance (as it threatens privileges) but is fundamentally and practically hard to achieve on its own: So we use our intelligence to ignore the signs, to go on with business as usual, maybe try a little bit harder or by shifting blame on ‘others’ that we carefully distinguish from ourselves. As described above, the starting point for this chapter is the increasing desire of designers and design students to intervene, ‘to act’ in more and more complex settings and against the backdrop of problems framed as increasingly complex and outsized in scale. Hence, as a proposition for one of many possible ways to contribute to this discussion, we will now look at the very concept of ‘taking action’ as a productive dilemma to illuminate. We use it as an analytical lens to elaborate on contradictions, ambiguities, and contingencies that deserve attention when we contextualize design in the discussion taken up by this book. Within such a literal and vital loss of orientation, the notion of ‘acting’ becomes increasingly complicated, and those willing to develop designerly decisions

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need to take the risk of doing so while being fully and (un)comfortably aware of not having all the facts straight. Nevertheless, the urgency to act seems to increase as a function of evolving uncertainties – yet there remain reasons to believe that d ­ esign can offer significant contributions to these problems, be it through its inherent logic of impeaching the status quo, its pragmatic means for analysis, its practical strategies of prototyping, or its relative freedom from disciplinary boundaries. ­Furthermore, design research equips us with rather broad understandings of the concept of ‘action’ (as we acknowledge thinking as acting, and clearly see the possibility of practical modes to be forms of reflection). We perceive ‘action’ thus as crucial for navigating dilemmatic situations, to be both sensitive and radical, to join forces with thers, and to develop a clear understanding of one’s own and of other standpoints and perspectives. Hence, it appears relevant to search for possibilities to position design within a context, in which, not unlike Chantal Mouffe’s understanding of democracy as a radical practice, inherent and fundamental contradictions are not to be solved or ‘smoothed over’ for the sake of alleged ‘solutions’ or consensus – but rather acknowledged and made productive. Positions, within and out of which design can construct and provoke the emergence of novel action spaces, while at the same time recognizing the problematic nature of this endeavor; positions that productively deal with inevitable dilemmata and find ways to make, negotiate, and/or change decisions amidst situations that are unclear or even contradictory, without falling into the trap of solutionism, paternalism, or ideology.

Transformation Design / Design Transformation The quest to find productive ways of rethinking and re-contextualizing design along the lines of this argument has been made the mission of many design scholars and practitioners in the last couple of years. It is a global search process, one that affects a great number of instances and institutions that set the frame of how design is being taught, studied, and practiced – regardless of denominations and levels of explicitness of labeling programs as part of this query: Approaches such as Transition Design (e.g. Carnegie Mellon), eco-social design (e.g. Uni Bolzano) or Transformation Design (e.g. Braunschweig University of the Arts) strive to ask relevant and radical questions, form new alliances, stimulate social debates, and rethink things, systems, and conditions. As a seemingly shared and central conviction, these programs all strive to incorporate and synthesize a diverse set of scientific knowledge bases, but claim that designers can and should start acting where others stop (e.g. scientists or activists who describe what goes wrong but not how to ‘fix’ it) and, as Findeli puts it, complement their analyses with diagnostic and prescriptive stances: To speculate, to design in the sense of the German term ‘Entwurf’, to ‘advise courses

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of action to change existing situations into preferable ones’ (­Simon) means that designers can and should explore possible alternatives, suggest seemingly improbable changes, and contribute ‘future imaginaries’ of a (slightly or f­ undamentally) different world. Undoubtedly, the double bind (or hubris) of both looking for and simultaneously offering orientation while ‘muddling through swampy lowlands’ (Schön) is challenging. One way to address this is the implementation of institutional spaces for testing and practicing, in German Überäume, in which conceptual and theoretical considerations can be complemented by model-case prototypings, existing systems and rules can be questioned, and alternative concepts can be discussed and tested in various forms of entanglement. Understanding the academic programs mentioned here and their different means of conducting this search for novel, productive roles for designers to ‘act’, ­ esign we will now focus on one example, namely the MA program Transformation D at Braunschweig University of the Arts (in which we, the authors, act as instructors), in order to exemplify some of the challenges and potential in addressing disciplinary and societal change processes. A central aspect of the program, and thus of our teaching philosophy, is to consequently regard Transformation Design as a heuristic notion. In this collective quest to gather necessary and helpful knowledge, instructors can’t be seen or addressed as persons who are in the possession of sovereign knowledge of how ­exactly transformation design is practiced and pass it on to the students in lectures and seminars. Contrary to that, we understand the program and its activities as decisively open and provisional and see our main task to provide and run that ‘inquiry space’ with a maximum amount of trust and courage, for it takes a lot of both to ­operate in that field. In that sense, our main goal is to offer frames of action for the students to ­experiment with and critically reflect on their own roles as designers in project ­contexts that are not only increasingly complex and interdisciplinary but often also lack clear briefings, clients, or recipes that can be tried and trained. While navigating the processes of such design projects, the students face certain dilemmata that we regard as symptomatic of what designers (and others) attempting to shift cultural norms experience today. Those dilemmata – including decisions on what to address with what goals, how/with whom and which resources to use – tend to slow down, prevent, or even hinder any concrete ‘action’ in their own right. With this in mind, we will briefly draw on three exemplary projects that were conducted within the framework of the mentioned MA program. By describing and reflecting on these examples, we illustrate that acting in spite of/in awareness of those dilemmata can be tricky, but indeed successful. The first example will focus on the dilemma of having to draw boundaries around a virtually infinite problem in order to render it suitable as a design problem. The second case illustrates the challenging situation of losing one’s own role while developing new ones, the third case, finally, will put into perspective questions about resources, means, and ends.

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Dilemma 1: What are the boundaries of problems?1 As design sets out to take on aspects of social complexity as objects of design, there seem to be at least two fundamental changes to problem-framing as the departure point for any design project (and that Herbert Simon, in the sixth chapter of his Sciences of the Artificial, famously illustrated with the 1968 moonwalk being fairly easy compared to solving social problems): Firstly, the complexity and inherent unsolvability of social problems present a challenge not only to the traditional understanding of designers as problem solvers but also to ‘project’ logics, which usually implicate a clear framing of a well-identified problem, a precisely defined timespan, clearly described goals, and communicable results. Secondly (and related to that), designers (or design teams) can’t learn about these problems in well-­ prepared briefings organized by clearly identifiable clients that make their expectations, metrics of success, or understandings of the respective problem known. The absence of well-contoured boundaries as well as the ever-looming question of who is to be addressed (and who has to be included) further question the traditional methods designers use to approach their subject matter. These (and other) problems were encountered by a group of students2 that set out to research internet culture from a queer-feminist perspective. Their ultimate goal was to get a grasp on (and develop a designerly stance towards) discrimination, marginalization, and suppression of knowledge, people, and identities in the context of online communication. They looked at search algorithms, at the use of language in online forums, or at statistics on who creates and who consumes which content (e.g. on platforms such as wikipedia.org). Their focus was the notion of knowledge as a central aspect in the construction of power. In choosing such a framework, the student group was quickly confronted with the enormous size, interdependency, and complexity of this problem space. They suddenly lacked anchor points to productively negotiate both their stance and scope (Jonas/Findeli) and to develop designerly positions of intervention. Consequently, the group established a workable framing of their problem by following its central aspects back into the physical world. They took their own academic environment as the space ­ arginalized in which to intervene. As a result, they initiated the Future Archive of M 3 Knowledge , a two-day intervention featuring lectures, film screenings, workshops, and discussions that served as a university-wide platform for very diverse stakeholders to collectively identify, discuss, and learn about perspectives and positions underrepresented in current curricula, with the goal to productively speculate about future ones. The decision to problematize exclusion, hegemony and the plurality of knowledges within the frame of their own university made for not just a needed and well-received project, it also enabled the student team to draw boundaries within a virtually infinite problem space. This allowed them to develop positions without illegitimately reducing complexity – or, respectively, getting lost in it. It goes without

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saying that the problem has not been solved in the course of this semester project (neither in the context of the university, nor in cyberspace). But it allowed the group to overcome the dilemma of acting and enabled them to construct their proposals. Furthermore, this project was only the first step for this team, as many keep on collaborating on related topics, building on the work they and others have already done. With this, they act on the knowledge that the mission to take stances for a plurality of identities, knowledges and ontologies is immeasurably greater, more complex, and longer-term than any single project – which must in turn be understood not with a mindset grounded in logics of solutionism but rather as one radically incremental step in the right direction.

Dilemma 2: Standpoints and perspectives in/of collaboration A second dilemma we would like to address also has to do with epistemological pluralities, as it is concerned with disciplinary boundaries. While specialized sciences have peacefully coexisted in an increasingly compartmentalized, disciplinary zoo for the last 200 years, today we face severe problems in communicating between the silos that don’t even share a common language anymore. And although it is almost commonplace for designers to understand themselves as inter- and transdisciplinarily competent, since they usually need to cooperate with different professionals to do their job, there is still a common understanding of the designer as author/inventor whose name can be tied to a certain ­product or service. But what happens if that is no longer possible or desired? And further, how can designers integrate and support others (movements, activists, civil groups) in what they are doing by applying and developing capacities and roles that go well beyond the mere re-contextualization of what they’ve always done until now (e.g. inventing new products or offering services such as graphic design to social ­movements)? In the summer term of 2019, a group of students4 set out to support the young Braunschweig branch of ‘Fridays For Future’. The academic frame, a semester project titled ‘un/making heimat (home/homeland)’, seemed suitable as they regarded the future as heimat-yet-to-come (or not, if nothing changes). In the course of the project, the students developed several ideas, approaches, and goals to pursue and ways to (inter)act with, for, and as the movement in social, political, and practical spheres – only to find out that most of what they came up with had already been thought of or even been done by the FFF group, who was, unsurprisingly, doing quite well without any transformation design support. While some students then chose to integrate on a personal level (going to meetings, giving speeches, participating in public protest), others kept questioning their role as ‘professionals’ in supporting and initiating change processes towards sustainability.

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Acting, in that respective case, had several different dimensions and possible routes to follow: The first would have been to take direct action as protesters – but this meant letting go of professional framings and getting personally involved. The second would have been to ‘advise’ the protesters – which indeed wasn’t necessary here. The third would have been to establish links and channels of communication between protesters and city government – which seemed overly complicated and unrewarding to the students. The option they finally chose was to design discursive formats for the construction of publics that addressed especially individuals and groups who were not yet convinced (or sufficiently knowledgeable) about the whole idea. This self-imposed constriction had two major effects: One the one hand, it enabled them to developed several prototypes, for example a format they called Stadtgeflüster (literally: city whispers/rumours), which was later used productively in other contexts as well. On the other hand, this comparably reductive framing of ‘how they could act’ created a rather constructive moment of disappointment, prompting them to collaborate on a text that reflected and speculated on current and future roles they could take on – well beyond their involvement in this particular project. With this, the project posed valuable questions, not only for students of such new programs but for all actors seeking for new roles and possibilities to act in the context of this book: What parts of our ‘old’ professions do we have to discard in order to build something new? What new sorts of ‘expertise’ can we assume, describe and offer as core competences? And how can these capacities be fruitfully linked to the expertise (and the goals) that are already out there, in the field of civil movements, transformative activism, and other forms of future-building?

Dilemma 3: How to relate ambitions and resources? The first case described here highlighted the ‘boundaries of problems’ and how they can be transferred to a manageable, but still complex and in several ways typical model case situation. The second example dealt with the difficulties, but also the opportunity to shift baselines with regard to the role models and institutions that increasingly depart from definitional and dualistic categories such as ‘author/ designer’ and ‘client’. The third case, although navigating both previous dilemmata quite elegantly, shall be discussed here in light of the book’s overarching theme, and thus with regard to the potentials and possibilities for designerly action in the sphere of the political. During the previously mentioned semester course ‘un/making heimat’, another team5 decided to tackle the question how (far) the shifting discourses of the far right ‘unmake’ what we perceive as our ‘heimat’ – by reintroducing vocabulary

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that has long been socially shunned, by inventing new terms, by normalizing derogatory discussion styles, by promoting narratives of self-victimization (claiming the decline of free speech – using it to do so), and by cultivating threatening (sub) tonalities. The two students departed from their own, lived experience to encounter ­situations where such ‘new’ right-wing language was used in public spaces. As ­witnesses and as interlocuters, they found it difficult to adequately react to and ­oppose it. They decided to study the phenomenon of NOT acting in public when witnessing far right verbal expression/aggression. In their research, the students came across multiple reasons for why it is so difficult for the (silent) majority to come forward and ‘talk against’ (hence the title of the project: ‘Gegenreden’6) propagators of alt-right speech. They learned, for example, about the insecurities of being exposed to a public with whom one can’t be sure where they stand, or potentially confronting a family member, a person looking for trouble, or someone prone to react physically. Similarly to our second case study, the students embarked on a decisively long-term quest to develop designerly positions within a problem space that is clearly too vast to be addressed or even overcome in the context of a project. As a foundational action to build on, they conceptualized a DIY newspaper, printable by anyone who wants to support or even join the project. Around this artefact, they designed, prototyped, and conducted regular workshops and roundtables that serve as ‘editor’s meetings’, as well as an online platform for anyone to submit articles: reader’s letters and opinion pieces telling of own experiences in critical situations (sometimes describing how they managed to ‘counter-talk’, sometimes reflecting on why and how they failed to do so), for example, or essays by other people working in such contexts offering advice. During the project, a lot happened that stressed its relevance: Austria’s Ibiza scandal, the Europe Council election bringing forward AFD in many German states or, later in the year, racist crimes like the murder of Walter Lübcke or the terrorist attack against the Jewish community of Halle. In their reflection, the students reported that they, at times, were overwhelmed by the sheer weight of their chosen subject – and that following the mantra of leaving the comfort zone and ‘going to where it hurts’ can cause real pain indeed. On the other hand, the feedback they received showed how important and rewarding such an approach can be – which makes it a good example to learn from for engaging with future dilemmata yet to come.

Discussion The concepts, projects, and prototypes discussed above have very different foci and logics – and they all come with their own traps, impossibilities, and challenges. Therein, the students had to develop positions of designing that make sense and

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that go well beyond normative descriptions of what design can, should, or wants to be. With this, they speak on several subjects we deem important – not just for the exemplary projects themselves, but for the very idea of understanding design as a form of ‘acting’ in contexts of great social complexity. This is precisely the quality that makes us (as instructors, designers, architects, and authors of this book chapter) feel compelled to pay attention to these processes. We must regard the reflections and discussions promoted by them as promising paths to the further development of our ideas about the complicated, yet promising, relationship of design and transformation. Just as the examples described in this chapter don’t claim to give ‘answers’ to the respective problem fields, we don’t think that this ‘conclusion’ concludes anything – on the contrary: We hope that we revealed just enough about the discussions we are currently engaged in in the context of ‘our’ exemplary programme, about its operating system, the resources we use, and our rather broad understanding of possible design matters – in order to sketch out the mental map that we currently deploy to orientate ourselves in the fluid landscape of ongoing and necessary transformation. There are, of course, many more regions we did not visit in this text (nor in our program) – again, here, the dilemmata described above concerning scope, stance, and means apply. Nevertheless, we not only invite others to discuss these questions with us7, but we also continue to cooperate and form alliances with partners who acknowledge (transformation) design as a productive endeavour. We welcome all those who take the risk, but also the chance to enter into ongoing debates with us and each other. In that sense, in our laboratory, ‘contamination’ is very welcome: as an opportunity to learn and train how to act in difficult circumstances and how to become better at getting out of our disciplinary trenches and at pulling our heads out of the sand. And not just because our bottoms are burning, but because we feel entitled to do so.

1

Reported as Charles Eames’ counter-question to: ‘What are the boundaries of design?’ in an interview at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Palais de Louvre in 1972. 2 Project team: Miriam Kreuzer, Pauline Lürig, Dina Richert and Veronika Schneider. 3 http://transformazine.de/zukunftsarchiv-fuer-marginalisiertes-wissen. 4 Project team: Anja Frasunkiewicz, Matthias Hüttmann, Miriam Kreuzer, Xueer Li, Pauline Lürig, ­Farzaneh Pourmohammadi, Dina Richert and Sebastian Schöne. 5 Project team: Jakob Hubmann and Veronika Schneider. 6 http://gegenreden.de. 7 www.howtoact.de.

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9  OFFICE FOR DESIGN OF DEMOCRACY – ­CONCLUSIONS FROM A FIELD TRIP Friedrich von Borries

In 2017, I joined German Federal President Walter Steinmeier1 on his state visit to Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand as his guest. I enjoyed the full bandwidth of the protocol – and was impressed, amused, and bewildered. Sitting in the airplane between Singapore and Australia it came up to my mind that the protocol needs a fundamental redesign. Unfortunately, up to now I was not commissioned to develop such an agency. But the ‘Office for Design of ­Democracy’ kept growing in my mind, and the following text is a conclusion of my experience, a first draft of the ODD’s possible program.

Imagination A powerful, mighty politician was traveling through the world, where he was confronted with the frightening rise of populist movements. He visited Donald Trump in the US, he made the acquaintance of Victor Orban in Hungary, and he met the representatives of the Law and Justice Party in Poland and negotiated with politicians of the Five Star Movement and League in Italy. He spent hours to understand the Brexit movement in Britain and the Yellow Vests in France. And for sure, he was shocked by the growing influence of AFD’s rightist politics in Germany, his home country. He realized that the current western representative democratic system is in a severe crisis. He met scientists and political activists, offering him explanations for the uncanny phenomenon. He understood that traditional campaigning won’t be of any help. And even though he sympathizes with artistic projects like Wolfgang Tillman’s ‘vote together’, he did not believe that these approaches could fix the problem of representation. The problem, so his impression, was too severe. But being part of the representative system, having gathered all his knowledge within the world of parties, campaigns, and coalition agreements, he felt ­unable to fix the system himself. But he developed a plan, a strategy to overcome this obstacle. Being an admirer of the Bauhaus and its idea of societal transformation through design, he wanted to ask designers to redesign the existing system in a collaborative process, involving politicians, professional designers, and politically aware citizens. Finally, he founded the Office for Design of Democracy (ODD).

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Symbols of democracy The brief of this institution was clear and simple: Using design to develop and strengthen the democratic system. To start the process, a first area of action was defined: the field of symbolic representation. The Western representative democracy, so goes the argument, finds itself in a crisis of symbolic representation. This crisis affects both language as well as forms of action and social interaction. The way politicians speak and interact with other citizens and how the institutions of democracy present themselves seem to be outdated. While society and individual life praxes have both become more diverse, symbols, rituals, and liturgies have not been further developed in essential ways, and have therefore forfeited their effectiveness. Hence, one task of the Office for Design of Democracy is to redesign the symbols of representation.

Redesign of medals An easy starting point would be the redesign of medals. Through the awarding of medals, a municipality thanks selected citizens for their engagement. Like many orders of civilian merit, also the most important German medal, the ‘Bundesverdienstkreuz’ (Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany), is based on military honors – a connotation and a symbolic language that no longer corresponds to contemporary life praxes in broad areas of society. This discrepancy exists as well at other levels of governmental representation. A redesign could start to rethink the symbolic reference (why referring to military symbolism?), the materiality (why should a medal be out of metal, what would a digital medal look like?) as well as the selection process (how would a transparent selection process work?). Basically, this project would explore the possibilities of communication design.

Redesign of uniforms Not all citizens are in touch with the issue of ‘medals’. Nowadays, medals are more or less an elitist phenomenon. But almost every citizen is in touch with uniforms, which also still belong to the realm of an authoritarian state. Does an open society still need uniforms? And if so, how could a uniform as a sign of state authority be combined or superposed with the individual expression of the person wearing it – a person who is also a citizen? In this project, the possibilities of fashion design would be explored.

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Design of voting ballots A contribution from the world of product design would be the design of voting ballots – no redesign, because currently voting ballots are not designed at all. The most formally significant event in democracy as it is actually lived – which is to say voting – is furnished with positive symbolic force only to a minimal degree. The current ­design of voting booths, ballots, and boxes hardly honors or expresses appreciation for the significance of the moment when citizens exercise their sovereignty. This physical contact of citizens with their democracy is for the most devoid of form – in some locales, ballots are even deposited in converted waste bins. Of course, consistently and appallingly low voter participation cannot be attributed to the design of voting booths – nevertheless, it would certainly not detract from a positive identification with democracy should this critical event be framed more appropriately.

Redesign of state visits A quite interesting element of official representation is the state visit. As earlier, still today official state receptions are accompanied by demonstrations of military might: Marching soldiers and salutes are key elements of the visual politics of state visits. It seems to be obvious that this form of representation is not appropriate for a contemporary, peaceful, democratic state. Many of the courtly elements of such official protocols fail to adequately convey the idea of a modern democracy. It could be an interesting challenge for set, exhibition, and stage designers to develop new forms of welcoming that may replace the outdated and inappropriate protocol of state visits.

Critique Unsurprisingly, not all designers were happy about this new institution and its approach. Two different sources of critique could be differentiated into two opposing perspectives. More classically operating designers thought that designers are not skilled to design a democracy. They should, so says the opinion of these conservative protagonists of the design world, focus on what they are trained for: the design of chairs, clothes, interiors, etc. On the opposite, critically engaged designers excoriate that the work of the Office for Design of Democracy is not radical enough. Instead of focusing on the real problems – the everyday of democracy, the idea of a national territory, the concept of representation – the office is wasting time with symbolic decoration. By ­redesigning the architecture of a parliament, you are not changing the system.

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Rebrief Consequently, the Office for Design of Democracy reshaped the original brief. The new ODD should consult public institutions and politicians in all aspects of their work. Furthermore, the ODD acts not only interdisciplinary, but it also is organized collectively. All ideas are developed by collectives, consisting of different people with various backgrounds. Besides developing design solutions, the idea of a design-­driven research entered the ODD. Its work should tackle the crisis of the existing democratic system on a deeper level, and therefore new fields of research and action where defined: organization, everyday life and the referential space of democracy. Three new fields of action where defined, and much wider than the mere redesign of symbols.

Organization of democracy The ODD is now commissioned to question the functionality of current procedural forms in representative democracy. To be examined is thereby the capacity of the political parties to moderate processes of democratic opinion-formation and decision-making. This discussion appears all the more necessary given the unsustainability of classical party affiliations, increasing criticisms of the disintegration of the representative mandate through obligatory voting, and an increasing focus of political communication on a small number of charismatic, commanding personalities (leading candidates, chairpersons, etc.). These symptoms reinforce the dysfunctionality that is reflected not least of all in the success of a variety of populist and extreme right parties and movements – whether the supporters of Brexit, the AfD, PiS, Lega Nord, or – and all of their heterogeneity – the ‘movements’ of ­Mélenchon, Le Pen, and Macron in France. Addressed in this field of action is the question of which new organizational models, procedures, and forms of participation (beyond plebiscitary populism) are conceivable and how the existing system could be supplemented via new elements, for example, lotteries.

Everyday life in democracy Almost radical is the third area of action: the everyday. In broad areas of society, ­notions of democracy have often been reduced to an administrative apparatus and periodic elections. Neglected in many instances are the political dimensions of everyday life and civil society. But democracy is successful only – according to the thesis of the third workshop – when citizens genuinely live democratic basic rights,

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that which is referred to in Germany as a ‘freiheitlich demokratische Grundordnung’ (a liberal, democratic basic order, abbreviated as FDGO), and participate actively on a daily level in the shaping of society, becoming directly involved in the social environment – thereby expanding the scope of democracy. This pertains to the organization of the family as well as to the economic sphere – especially in times when globally active enterprises are more influential political players than nation states. Recently, the conflicts surrounding Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg’s behavior on the one hand and publicity-hungry politicians on the other have made this discrepancy blatant. What would a democratically functioning enterprise look like? What would be the source of its legitimation – the customers and employees who are ­affected by its behavior and its business model? And what would be the impact of democratization on the economic behavior of an enterprise, on the imperative for profitability, etc? The Office for Design of Democracy will search for ideas that promote democratically conceived organizations that encourage greater participation through democratization, decentralization, and self-government.

Referential space of democratic states The last area of action is the referential space of democracy. Most contemporary Western concepts of democracy are still based on the principle of the nation state, itself based on the notion that the individuals occupy a shared territory on a permanent basis, and that the kind of social cohesion that is effected through shared language, ethnic origin, culture, and history obliges individuals to maintain bonds of mutual solidarity. But posing itself against the background of globalization and migration is the question of the prospects for sustainability of this spatial conception of statehood, and whether notions of common ethnicity, culture, and history still apply. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that many contemporary problems cannot be resolved within the framework of the nation state, nor for the most part through intergovernmental agreements, but instead require supranational decision-making. Which organizational forms might supplant the nation state in the future? Are we witnessing the formation of globally-oriented, transnational, or cosmopolitan communities of values? Do heterogeneous spaces of identification exist? And how might a supranational, global organization be democratically legitimated? Could cities potentially redefine the ancient tradition of the Greek polis, becoming forward-looking actors in a democratic world? The Office for Design of Democracy engages in speculation about which type of post-­nationstate system might be capable of guaranteeing and implementing democratic rights (and responsibilities) in the future, while serving as a space of identification for shareholders.

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Perspective Alternative voting processes. Democratization of work. Dissipation of the nation state. Big issues. Too big for designers? The ODD only exists in my imagination. Up to now, I am not commissioned to develop such an agency. But do we really need a commission to make the ODD happen? Possibly, all of us should invent our own ODDs. Acting as being commissioned. Contributing to political issues as designers. Solving practical problems. Developing utopian ideas. Shaping the imaginary of a better world. Maybe that is the best a designer can do. And finally, the time will come that politicians will ask us for our help.

1

Frank-Walter Steinmeier (born 5 January 1956) is a German politician serving as President of Germany since 19 March 2017. He was Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2005 to 2009 and from 2013 to 2017, and Vice-Chancellor of Germany from 2007 to 2009. He was chairman-in-office of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2016. (Editors).

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10  AGONISTIC EVENTS TO REMEMBER Carl DiSalvo and Amanda Meng

Design has long been imbricated with politics, perhaps always. The matter of concern is not whether or not design is political, but rather, what sorts of politics are at motion in any given project and practice. We seem to be in a moment when there is renewed and heightened interest in the interplay of design and politics. In part, that may be because political conditions are dire and dramatically visible. For many, the political conditions have long been dire, but this moment seems to be a remediation of prior historical moments during which new media forms and channels brought amplified attentiveness to widespread issues. At the same time, this interest in design and politics may be because there is an increasing awareness of the role of design in bringing innovations to market, coupled with an increasing awareness that those innovations are far from innocent. And too, the interest in design and politics may be because there is a deepening unease with the politics of design itself, with the hegemonies of globalized and unfettered free-market capitalism and the European, male, histories that permeate so much of design discourse, practice, and education. Democracy is at the center of many contemporary discussions of design and politics. That is not surprising, but it is something that could be called into question. As is too often the case in design discourse, terms are taken as givens. Of all fields, this is particularly ironic in design. While so much of design prac­ irected towards articulating potentials through re-framing, some concepts tice is d and their attendant terms seem to escape this attention, seem to be stuck in their 20th-century frames. Free market capitalism is one such concept that too often gets treated as if it were the singular and inevitable economy. Fortunately, there is a growing body of design scholarship contesting the dominance of such a restrictive perspective on economies, and offering a wealth of possibilities for theory and action. Democracy is another such concept. Too often democracy, particularly deliberative democracy in the context of a representational democracy, is treated as the one right and good process for decision-making and power-sharing. Although this may be the dominant form and experience of democracy at this moment, it is not the only form of democracy possible or practiced. Many design theorists and researchers are interested in exploring agonistic pluralism as an alternate model of democracy. Simply put, theories of agonism place contestation as central to democracy. From an agonistic perspective, the ideal democratic condition is not one of consensus through rational debate, the ideal democratic condition is one in which contestation occurs. Chantal Mouffe is one of the foremost contemporary theorists of agonism, and her work is f­ ormative

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to our interpretations of how design might do the work of agonism (2013). Mouffe is not alone in theorizing agonism, Hanna Arendt (1958), William Connolloy (1993), and Bonnie Honig (2016), among others, have all contributed to our understandings of agonism, its possibilities, and limitations. Adversarial Design directed attention directed towards varied artifacts, such as visualizations and software, robots and interactive devices, and offered an explication of how such artifacts could do the work of agonism (2012). The hope was to provide additional concepts and themes to the collective discourses on design and politics, and more specifically, to those discourses on design and democracy. Of course, the practices of design extend beyond making objects. What’s more, interpretations of objects, particularly in the absence of use, tend towards exclusive encounters with design. We recognize there are limits to what artifacts can do and what we should expect of them. So, we believe it is worth asking the question: ‘What are other ways the practices and objects of design might contribute to the work of agonism?’ This is not about negating the relevance of artifacts, but rather about considering the making and use of artifacts within more expansive fields of practice, situated within lively democratic conditions and endeavors. If our commitment as activist-researchers is enabling and participating in agonistic pluralism through design, what else, as designers, might we be doing? And how else, as scholars, might we be describing, theorizing, and appreciating this work? In this reflective essay, we offer a tentative set of answers to those questions, by shifting our attention towards events as a site and means of contributing to the work of agonism. We are not the first to theorize design in relation to events, nor are we the first to suggest that events can be understood as having political effect. What we bring to the discussion of design events is a particular consideration of time – events are staged for what happens at that moment, and also, to produce memories, experiences that can be recalled as evidence and models. What we hope to contribute is to thicken our collective understanding of how designed artifacts and activities can aid in the expression of contestation, in enabling a lively agonistic encounter in the context of democratic dilemmas.

Agonistic encounters with AMI Over the past several years we have worked closely with resident activists and advocacy organizations in Atlanta who are striving towards equity and care – which we consider to be democratic conditions – amid systemic oppression. Agonism is rife in these endeavors. As part of those efforts, several years ago we collaborated with a coalition of residents to stage an event around issues of affordable housing – specifically how the availability of and access to affordable housing is structured by­

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l­ocal policy, and how local policy is structured by statistical analysis. Of particular concern was the statistic area median income (AMI). Residents understood that AMI was, in some way, a condition that affected their access to affordable housing, but they did not know what the term really meant, or how it might impact their or their neighbor’s access to affordable housing. AMI involves determining a base level of income for a region or city, and then from that determining at what level (what percent AMI) an individual or household income must be to qualify for affordable housing subsidies. Specific to this moment in time was the development of policies for the city of Atlanta that were setting an AMI level that would determine access to affordable housing policies, including standards that real estate developers must follow to receive tax concessions and other funding programs meant to incentivize the development of affordable housing. At issue were two factors. First, the geographic region used to set the AMI for Atlanta included some suburbs. Because of this, the AMI was skewed upwards, negatively affecting residents who lived near or below poverty incomes. This, in turn, thwarted the effectiveness of programs intended to prevent displacement in certain neighborhoods that exist well under the metropolitan area’s median income. Second, because percent AMI for affordable housing was set too high, many people who do not actually need affordable housing might qualify, thereby creating unfair competition for limited affordable housing stock. Whatever the particulars of AMI and Atlanta, what is important through all of this is that ‘affordability’ in the context of housing is a contested variable, determined by convoluted means which can, unwittingly but quite dramatically, produce inequities. The neighborhoods of Vine City and English Avenue have suffered from decades of neglect as an expression of systemic racism. The majority of those who live in these neighborhoods are renters and the median annual income for English Ave is $18,564, while for Vine City it is $25,981 (compared to a national median of $55,322). Put another way, a sizeable percentage of the residents of these neighborhoods needs affordable housing. This need is becoming acute as the pressures of gentrification creep into these neighborhoods and rents rise. Our community partners are activists in the neighborhood working for housing and other forms of economic justice. At that time, there was much talk within city government, among local advocacy organizations, and with philanthropies of constructing financial mechanisms to promote more affordable housing in the midst of (yet another) real estate boom in Atlanta, which threatened (yet again) to displace longtime residents. AMI was a statistic that figured into most of those financial mechanisms. In their conversations with other residents, our neighborhood partners heard time and again confusion over AMI, what it was, and what it meant to them and their lives. From this, they decided to host an event that would bring together residents, members of city councils, and local philanthropies to work to collectively understand AMI. It was in the context of this event that we were invited to participate.

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The event was charged from its inception. Residents were suffering from a lack of affordable housing. Our partners in the neighborhood had been in conversation with city councilmembers, government agencies, and philanthropies, and were dissatisfied with what they were hearing. Our invitation was to assist in staging an event that would both inform residents about AMI in an appropriate and compelling manner, and provide an opportunity for engagement between those affected by housing issues and those involved in addressing affordable housing conditions. Collectively, we knew this engagement would be contentious; already there was disagreement about the allocation of resources, about what counted as affordable and for whom, about what the just and caring conditions are for these neighborhoods. We decided to design a game, of sorts. We brainstormed the basic game mechanics together in our studio and quickly developed a prototype. We made the first round of iterations after playtesting among the studio, and the second round of iterations after playtesting with three of the residents who were organizing the community event where the game was to be featured. The purpose of the game was to explain AMI and demonstrate the consequences and possibilities of setting AMI at different levels. The game is simple, intentionally reductive. Players are given cards with annual incomes on them; each designated income is drawn from data on income ranges in Atlanta. After the incomes are dealt, the game master (and MC of sorts for the event) sets the AMI and the Percent AMI, and based upon that, players determine whether or not they are eligible to apply for affordable housing. Then, players engage in discussion with one another and non-players, discussing whether this combination of AMI and Percent AMI is fair and of benefit to residents. To be clear, there is nothing particularly fun about this game. Playing it is akin to solving math word problems as a group, and the consequences of the outcome show the grim realities of how difficult it is to ‘win’ when it comes to affordable housing. The event took place in a neighborhood community center that houses multiple programs, mostly oriented towards youth. This event was in the early evening, so the youth had left for the day. The space itself is new, the floors and furniture are cheerfully reminiscent of a school (brightly colored tile, thick, stackable tables and chairs); it is a welcoming space, with art and photographs from the community on the walls, with a large open space in the middle of building, well lit. As people entered into the room they saw larger printed maps of the city and the neighborhood on easels, with information about median income printed on the maps. The event began with background presentations by residents, members of city councils, and local philanthropies, each differently addressing the state of affairs with affordable housing. As anticipated, these presentations incited much discussion. It was pointed out that the area used to calculate AMI was much too broad, and because of that, it distorted AMI in ways detrimental to residents. It was argued that this was beyond anyone’s control, that AMI offered the best possible ­statistic.

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It was argued that the policies being put in place would be bold. It was argued that the policies being put in place would be insufficient. There was dissensus. At this point, about 30 minutes into the event, we played the game. Chairs were moved aside and tables were moved to the center of the room where people had been seated. The room was discreetly rearranged to support the happening of the modest spectacle that was to come about. Two residents and two council members were chosen to play the game, while other attendees (perhaps 20 or so) sat or stood in a semi-circle around the players. Meng (one of the co-authors of this essay) was the chosen MC for the event (chosen by our resident partners, as a known and committed accomplice to the community). She explained the gameplay, handed out the annual income cards, set the AMI and the Percent AMI, and orchestrated each round. This orchestration was not neutral. Meng played the role of provocateur. The income cards were not dealt blindly, she knew who she was giving what income, and did that with the purpose of provoking laughter for some, consternation for others. All with jest, but also with cunning. Throughout the gameplay, there was persistent banter among all those who were there, not just those selected players. In a sense, all those who were there became enrolled in the gameplay through the chatter. As the game went on and the concept of how AMI worked became defined through play, the discussions became more direct, pointed, and agitated. In part, this had to do with the specifics of AMI. In part, this also had to do with how the discussion of AMI provided an entrée to other issues of affordable housing. Such issues included variances in how affordability is defined and demarcated, competition for affordable housing within and across neighborhoods, and the structures of tax programs established to require developers to build affordable housing. Questions were asked, accusations were made, words were exchanged. In discussing tax programs, at one point an exasperated resident stated something to the effect of … ‘So, you’re not even taxing them [real estate developers], you’re taxing us and our neighbors, and then you’re giving them our tax money as incentives, you’re ­coving their tax bills with our money, so they’ll build apartments we can actually ­afford? So, they aren’t really giving up anything, and we’re still paying them?’ And a councilmember, equally exasperated replied … ‘Yes, of course, that’s how the market works!’ Such exchanges went on for perhaps the better part of an hour. No one walked away. City councilmembers argued the necessity of tax incentives, representatives from government agencies explained and defended bureaucratic procedures, philanthropies touted the efficacy of their giving, residents argued for meeting their lived experience and needs, not abstractions. The gameplay event was very much an agonistic moment: ‘a polyphony of voices and mutually vigorous but ­tolerant disputes among groups united by passionate engagement.’ (Björgvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2010: 129).

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It is fair to ask, ‘What came of this event?’ The answer is ‘Further debate.’ Going into the event there was no expectation, either by us or our partners, that some resolution to the issues of AMI or affordable housing would be resolved that evening. Our partners’ objective was multiple. It was to educate other members of the community about AMI, in a way that was reasonable to them, and to educate them on the issues of AMI in relation to their needs for affordable housing. It was also to provide the opportunity for residents to engage government officials and philanthropy officers in informed debate, so as to, hopefully, educate those government officials and philanthropy officers, and hopefully, move those government officials’ and philanthropy officers’ positions by an encounter with the acute frustrations of residents and their actual conditions and needs. To varying extents, these things happened. But what’s more, the game and the event are marked in time – they are remembered by many of those who attended. In ongoing conversations, in the debates on affordable housing, the game continues to be referenced by residents and by our neighborhood partners – its playing is referenced and recalled. And this recollection is a principal aspect of staging such encounters.

Reflections Many aspects of this story are familiar across various genres such as participatory design or design activism or social design. One way to describe these endeavors is that what we are contributing to and participating in the staging of events. We are certainly not the first to suggest the idea of staging agonistic events. Such work has been present in design for some time. To begin with, Binder, De Michelis, Ehn, Jacucci, Linde, and Wagner (2012) and Jönsson’s (2014) work on design events provides entrée into considering events as structures and processes of design in which artifacts remain present, but those artifacts do not wholly encapsulate the work or effects of designing. In many ways, their work opens a space of design events, in which we can begin to explore different characters of the event, such as the agonistic event. In conceptualizing this notion of staging agonistic events, our work is strongly influenced by the work of Björgvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren (2012) and Seravalli, Hillgren, and Agger-Eriksen (2016), who collectively have worked to explore how to create spaces for agonism in and through design processes, engaging diverse communities and government. We see our work as quite similar, drawing from shared histories and practices of participatory design. What we are hoping to provide, as complement to that work, is to begin to draw out some of the particular qualities of agonistic events. The work of Keshavharz and Maze has also been important in drawing attention to how dissensus is and might be differently framed through design, calling into question how participation is staged in design work (2013). From Keshavharz and Maze we take a critical stance to our work, to

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r­ ecognize and respect the already existing politics in the communities we partner with and thus, to more closely question how we position ourselves, and how our scholarship positions design, into these already existing politics. So, one answer to the question ‘If our commitment as activist-researchers is to enable and participate in agonistic pluralism through design, what else, as designers, might we be doing?’, is that we can contribute to staging agonistic events. But we know this. As just recounted, many designers, theorists, and researchers are doing just this. Perhaps there is another question we should ask then: Why stage agonistic events? To what ends? We realize some might bristle at that question, as if we are trying to unduly instrumentalize these events, and in the process slip into solutionism. But we are not. Rather, we are attempting to create an appreciation for them such that we can justify the labor of these endeavors towards our values of care and action. Those values do not reduce to rote notions of utility, but rather direct us towards cultivating attention and discretion, towards sustaining the possibilities that contestation provides. One of the qualities of an event is that it is memorable, it is a happening that we can recall. As odd as it might sound at first, one of the principal motivations for staging agonistic events is to construct happenings that we can recall. These recollections serve as evidence and models. They are evidence of collective contestation. They are models of diverse civics. This evidence makes it possible to say ‘We have come together to disagree, to challenge, to refuse, to request that things be otherwise.’ These models make it possible to say ‘We have shown you that we can do politics differently.’ By having these encounters unfold in place, with those affected by these issues and their conditions, the work of these agonistic events is quite different from what we might claim of an artifact. The agonism expressed in events as described in this essay is not the authorial expression of a designer, circulating through media. The agonism expressed in such events is the expression of those who participated, the residents, the neighborhood activists, the councilmembers the bureaucrats, the philanthropy officers, which occurred in a particular place, at a particular time, disseminating its effects throughout the evening and in the recollections ­afterward. Design, and designers, are still quite present in this affair. The event described certainly was planned, orchestrated, and mediated, all things that we, as designers, had a hand in. Our role, however, was not one of distance, of interpretation made from afar. We were ourselves, enrolled in this event. We were asked to take a position and inhabit it, not merely to communicate a point of view, but to participate in a position together with our partners. Of course, this does not put us on the same grounds as the residents. Their lived experience is not ours. We were able to walk away from their conditions at the end of the event. But in the course

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of the event, our subjectivities were, in some limited but nonetheless meaningful ways, entwined with our partners and their cause. Not only does this affect our relationship to the event at the moment – what occurred that evening – but also to how we are recalled in relation to the event. Similar accounts of engagement can be found in the literature on participatory action research. But our work was not really participatory action research; to claim that it was would be an overreach, not fair to the structure and theories of that practice. Rather, we have found ourselves in a position more akin to accomplices: accessories to and with the work of our resident partners (see Powell and Kelly 2017). In a sense, we are returning to a notion of design as contributing to the crafting of an experience. Without a doubt, the notion of experience in design is welltrod and fraught. But this is not the sort of shallowness that too often typifies socalled user experience – constructing a ‘feel-good’ moment, an achievement with a product or service so as to increase its stickiness. Rather this is an experience in the sense of an occurrence unfolding in time, charged with affect (Dewey 1934). These sorts of events are collective experiences, not an individualistic one. They are experiences in which a multiplicity of peoples are brought together and they co-construct a lively environment of feeling and meaning-making through their actions. Another question then emerges, ‘How do we contribute to staging these events, such that there is an agonistic experience that is memorable as evidence of collective contestation, as models of diverse civics?’ Making of artifacts is part of the answer, but not all of it. The game was crucial to staging. It provided a material channel for action, focusing the attention of those who were present. One way to describe the work of the game is that it allowed us, collectively, to perform adversarial tactics: as revealing hegemonies, as dis-­ articulating existing orders. The embodied and situated aspects of these tactics are important to emphasize. This work is done in context, it unfolds through the presence and actions of multiple folks, of those who are most directly affected by and involved in these matters of concern. And to be clear, the contestation was not expressed by the game, but rather through the play of the game. Put another way, agonism was not expressed by an object of design, but rather, agonism was expressed by participating in an event staged, in part, through activities shaped by design. More so than any artifact, what comes to the fore as important are the qualities of interaction in the unfolding experience – it is in the qualities of interaction that we can look for the aesthetics and effects of an agonistic event. There are, most certainly, many kinds of qualities that make up these aesthetics and effects. These are, in part, temporal qualities: matters of sequencing, of pacing, of rhythm. These are also, in part, spatial qualities: matters of the arrangement of bodies and things. Perhaps disappointingly, we do not have a list of these qualities to offer. But our lack of enumeration directs us back to a question we began with: ‘How else, as scholars, might we be describing, theorizing, and appreciating this work?’

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­ onceiving and appraising these aesthetics and effects is critical work to be done if C we are to continue to participate in and contribute to varied modes of democratic action. Part of our commitment as activist-researchers is to developing perspectives and vocabularies that we can use to describe diverse practices of both design and democracy. Here we take inspiration (again) from work on diverse economies, which calls for new ways of talking about and imagining labor, exchange, and markets if we want to take seriously other economic possibilities (Gibson-Graham 2006). Likewise, there is a need for new ways of talking about and imagining the work of design in enabling and participating in agonistic pluralism. The move towards events; towards appreciating events as a means to construct happenings that we can recall and those recollections as evidence of contestation and models of different ways of doing politics; towards recovering a notion of experience; towards an aesthetics and effects agonistic interaction – these are moves to develop new imaginaries of what the roles of design might be in contributing to an agonistic pluralism.

References Arendt, Hannah (2013). The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press. Binder, Thomas, Giorgio De Michelis, Pelle Ehn, Giulio Jacucci, Per Linde, and Ina Wagner (2011). Design Things. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT press. Björgvinsson, Erling, Pelle Ehn, and Per-Anders Hillgren (2012). ‘Agonistic participatory design: working with marginalised social movements.’ CoDesign 8, no. 2–3: 127–144. Connolly, William E (1993). The Terms of Political Discourse. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dewey, John (1934). Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch, and Company. Gibson-Graham, and Julie Katherine (2006). A Postcapitalist Politics. U of Minnesota Press. Hillgren, Per-Anders, Anna Seravalli, and Mette Agger Eriksen (2016). ‘Counter-hegemonic practices; dynamic interplay between agonism, commoning and strategic design.’ Strategic Design Research Journal, 9 (2) May-August 2016: 89–99. Honig, Bonnie (2016). Political Theory And The Displacement Of Politics. Cornell University Press. Jönsson, Li (2014). ‘Design Events: On Explorations Of A Non-Anthropocentric Framework In Design.’ PhD diss., The Royal DanishAcademy of Fine Arts, School of Design. Keshavarz, Mahmoud, and Ramia Mazé (2013). ‘Design and dissensus: framing and staging participation in design research.’ Design Philosophy Papers 11, no. 1: 7–29. Manzini, Ezio (2016). ‘Design Culture and Dialogic Design.’ Design Issues 32, no. 1: 52–59. Mouffe, Chantal (2013). Agonistics: Thinking the world politically. London, New York City: Verso Books. Powell, J., and A. Kelly (2017). ‘Accomplices in the academy in the age of Black Lives Matter.’ Journal of ­Critical Thought and Praxis, 6 (2). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.31274/jctp-180810-73 Rancière, Jacques (2015). Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

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11  DESIGN ACTIVISM, DEMOCRACY, AND THE CRISIS OF SOCIAL NETWORKS Maziar Rezai

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

What we now call science fiction and also what we know as the digital world have miraculously crossed a passage under the influence of two leading women in the 19th century, Mary Shelley (1797–1851) and Ada Lovelace (1815–1852). What is interesting here is the relation between these two and the influence of a man on both of them: Lord Byron. Byron (1788–1824) was an English poet and politician who became a revolutionary in the Greek War of Independence and is considered as one of the leading figures of the Romantic Movement. He was the father of Ada Lovelace, a woman who was the first to recognize that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is widely regarded as one of the first computer programmers (The Guardian, 2012). At the same time, Byron was a close friend and companion of Mary Shelley, an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and the lover of Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister (­McGann 2013). Perhaps it was the impacts of Byron’s character, the ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ romantic poet that somehow reinforces the features of digital technology and the sci-fi world, which are both amazing, dangerous, even romantic areas, and also crazy. The madness of technology, in the last three centuries, has always been one of the matters of humankind, and one of the big madnesses is technology possession by dictatorship powers that harm humans and mutilate the spirit of democracy. Social media (including social networks), obviously is one of the technological symbols that had been imagined could increase social participation, impact social and political issues, and deploy democracy in societies during past years. As a decade before, social networking and media-sharing websites, in addition to the­­increasing prevalence of cellular telephones, have made citizen journalism1 or democratic journalism phenomena more accessible to people worldwide. Notable examples of citizen journalism reporting through social networks from major world events are the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the 2013 protests in Turkey, the Euromaidan events in Ukraine, the Syrian Civil War, and ­ erguson unrest. But the controversial presidential election in Iran in the 2014 F 2009 was an impressive happening in this regard. Twitter played an i­ mportant role during these election protests after foreign journalists had effectively been ‘barred

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from reporting’. Twitter delayed scheduled maintenance during the protests that could shut down coverage in Iran due to the role it played in public communication (Landler and Stelter 2009). Another example, ten years later, which shows the influence of social media again in supporting democracy, was the use of Hong Kong protesters from social media like AirDrop and Telegram channels to share their demonstration posters and announcements in 2019. The emergence of the citizen journalism phenomenon is a case which shows the power and ability of a social network and its impacts on social and political changes in the world, but the social network’s coin has the other side too.

Social networks: Frankenstein’s monster Technology alone can’t save democracy. When technology is designed and used well, it can make it easier for people to participate in elections and other activities of civic life; but when it’s not, technology that promises to help ends up being harmful (Quesenbery 2017).

Social networks as a technology and their relation to democracy have been under the magnifier recently. But here, one of the main questions is whether ‘this virtual world is really democratic’? And, why these digital products were designed in this form? The fact is when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his classmates at Harvard launched Facebook, for example, they wouldn’t have imagined the next years of this new platform and dimensions of violence, ethical challenges, its impacts on people’s lives and businesses and also, democracy. This is true about other entrepreneurs, developers, and technology leaders, too. Zuckerberg and his friends have just targeted the lack of emotions in 21st-century life and the weakness of human connections; as humanity means somewhere there are human r­ elations and they made this virtual location. Thus, the social network was an answer to the need, but almost nobody had an estimation of the future problems that social networks could make for people. However, what is meant by social network problems here? Recently, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, among others, ‘have all been subjected to intense scrutiny because of the negative externalities that their services create. A focus of concern has been the abuse of social-media channels as part of efforts to influence the outcome of major political events, including the June 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the US presidential election later that year’ (Deibert 2019). In both cases, studies and show, nation-states and nonstate actors exploited, abused social media as a tool of their ‘information operations’ (Rosenberg and Confessore and Cadwalladr 2018). So that in 2017, political scientist Thomas Rid wrote that Twitter, ‘has become a threat to open and liberal democracy’ (Rid 2017).

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Hence, growing numbers of people are coming to believe that social media have too much influence on important social and political conversations and naturally it makes concerns about social networks based on these recent happenings. For instance, according to a New York Times investigation, Facebook has data-sharing deals with at least 60 device makers – including Amazon, Apple, BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Samsung. After installing an application from one of them, this app was able to gain access to unique identifiers and other personal information of hundreds of his Facebook friends, and close to three hundred thousand online ‘friends of friends’ (J.X. Dance, Confessore, and LaForgia 2018). Moreover, in research in 2014, Pew Internet discovered that apps can seek up to 235 different kinds of permissions from Android smartphone users, with the average app asking for five (Olmstead and Atkinson 2015). Accordingly, it seems social networks, social media, and our cellphones are changed to professional spy instruments that not only can find our location, our contacts, notes, comments, personal information, and even family photos but also have access to our mind and thoughts. It can estimate based on our Google searches and our clicks, or even a pause in a second on an image, what are our current ideas, what are our favorites, and what will be our future needs. Also, it can choose the photos, the advertisements, and the videos we have to see and guide us to vote for its favorite candidate in the next election if it wants. It means that these new big systems are bigger than the KGB or CIA2 or other spy organizations in the world and can abuse people in every form they need. Now, this volume of capabilities, more than ever, especially after the coronavirus crisis and the government’s use of social networks and applications to crisis management, is available to populist politicians and it is feared that it will later become a pervasive threat to democracy. Overall if we want to summarize some of the most important harms of social networks, especially with the emphasis on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as three of the most popular social networks3, without priority, we can mention these titles in two groups:

1) The crises that harm democracy and human rights Data privacy and digital human rights: On 5 July 2019 Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia, in an interview with CNBC said he’s not happy with how the internet has evolved in the nearly two decades since then. Sanger’s main gripe was with big social media platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter. These companies, he said, exploit users’ personal data to make profits, at the expense of ‘massive violations’ of privacy and security: ‘They can shape your experience, they can control what you see when you see it and you become essentially a cog in their machine’. Sanger who is advocating ‘decentralized’ social networks, criticized executives in Silicon Valley

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like Mark Zuckerberg for being ‘too controlling’ in this interview4. Don’t forget that when the Sanger interview was published while some months later, personal information of 267 million accounts on Facebook was exposed.5 Fake accounts: One study estimates that between 9 and 15 percent of Twitter’s ­active ‘users’ are in fact bots (Varol 2017). Also, in September 2018, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told a US Senate committee that from October 2017 to March 2018, her company had deleted 1.3 billion fake accounts (Vaidhyanathan 2018). All these fake accounts/identities in future elections can be the most helpful to populist leaders and help to change the direction of the minds and strike a blow at democratic processes. False information and authoritarian inclinations: Another problem of social media companies is ‘the actions (or inactions) of them that appear unwilling or unable to weed out malicious or false information/disinformation’ (Deibert 2019). A 2018 study found that ‘more than 80 percent of accounts that repeatedly spread misinformation during the 2016 election campaign are still active, and they continue to publish more than a million tweets on a typical day’ (Knight Foundation 2018). Also, ‘a recent survey by the Oxford Internet Institute found that 48 countries have at least one government agency or political party engaging in shaping public opinion through social media. It shows authoritarian-minded leaders routinely lambaste ‘fake news’ while at the same time shamelessly pushing patent falsehoods’ (­Deibert 2019). On an individual scale, to give just one example, a German study found that when otherwise-similar municipalities are compared, the ones where Facebook usage is higher also tend to have a higher incidence of violence against refugees (Müller and Schwarz 2019). It can be concluded, people with authoritarian inclinations are actively taking advantage of the propitious environment that social media offers (Gunitsky 2015) and this is one of the main challenges. For e­ xample, Donald Trump, who was made a big part of his hegemony by using ­Twitter, after a fact-checking row by this platform, signed an executive order targeting s­ ocial networks and also urged Twitter users to join Parler.6 The dimensions of authoritarian inclinations are more than this, of course.

2) The crises that harm people/users Making money through social networks: It’s a big opportunity and at the same time, a great threat. Social networks are a fantastic platform for advertising businesses without spending a lot of money by using some instruments including copywriting, using hashtags, sharing advertising photos and videos, and new business players called ‘influencers’. At the same time, social networks like Instagram or Face-

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book are the best place for buying and selling everything, including illegal goods like pistols, drugs, and even pornography videos and prostitution. Controlling this big marketplace is one of the most important duties of platforms, without the restrictions of companies and the possibility of advertising. Also, selling pages and fake followers are a new monetization in social networks especially on Instagram that helps to fund illegal activities and fraud. Therefore, to become safe and democratic, it seems necessary to review the economic and moral system of social networks, while respecting the principles of freedom of expression. Producing violence: The social network, now, is not only the place of human networking, information development, and growth of knowledge but also the ideal media for publishing thousands of bullying and hate in daily comments and a fantastic media for terrorist groups. Therefore, one of the other crises of the social network, today, is the generating of violence. This aspect, unfortunately, grows day by day, and companies are forced to spend a lot of money to control it; the control sometimes works as a kind of censorship. Facebook leads three great and popular networks (Whats App, Instagram, and Facebook) and is spending millions of dollars per year for decreasing violence and its consequences on these platforms. The method Facebook uses for decreasing verbal violence crisis is to read comments and examine the posts, and if the rules are violated, remove the post or comment from the platform. Facebook, as a case, does all this control as an American company under the US regulations, and this makes some problems for a platform that can have effects worldwide. For example, after the presidency of Donald Trump, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is a branch of Iran’s Armed Forces, since 15 April 2019, is considered a terrorist organization (Brice 2019). This designation was criticized by a number of governments including Turkey, Iraq, and China as well as the Islamic Consultative Assembly, Iran’s parliament. Anyway, instantly Facebook designated the IRGC as a terrorist group and started to eliminate each post which supports or praises the IRGC. While it was the political decision of the US government under the leadership of Donald Trump and maybe will not continue after the return of the two countries to the negotiating table or finishing the mission of the US president. It seems the social network, unlike the last decade, is at the service of political power, and more than ever, there is a need for a free and safe platform with global dimensions and a worldwide function under United ­Nations protocols and a international covenants. Addictive machines: According to a study, ‘most students from [ten] countries failed to go the full 24 hours without media, and they, all used virtually the same words to describe their reactions, including: Fretful, Confused, Anxious, ­Irritable, Insecure, Nervous, Restless, Crazy, Addicted, Panicked, Jealous, Angry, Lonely, ­Dependent, Depressed, Jittery and Paranoid’ (Prof 2011). One of the reasons for

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these reactions I think returns to the importance of a presence in social networks for consolidation of a social position; as it is, it seems without activity in social networks, you are not in real life. Moreover, ‘social media stimulates us in a powerfully subconscious and hormonal way’ (Deibert 2019). It affects the human brain in the same way that falling in love does (Penenberg 2010). Levels of oxytocin or ‘love hormone’  rise as much as 13 percent when people use social media for as little as ten minutes (Seiter 2017). People addicted to social media ‘experience symptoms similar to those experienced by individuals who suffer from addictions to substances or other behaviors’ – such as withdrawal symptoms, relapse, and mood modification (Griffiths 2013). Thus, it seems social media has the power to become addiction machines. Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, described how features such as the ‘like’ button were designed – remember the role of decision makers/designers here – to give users ‘a little dopamine hit.’ He explained: ‘It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like me would come up with because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology’ (Solon 2017). Indeed, how can we control these addiction machines with their psycho effects and ‘like’ crisis in our lives? Creation of irrelevance caste in societies: Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli ­historian, believes with the progress of technology especially in AI and biotechnology, in 2050 we will encounter people who have many things to do, but they are ‘useless’ and ‘inefficient’.7 It is true about social networks also, as these people will do many things in the social network but generate nothing and what they do will have no value, while it takes many hours. Digital social networking is one of the most important things that this irrelevance caste has to do. Solving the social and economic problems of these people is one of the next years’ challenges related to ­social networks.

‘A change through design’ or ‘Why we have this chapter in this book’ Obviously, social network as technology would be a great source at the service of democracy, if the mentioned crises of it can be solved. Here, design can be a fantastic tool to help in this regard. Herbert A. Simon has stated that design is always about ‘courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (Simon 1969). The ability of change is still the most important duty that design can do for societies and users, from my point of view. Therefore, problem solving, as the biggest imaginable claim for design, is a way to change toward a preferred situation. Now, the social network needs to change, but how about democracy?

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In March 2017, Ezio Manzini and Victor Margolin (RIP), two design thinkers, in an open letter to the design community, asked them to take action and respond to the crisis that democracy is undergoing: ‘We [designers] are in difficult and dangerous times. For many years, we lived in a world that, despite its problems, was nevertheless committed to principles of democracy in which human rights, fundamental freedoms, and opportunities for personal development, were increasing. Today, this picture has changed profoundly. There are attacks on democracy in several countries – including those where democracy had seemed to be unshakable’. They asked the design community to take action, because ‘normal’ ways of designing were not enough, and the role of designer in confronting the lack of democracy in the world needed to be changed (Manzini/Margolin 2017). In truth, it was an invitation to designers for intervention in changing to improve democracy and its tools. Although considering social issues in design is not a new phenomenon – as footmark of waves of social consciousness through design history can be found from the Arts and Crafts movement in the 19th century to Bauhaus and ater the Ulm school, up to now – but intervention in big systems such as social networks and talk about design and democracy relation needs a new disposition in design. This new disposition is about awareness of existing power relationships, and at the same time, confidence regarding new skills and capabilities in design. From this point of view, today, design activism is the same new tendency for designers, I can say. An activist designer is a designer who observes, analyzes and then does an act by its design. Activist design is more sensitive to its surroundings, especially to social issues that affect society and thinks fundamentally and out of the box. In ­design activism what is most important is questioning and criticism, deep observation, and making change for people, not just being a cog in the capitalism machine. In design activism, there is no method that is recommended and all methods are just instruments to do any positive change, even a small one. Here, design and activism are two hands joined together; but there is a point. This river started from design and falls into activism, therefore I believe just being ‘activist’ cannot be enough because we, designers, can’t be more ‘active’ than activists. We, as designers, should think deeply and design correct – this correctness is not only about form and function, but also is about consideration of user needs and the moral consequences of our design – and then can use the help of people or activists to implement our ideas, or vice versa, our ability to implement people’s ideas. In this regard, the social network is a great challenge for activist designers as a big project with different aspects of system design, strategy, behavioral design, customer experience, and so on. However, it’s clear that running a new platform, as a new player in social networks contest, is not so easy. It’s a big production and now can't be an ordinary platform, especially when a platform in the presence of other players like Facebook and Twitter make claims about safety, high security, and being democratic, which looks like grand gambling. Also, we know social ­networks

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today are not only a website on the internet but also a political and security matter. But really, if social networks are going to change based on what has been said, what will these changes be?

Next generation social networks In this stage, the first step is the problem of the user’s identity. Randi Zuckerberg, the former director of market development, Facebook spokesperson, and sister of Mark Zuckerberg, in 2011 and in one of her last public appearances as Facebook marketing boss about the end of anonymity on the internet and in order to protect especially children and young people who can be bullied via the internet, has said, ‘Then people just behave better. If they stay anonymous, they think they can say anything they want’8. What she said is true, because anonymous accounts are the best way of making different violence and also illegal activities and disinformation. In fact, in many social networks, you can easily make a fake account with an allonym by just an email. For example, Twitter does not require real-name registration, and there is no limit on how many accounts may be created. Account owners can easily delete accounts and content, and the service is highly automated – circumstances that have made the platform easy to exploit (Deibert 2019). Therefore, in an ideal safe network, the user can create just one account with its own real identity. For each account, an email should be presented that shows you or your company real name. Also, for identifying the user, a safe network can identify a website or other social networks of a user like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram page. And for a person who has no other social network, online profile, or website, a safe platform can use methods like the same procedure which Google uses for the claim of its knowledge panels or Instagram uses for recovering passwords and/or other current methods that other platforms use. As well as this idea – each person or company can make an account once; each email should be the same with the name and etc. – can decrease the violence and possibility of crimes, as obviously no one for doing an illegal activity would use their real identity. Although it’s not the absolute way of solving this big problem, as it seems we can’t delete all violence on the platform or close all windows of fraud, we can decrease the huge amount of violence and crime by designing the strategy. Most users, because of their culture, social norms, and also the possibility of prosecution, usually don’t use their real name and information and they prefer to use the allonym. But approaching the virtual identity of users to their real identity helps to increase r­ esponsibility in a society that is the first step of democracy, and in the long term to increase the freedom of speech capacity in society by social networks. Even in authoritarian regimes, although a poster or commenter should be more careful about what he/she publishes or writes/talks metaphorically, but in the long term,

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this will be the authoritarian regime that unintentionally will expand its capacities in freedom of expression, because these regimes cannot control all these people in the scale of society and fortunately the same experience of using social networks for more than a decade has helped to increase social awareness and make thoughts easier to express. Consider that we are talking about an examinable alternative social platform in the presence of all other social networks that are active now. Thus, it was conventional wisdom to assume that social networks would enable greater access to information, facilitate collective organizing, empower civil society, and help democracy to develop as the social network was conceived as democracy of the third kind (the sovereignty of the majority over the majority) but this was not the whole story. In other meaning, one big weakness in social networks that was imagined before, which is a positive aspect and now has changed to a big threat to democracy, is reducing the concept of democracy to an instrument of making the opportunity for everyone to comment and talk about everything ­ ossibility without expertise. Something now, after some years of experience, this p has changed the social network concept to a controlling tool for populist leaders/­ dictators. It seems we need a kind of aristocracy or even technocracy in social networks; something like the electoral college experience in the US democracy and removing the possibility of creating anonymous accounts that help to change users’ behavior is an endeavor in this area. In fact, the presence of users with recognized identities could decrease populistic statements and not-thoughtful comments. Also, a change in ‘commenting’ and ‘posting’ is felt, and that is by showing all comments and/or posts of a user to their followers. Clearly this simple change will decrease verbal violence because the experience of the first generation of social networks shows users have more responsibility in their posts in comparison with their comments (which their followers usually don’t see them) and/or their stories (their temporary posts), which are less important for the poster. This idea reminds me of the the famous Dewey–Lippmann debate in the US about a century ago. In 1922, Walter Lippmann published an influential book ­entitled Public Opinion and in this book, he was very suspicious and critical of any model of democracy. From his point of view, ‘the most feasible alternative to such democracy consisted of a technocracy in which government leaders are guided by experts whose objectives and disinterested knowledge go beyond the narrow views and the parochial self-­interests of the average citizens organized in local communities’ (Schugurensky 2001) and (Lippmann 1922 and 1925). In his response to Lipp­ mann, John Dewey, first in a review published in The New Republic (1922), and later in his book The Public and its Problems (1927), argued that democracy should not be limited ‘to the enlightenment of administrators or to insiders like industrial ­leaders, and highlighted the importance of public deliberation in p ­ olitical decision-­ making. However, he was not an advocate of any type of deliberation’ (­Schugurensky 2001). He expressed that just letting discussion go, without eliciting facts of any

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kind, and without appealing to common meanings, was fruitless (Hart 1993). For him the weaknesses of democracy are symptoms, rather than causes, of the problems of modern society (Dewey, 1922, 1925, and 1927). Here, it seems about what I’ve tried to explain, despite Dewey’s brilliant comments, the Lippmann idea works better. Because we are talking about a social network with worldwide impacts and obviously we know that the quality and expansion of education and democracy are not identical all over the world and even the best upbringing and education is no guarantee of democratic attitudes. However, why don't Facebook or other companies redesign themselves with some ideas like real identity accounts? The answer is simple: because they couldn’t change their identity with their specified business models and millions of users. They can just improve their services, add some more possibilities, or change some features in a long time. Thus, it seems for creating a new, safe platform, based on these recognized current problems, the concept of social networks philosophically should be examined. Furthermore, if a social network would be popular and one of the competition players, it should present a new idea and meet one of the needs in human relations in the virtual world. Since the first generation of social networks, with its current meaning, focused more on networking people, sharing information including comments, images, videos, and news and helped to reinforce freedom of speech, but the second generation of social networks more emphasized emotions and human relation and the best example for that is a large number of dating social networks from Tinder to Bumble or a large number of live chat applications after the success of Instagram Live (as we were evidence of the creation of dozens of online meeting applications after the coronavirus crisis, like Zoom). Therefore now, the third generation of social networks should do something more; something that should answer the recognized crises of social networks and also would be democratic.

Design by ‘value’ Shermin Voshmgir, director of the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics, the founder of BlockchainHub in Berlin and writer of Token Economy: How Blockchains and Smart Contracts Revolutionize the Economy believes in ‘digital human rights’ and ‘decentralizing data structures’ and the third generation of web called Web 3.0 that is internet based on blockchains. ‘If the current web mission is the ‘information’ exchange, the Web 3.0 mission is the ‘value’ exchange based on tokens. Bitcoin is a kind of token’9, she said (Voshmgir 2020). But what is this new idea related to social networks matter? More than a decade of social network presence in our lives shows that censor­ sers. Also ship (in the modern forms) is the best way of controlling social network u

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clearly, censorship is the best way to suppress democracy and freedom of speech. Therefore human society should change this method and also find a new way to control violence and the populistic atmosphere of the online social networks (OSN), to interrupt the abuse of populist leaders and dictators from social networks. Making accounts with real identity in these platforms, as mentioned, can be a step in this ­regard. The second step is the concept of ‘value’, what ­Voshmgir has mentioned ­correctly. The concept of value is challenging and important and here we have to describe what we mean by value. Value in ethics? In philosophy? Are we talking about value in the economy and if which theories of value? From a Marxian economics point of view or from the Marginalists’ perspective? Obviously, ‘value’ is a big topic; I do not intend to redefine it. What I’m talking about is the same economic value10, or in better words, use value (German: Gebrauchswert) or value in use that is a concept in classical political economy and Marxian economics. Value in use refers to the tangible features of a commodity (a tradeable object) which can satisfy some human requirement, want, or need, or which serves a useful purpose. In Karl Marx’s critique of political economy, any product has a labor-value and a usevalue, and if it is traded as a commodity in markets, it additionally has an exchange value, most often expressed as a money-price. (Marxists.org, 2012) This definition also needs more explanations in the matter that is examined here. Because in general, when we talk about the concept of value in today’s world, purely economic value, that is, what I have described is not enough, and multidimensional values have replaced. Likewise, we know that design creates value, not only use-value but also multidimensional values. Besides, in market-oriented/‘human-centered’ design discourse there is the sometimes very hollow catchword of ‘value proposition’, which is generated by design. However, the value word here refers to money or digital money and the idea is simple; if you exchange ‘value’ by what you are doing on the social networks – every action on the platform – your behavior as a user will be completely different. While now, none of us as users almost have responsibility for our comments and posts on the platform. Also, we have no profit except for the psychological attracting of ‘likes’ or ‘shares’ and networking. And, having income ways in social networks are the same legal or illegal recognized methods that were mentioned. On the other meaning, the idea is the possibility of using blockchain’s idea in social networks, not only in the model, which the model is available right now and is a great way in decentralizing data and safe enough in privacy and control11, but also in exchanging value, which means it makes value for any action on the platform including content creation. For example, a safe social network can define its digital currency that could be digital euro, in Europe’s case; when a user likes a post, the platform gives the poster one coin or a part of a coin/Satoshi (based on a bitcoin p ­ attern, a Satoshi is the smallest unit of bitcoin and is equivalent with 0.00000001 bitcoin) or when a user reposts (re-share a post) and/or replies to a post, value exchange can be repeated. In this system the user is e­ xchanging

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­digital c­ urrency/value and depends on the sharing contents, the user can gather more likes/money. But what will exactly happen here? First of all, most users about sharing a post and like content will be cautious; because in this structure you will have limited digital coins to spend (cryptocurrency has supply limit and this limitation is the main reason for digital coins’ price increase in the long term. For instance, the supply limit of bitcoin is about 21,000,000) and forced to be careful about what you are writing and share and the content you want to ‘like’. This simple change probably would improve the quality of shared content by users and will help in solving one of next year’s problems: the creation of an irrelevance caste in societies. In other words, value exchange in a ­social network would help to make money and decrease the irrelevance caste.

The ethics of ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ buttons What about the ethical aspects of a system like this? Imagine a social network that users do anything for having, for example, more ‘likes’? Thousand times worse than what is happening right now. How we can solve this newborn problem? The answer is the ‘dislike’ button. With having both ‘agree’ and ‘disagree’ buttons, not only we can make a balance in scores that users gathered (coins), but also we can show the power of democracy and opposite opinions. Remember that if we can control fake accounts here, we can see what the majority thinks and what the minority wants, without any concern about the destruction of a user’s opinion by others. Also, valuing is the best way to control violence because, despite the dislike button, few people would pay money to read hate and bullies or share violent content. About the moral aspect of a social network that works with value exchange and/or when the ethics and money are placed next to each other, remembering a famous Max Weber work is necessary. Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (German: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus) wrote that capitalism in Northern Europe evolved when the Protestant (particularly Calvinist) ethic influenced large numbers of people to engage in work in the secular world, developing their own enterprises and engaging in trade and the accumulation of wealth for investment (McKinnon 2010). The Protestant work ethic was an important force behind the unplanned and uncoordinated emergence of modern capitalism. Calvinists thought the accumulation of wealth for investment unlike other Christian beliefs is not an immoral concept. In other words, when a social phenomenon becomes more economical, it will be less immoral. For example, in a value-based social network, selling popular pages will be not illegal, because the context of making violence and fraud is nearly removed and its exchange through a valuing platform can be a part of that platform’s ­ability.

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In this regard, blockchain is a way to help to rebuild social networks on the valuing system and is a technology that makes the economy more democratic. Blockchain started as a way to move digital coin from point A to point B, but it is now being used by a host of big companies to monitor and move any number of assets around the world as easily as sending an email. From the instantaneous settlement of German government bonds to verifying the provenance of diamonds mined in Africa and bringing liquidity to a small supplier of sliding shower doors in Zhongshan, China, many big companies have largely moved beyond the theoretical benefits of blockchain, to generating very real revenues and cost savings. For example, T-Mobile’s NEXT Identity project was created using Blockchain ­Hyperledger ­Sawtooth in collaboration with Microsoft and is meant to improve the way the telecommunications company manages who can gain access to employee and customer data (Debter 2020). Moreover, social media companies like Telegram and Facebook started to introduce their digital currencies (Gram and Libra), and also governments are trying to issue their digital currencies: People’s Bank of China (PBOC) with the cooperation of other Chinese banks and China Telecom is work on digital yuan, Digital Japanese yen (JPY) is being testing by the Bank of ­Japan, and also the association of German banks including Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank are working on ‘crypto-based digital euro’ in Germany, when many endeavors have occurred in Europe for unifying rules on data protection because ­ igital sinagreement on the Commission’s EU data protection reform will boost a d gle market12. In this area, bringing blockchain technology to social networks, it’s not far from mind. Furthermore, using blockchain is not possible except having real ­identities; as you can’t have an account with a fake identity in a bank. This is the same overlapping of the first and the second step which was discussed13.

Conclusion Obviously today, we have to develop digital human rights and we need a decentral­ ized data structure. At the same time, the world needs a decentralized economy and decentralized power to save democracy. Hence, using blockchain technology for creating a valuing system in social networks makes the possibility for a democratic economy on a small scale (each user who can produce better content will earn more likes/shares/replies/coins). In a safe project, not only can a celebrity sell his/her page and or make money from their posts (like Instagram) but also every user can do so, but based on identified rules of the platform (unlike Instagram and other platforms). In other meaning, the designed relation of democracy and the economy looks logical in a value system like this and it seems blockchain, the

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­currently accessible technology, can provide the same democratic and economic way to decentralize the virtual power and the best method to control it. Clearly, performing this new virtual world without design looks impossible.

Acknowledgments I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Jonas, Dr. ­Mitra Khazaei, Dr. Laura Scherling, and Hojjat Mansourpour; those who I had the chance to discuss the ideas presented in this text with them.

1

Citizen journalism is based upon public citizens ‘playing an active role in the process of collecting, ­reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information’, especially in political and social happenings (Bowman, S. & Willis, C., 2003). 2 The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States. 3 More information available here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networksranked-by-number-of-users/. 4 Find it here: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/05/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-sanger-slams-facebooktwitter-social-media.html. 5 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/researcher-data-267-million-facebook-users-exposed-67859285. 6 See for instance: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52843986 and https://gadgets.ndtv.com/ social-networking/news/what-is-parler-and-why-are-people-leaving-twitter-to-join-it-donaldtrump-2237265. 7 In an interview with BBC Persian: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyszycyEByw] Published on Jul 23, 2019. 8 ‘‘It has to go away’: Facebook director calls for an end to internet anonymity’ by DAILY MAIL reporter: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2019544/Facebook-director-Randi-Zuckerberg-calls-end-internet-anonymity.html [28 July 2011]. 9 In economics, Token money, or Token, is money that has little intrinsic value compared to its face value. Unlike fiat money, which also has little intrinsic value, it is limited legal tender. 10 Economic value is a measure of the benefit provided by a good or service to an economic agent. It is generally measured relative to units of currency, and the interpretation is, therefore ‘what is the maximum amount of money a specific actor is willing and able to pay for the good or service’? (https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Value_(economics) – [last retrieved 17 October 2019]). 11 For instance: https://society2.com/. 12 In this regard: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_15_6321. 13 More information: https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2020/starbucks-among-19-firms-trialingchinas-digital-yuan/ and https://www.ledgerinsights.com/association-of-german-banks-digital-euro/.

References ‘Ada Lovelace honoured by Google doodle’. The Guardian. 10 December 2012. Retrieved 10 December 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/dec/10/ada-lovelace-honoured-google-doodle.

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Brice, Makini, (15 April 2019). ‘U.S. officially designates Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist group.’ Reuters, Archived from the original on April 16, 2019, Accessed April 16, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/ article/us-usa-iran-idUSKCN1RR1BE. Bowman, S. and C. Willis (2003). ‘We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information.’ The Media Center at the American Press Institute. Confessore, Nicholas, Matthew Rosenberg, and Carole Cadwalladr (2018). ‘How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions.’ New York Times, March, 17 2018. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html. Confessore, Nicholas, Gabriel J. X. Dance, and Michael LaForgia (2018). ‘Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends.’ New York Times, June 3, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/03/technology/facebook-device-partners-users-friends-data.html. Debter, Lauren et al. (2020). ’Forbes Blockchain 50.’ Forbes, Edited by Michael del Castillo and Matt Schifrin. www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2020/02/19/blockchain-50/. Deibert, Ronald (2019). ‘The Road to Digital Unfreedom: Three Painful Truths About Social Media.’ Journal of Democracy, January 2019, Volume 30, Issue 1. https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-roadto-digital-unfreedom-three-painful-truths-about-social-media/. Dewey, J. (1922). ‘Review of Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann.’ In John Dewey: The middle works 1899– 1924, Volume 13, 1921–1922, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 337–344. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. First published in (1925). New Republic, 30, 286–88. Dewey, J. (1925). ‘Practical democracy. Review of Walter Lippmann’s book The Phantom Public.’ In John Dewey, Philosophy and Democracy: The later works 1925–1953, Volume 2, 1925–1927, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 213–220. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. First published in (2 December 1925). New Republic, 45, 52–54. Dewey, John. (1927). The Public and its Problems. New York: Holt. Griffiths, Mark D. (2013). Debates and research on this topic are summarized in: ‘Social Networking Addiction: Emerging Themes and Issues.’ Journal of Addiction Research and Therapy 4, no. 5, https://www. omicsonline.org/social-networking-addiction-emerging-themes-and-issues-2155-6105.1000e118. php?aid=22152. Gunitsky, Seva (March 2015). ‘Corrupting the Cyber-Commons: Social Media as a Tool of Autocratic Stability,’ Perspectives on Politics 13: 42–54. Hart, Carroll Guen (1993). Grounding without foundations. A conversation between Richard Rorty and John Dewey to ascertain their kinship. Toronto: The Patmost Press. Knight Foundation (2018) ‘Seven Ways Misinformation Spread During the 2016 Election.’ Trust, Media, and Democracy, October 4, 2018. https://medium.com/trust-media-and-democracy/seven-ways-misinformation-spread-during-the-2016-election-a45e8c393e14. Landler, Mark and Brian Stelter (2019). ‘Washington Taps Into a Potent New Force in Diplomacy.’ The New York Times, June 16, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world/middleeast/17media.html. Lippmann, Walter (1922/1934). Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan. Lippmann, Walter (1925). The Phantom Public. New York: Harcourt, Braace and Co. McGann, Jerome (2013) [2004]. ‘Byron, George Gordon Noel (1788–1824)’. Oxford Dictionary of National ­Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-4279. Marx, Karl, ‘Glossary of Terms: Us’. Marxists.org. Accessed March 13, 2012. Margolin, Victor and Ezio Manzini (2017). ‘Open Letter to the Design Community: Stand Up For Democracy.’ Democracy and Design Platform, March 5, 2017. http://www.democracy-design.org/open-letter-standup-democracy/. McKinnon, Andrew M (2010). ‘Elective affinities of the Protestant ethic: Weber and the chemistry of capitalism.’ Sociological Theory, vol 28, no. 1: 108–126. https://aura.abdn.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2164/3035/ McKinnon_Elective_Affinities_final_non_format .pdf;jsessionid=636368070A5CCE31EA990FC544D826A6?sequence=1. Müller, Karsten, and Carlo Schwarz (November 3, 2019). ‘Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime.’ SSRN. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3082972 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3082972 . Olmstead, Kenneth and Michelle Atkinson (2015). ‘Apps Permissions in the Google Play Store.’ Pew Research Center, October 2015. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/11/10/apps-permissions-in-thegoogle-play-store/. Penenberg, Adam L. (2010). ‘Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling in

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Love.’ Fast Company, July 1, 2010. https://www.fastcompany.com/1659062/social-networking-affects-brains-falling-love. Prof, Merrill (2011). ‘New Study By Finds Students Everywhere Addicted To Media.’ https://merrill.umd.edu/2011/04/new-merrill-study-finds-students-everywhere-addicted-to-media. Quesenbery, Whitney (2017). ‘Democracy Has a Design Problem: ‘What exactly do you do when you go to the polling place?’.’ The Atlantic, May 17, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/ democracy-has-a-design-problem/524898/. Rid, Thomas (2017). ‘Why Twitter Is the Best Social Media Platform for Disinformation.’ Motherboard, November 1, 2017. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bj7vam/why-twitter-is-the-best-social-media-platform-for-disinformation. Seiter, Courtney (2017). ‘The Psychology of Social Media: Why We Like, Comment, and Share Online.’ Buffer, August 20, 2017. https://buffer.com/resources/psychology-of-social-media. Simon, Herbert Alexander (1969). The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge: MIT Press. Schugurensky, Daniel (2001). ‘Walter Lippmann and John Dewey debate the role of citizens in democracy.’ Selected Moments of the 20th Century (A work in progress edited by Department of Adult Education, Community Development and Counselling Psychology, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT). http://schugurensky.faculty.asu.edu/moments/1922lippdew.html. Solon, Olivia (2017). ‘Ex-Facebook President Sean Parker: Site Made to Exploit Human ‘Vulnerability’.’ Guardian, November 9, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/ nov/09/facebook-sean-parker-vulnerability-brain-psychology. Vaidhyanathan, Siva (2018). ‘Why Facebook Will Never Be Free of Fakes.’ New York Times, September 5, 2018. Varol, Onur et al. (2017). ‘Online Human-Bot Interactions: Detection, Estimation, and Characterization.’ Proceedings of the Eleventh International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Palo Alto: AAAI Press. https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM17/paper/view/15587/14817. Voshmgir, Shermin (2020). Token Economy: How the Web3 reinvents the Internet. Second Edition. BlockchainHub Berlin.

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12  DEMOCRACY UNDER CONSTRUCTION, ­CONSTRUCTION AS REGIME: DESIGN, TIME, AND IMAGINARIES OF PUBLICNESS IN MID-2010S’ TURKEY Eray Çaylı

I would like to start with an image. It documents the so-called ‘steel castle,’ a barrier-cum-trailer designed and manufactured in Turkey bespoke for the Turkish police. This barrier-on-wheels made its first public appearance on May Day in 2014, in the wake of the popular protests which erupted in Istanbul’s Taksim Square and Gezi Park, and which then shook the entire country throughout late 2013. The ‘steel castle’ is seen here mounted a few hundred meters ahead of the capital Ankara’s central square Kızılay, a principal scene of protest during the Gezi Park episode a few months prior to this shot. Hailed by the mainstream press as a product of cutting-edge design, the barrier is fully equipped with CCTV cameras, audio and video recording devices, full-body scanners used for X-raying incoming protesters, security lights, an automated tear gas and pressurized water release system that gets activated if a certain amount of load is pressed against the barrier, and a separate pressure washer to clean up the scene once the dust settles. It also doubles as a police checkpoint and temporary detention center thanks to a small cage at its back where activists arrested on the spot are held before being transferred to police headquarters. The barrier’s designers and commissioners have touted it for its cutting-edge technology, instantaneousness, multi-functionality, and portability. According to them, this versatile and flexible design strikes a perfect balance between maximum public safety and the least possible disruption to urban life during protests. By significantly reducing the role and presence of officers, it purports to address many contentious aspects of law enforcement in the event of protest: Was force used too heavily too early? The barricade’s automated features mean that the answer to this rests no longer with officers but with protesters and their interactions with this hi-tech barrier. Is the body search too demeaning? The X-ray machine, an all-too-­ familiar device used prolifically in public settings, means that this is no longer the case, leaving little reason for protesters to refuse to cooperate. For the designer, the barrier’s commitment to public space is evident in the fact that it was modeled on a similar device used in the UK – in the words he uttered to me in my June 2018 interview with him in Ankara, ‘one of the world’s most advanced democracies.’ This device is the so-called ‘steel police cordon’ – according to the British tabloid Daily Mail, a ‘revolutionary police barrier’ – that was rolled out in late 2011 in

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the wake of the London riots (Slack 2011). It was deployed in numerous instances that year, such as the anti-austerity protests held in central London mid-December. Although in these instances the barrier was used for the purpose of isolating political protest from public space, this was not the reason why it was initially conceived. As the journalist Dan Hancox has documented, the barrier was originally designed for dealing with a disaster of catastrophic proportions, which public authorities refer to as CBRN incidents, where the acronym stands for ‘Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear’. Contemporary debates on publicness in design and architecture often revolve around the same notions that characterize the steel castle’s workings and the rhetoric around it. Design activism in cities often strives to draw its strength from the participation of ordinary citizens rather than impose preprogrammed schemes on them (Catling 2014; Lydon/Garcia 2015). Tactical urbanism builds on a venerable critical-methodological tradition which stretches from Benjaminian flânerie (Benjamin 1999, 22) and Situationist derive (Debord 1997) to Certeauian ‘tactics’ (Certeau 1984) and which engages spontaneous and temporary interventions that promote collective and diverse uses of urban space. Anti-enclosure movements and practices of commoning challenge permanent boundaries in cities and obstacles to public space (Jeffrey et al. 2012). Of course, each of these ap­ ightmare proaches also has its critics. Participatory design activism is said to be a n (Miessen 2011) as it idealizes consensus and shuns dissensus, conceptualized by Jacques Rancière as unexpected interruptions in long-established distributions of the sensible (Rancière 2010). Spontaneous and temporary blows dealt by tactical approaches to exclusionary and hegemonic spatial practices are found ­futile unless they evolve into longer-term strategies that construct their own counter-hegemonies (Dean 2016). Whether they side with strategies, consensus, and program, or with tactics, dissensus, and spontaneity, all these positions are commonly haunted by an orthodox understanding of the struggle over what makes design public; they understand it as a binary opposition between power and resistance as readily observable acts. But, if the same positions also characterize the story of the steel castle, they do so in entanglement rather than opposition. This is a temporary barrier but, as such, the shadow it casts on urban life and the streetscape becomes permanent: easy to set up and pack up, it threatens to appear anytime, anywhere. While practically a tactical intervention, the barrier originates in a strategy to mitigate the purportedly omnipresent risk of large-scale disaster. The full spectrum of its various features aims less to prevent dissent or consent, than to materialize both simultaneously. For instance, the X-ray machine somatically turns proclaimed dissidents into consenting citizens, while the automated tear gas, pressurized water, and security lighting systems aim to physicalize dissent. If the steel castle attempts to reshape the publicness of the urban environment, it does this by perpetually entangling strategies with tactics, consensus with dissensus, and program with spontaneity rather

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than by polarizing these phenomena. In so doing, it calls into question the power-resistance binary that underpins such polarizations.1 How else might we understand the struggle over what makes design and architecture, then, if not through the various variants of the binary opposition between power and resistance? One way to begin exploring this question requires attending to the catastrophic scenario that lies in the steel castle’s origins. By normalizing this extraordinary scenario as an ordinary exercise in ‘public order’, the barrier bifurcates the role it ascribes to the public. Whereas in the first instance this role is limited to that of a vulnerable object in need of protection against c­ atastrophe, now it also includes that of a subject with the power to instigate ­catastrophe. To better understand the implications of this conjunction of objectification and subjectivation resulting from the extraordinary’s increasing influence on the ordinary, we might turn to the anthropologist Veena Das. In her work on how individuals have coped with the world-shattering event of the Indian Partition, Das finds that these coping mechanisms are better understood as a ‘descent into the ordinary’ than as ‘resistance’ or ‘counterpower’ (Das 2007). This means that individuals ‘occupy’ the ongoing reverberations of the extraordinary event ‘and give them a meaning’ by repairing and recovering everyday relationships, routines, and patterns (ibid. 78). The medium of this repair and recovery, for Das, is time. Crucially, time does not operate here only by virtue of its quantifiable aspects, as it does in the power-resistance binary: whether as accumulation one needs to disrupt (as in the case of resistance) or as accumulation one needs to work towards (as in the case of power). In Das’ ‘descent into the ordinary,’ time is navigated not just horizontally (i.e., by moving chronologically or counter-chronologically) but also vertically (i.e., by descending and ascending). It thus serves as a qualitative medium through which to continually restructure the relationship between experience, habit, and expectation.2 I would like to explore the role time might play as just such a medium within debates on what makes design and architecture public. I will discuss examples from both mainstream architectural practice and design activism – examples that have each laid a claim to a certain notion of publicness in 2010s’ Turkey.3 Importantly, this is a context characterized by the same trilogy of disaster, democracy, and technological prowess that ran through the story of the steel castle. Taking my cue from Das’ notion of ‘descent into the ordinary’, I will consider the various ways in which the convergence between the extraordinary and the ordinary might enable not only the objectification of publics but also an opportunity for their potential reclamation of political subjectivity. First, I would like to briefly unpack the three interrelated forces that have come to shape the urban environment in 2010s’ Turkey, which are calls for democratization, a so-called ‘construction boom,’ and the purported risk of disaster. The first force, democratization, operated against the backdrop of the 20th century throughout which various episodes of state-endorsed violence targeted ­demographically

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minor or politically dissentient groups. In the late 2000s, this violent history became one of the major concerns of a project of ‘Europeanization’ and democratization instituted by the ruling party, which first rose to power in late 2002 and has since ruled Turkey in what has been the country’s longest ever series of consecutive majority governments by a single party. While the project did introduce a series of culturally oriented reforms geared towards historically marginalized minorities, the resulting boost in political legitimacy was employed by the government to further consolidate its grip on society especially in the realms of economics, law, and urbanism. This materialized in a series of policies at the interface of these three realms, which transformed the construction sector into the foremost driver of Turkey’s alleged ‘economic miracle’. Effectively, these policies were meant to mitigate the negative impact that Asia’s rise as the global factory made on Turkish businesses. This impact would be averted, according to the government, by getting industrially-driven corporations to turn instead to construction and real estate as their primary means of capital accumulation, aided by publicly funded large-scale infrastructural projects that would catalyze land speculation and privatization of publicly owned lands. The fact that public funding and publicly owned lands were now at the disposal of Turkey’s alleged ‘economic miracle’ was to be offset by branding the resulting environments, both physically and rhetorically, as spaces of enhanced publicness. A prime example of this is the luxury residential and retail complex Zorlu Center, commissioned by the eponymous conglomerate whose business had historically relied on textiles and electronics manufacturing but recently turned to construction and real estate [Figure 4]. The complex was built in 2013 on a 100,000-square-meter plot near the European end of Istanbul’s first Bosphorus Bridge, which was previously owned by the Ministry of Transport. It was designed by one of Turkey’s ‘starchitects,’ Emre Arolat, and boasts what the architect calls brand-new ‘public spaces’, including (1) green slopes, (2) several piazzas (which are indeed named within the complex as meydan, the Turkish word for ‘town square’), (3) a terrace that envelops the second floor, and (4) uninterrupted pedestrian access into, out of, and throughout the whole complex. The fact that it is often a struggle to try and use such privately owned ‘public’ spaces in line with the ‘publicness’ they have been assigned was reiterated by my visit to Zorlu Center in summer 2014 when I found out that the green slopes were closed to the public. Similarly, my attempts to photograph the complex’s ‘public’ spaces were halted by security guards. Although the architect had informed them of my research visit, the guards argued that ‘photographing the common areas is not permitted, unless the photographer is inside the frame’ (italics mine). Their improvised ban led me to take this series of what I call ‘architectural selfies’ [Figure 5]. Despite all this, the complex’s architect has laid insistent claim to publicness, while also conceptualizing it as synonymous with accessibility and walkability, which Zorlu Center indeed establishes thanks to the near-complete absence

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Fig. 4  Zorlu Center as seen in 2014 from various angles.

of walls, fences, or railings. So ambitious is this claim that, the architect speaks of his single most significant motivation throughout the numerous commissions for similar complexes he has won or has sought after within the 5-kilometer perimeter around Zorlu Center as enhancing the publicness of this central part of Istanbul – that is, to making it entirely walkable by anyone who wishes to do so. Spatially, Arolat’s conception of publicness as the constant circulation of bodies may seem a step forward. But in terms of temporal experience, it amounts to little more than an extended present on loop in which otherwise, politically actionless bodies continually move through dynamic environments – an experience whose very sensorial dynamism overwhelms possibilities for qualitative engagement. In saying this, I am thinking of Jacques Rancière’s understanding of politics as refusing to ‘move along’ that many a contemporary ‘public’ space imposes on citizens – politics, suggests Rancière, consists in defying the imposition to ‘move along’, by, first, stopping and inhabiting space, to then start articulating demands from within this space, and refiguring it materially and experientially (Rancière 2010, 37). A defiance of this sort was precisely what we witnessed during the summer 2013 protests that erupted in Istanbul’s Taksim Square and Gezi Park against the

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Fig. 5  Zorlu Center documented by way of the author’s ‚architectural selfies.‘

government’s increasingly self-ordained and law-defying interventions in urban space in the name of sustaining the ‘economic miracle’. Although the protests enjoyed wide coverage around the globe, what is not as widely known about them is the fact that they were practically ignited by a government-endorsed project which claimed to amplify the publicness of Taksim Square, Turkey’s foremost locus of ­urban activity. The bulldozer that drew the first group of protesters to Gezi Park by attempting to uproot trees was operating as part of the Taksim Square Pedestrianization Project, which involved moving all vehicular traffic underground and revitalizing underused and outdated spaces in and around the Square. Concealed behind this rhetoric of enhanced publicness was a project whose full details were never made public prior to their being revealed in practice through the construction activity taking place at the site. Simultaneously with this gradual revelation, the criticism leveled against the project was compounded even further due especially to various structural shortcomings involving air ventilation, drainage, and weathering. Faced with this criticism, the government’s response has been to physically amend the project’s flaws on the fly, while also continually proclaiming that ‘the project is open-ended’ and welcomes critical feedback from the public until it is perfected. Crucially, this intervention in Istanbul’s central square was complemented with the construction of an altogether new, 700,000-square-­meter ‘public’ space about six kilometers to Taksim’s southwest: Yenikapı Square. Constructed within just six months, Yenikapı Square is literally a brand-new ­public space as it was built

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by reclaiming land from the Marmara Sea. At a capacity of one and a quarter million people, it has been designated by the authorities as the official ‘Rally Grounds of Metropolitan Istanbul’, a designation that has more recently been extended to a similar project in Maltepe at the opposite end of town, built also through land reclamation. The designation of these two sites as Istanbul’s ‘official rally grounds’ means that those wanting to hold a demonstration in the city are now obliged to use either one or the other. To be sure, the introduction of these two sites as legal protest venues is intended as a direct challenge to the role Taksim has acquired since the late 1970s as Istanbul’s foremost venue for political demonstrations, by virtue of its centrality, visibility and historical significance. But the two sites have also been made to approximate Taksim in interesting ways. As in the case of the latter, the authorities have touted Yenikapı and Maltepe as versatile spaces inviting the public’s ­participation; they are, for instance, intended to double as parks and venues for cultural events. Also recalling the ‘pedestrianized’ Taksim, whose images you see here, is the two sites’ unresolved physicality resulting from hasty construction, which the authorities have posited as evidence of their programmatic flexibility and open-endedness as they have done with respect to the recent revamp of Istanbul’s central square. Liberal notions of democracy and participation in public affairs have often been associated with continuous and open deliberation. These three squares in Istanbul have reduced this association to a matter of spatial representation, in the form of nondescript environments that are continually under construction. In that they echo artist Robert Smithson’s notion of ruins in reverse; virtually perpetual construction sites that do not fall but rise into ruin, and, as such, continually invite meaning but do so as an end in itself rather than as a means to better understanding the world and intervening in it (Smithson 1967; cf. Çaylı 2013). The­­temporality of such perpetual construction sites is, once again, a continually extended present that excludes any sense of qualitative progress achieved by mobilizing one’s I nci has captured this temporality in his recent agency. Turkish GIF artist Erdal ˙ artwork titled ‘Taksim Spiral’ which uses the vast swathe of concrete spanning the square as a backdrop for pedestrians going around in circles. Alongside the stalled temporality of a city transformed into a conglomeration of ruins-in-reverse, there is a second sort of temporality to be accounted for with respect to recent design-based claims to publicness in Turkey. This concerns the catastrophic scenarios which I discussed at the beginning of this chapter as underpinning the steel castle and the exceptionality of which risks unsettling the correlation between experience, habit, and expectation as it stands at any given time. Indeed, such scenarios have been made into the mainstay of the comprehensive and legally stipulated episode of physical transformation that urban Turkey has seen since May 2012. This was when the parliament passed the Law (no. 6306) on the Transformation of Areas under Disaster Risk (popularly known as the ‘Disaster

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Law’). The law proclaimed to disaster-proof the country’s building stock by capitalizing on the experience of the violent earthquakes that devastated parts of Turkey’s tectonically active northwest in 1999, causing around 20,000 deaths and destroying some 150,000 buildings. Although it was proclaimed as an earthquake-related measure, the purview of the Disaster Law is not limited to vulnerable regions or buildings. The areas currently being redeveloped under this law include not just buildings and areas designated as ‘risky’ but also zones identified as ‘safe’ for new settlement.4 This means that the law’s scope is so expansive as to make the entire country susceptible to redevelopment. Indeed, over the past five years, the authorities have declared numerous neighborhoods in their entirety as ‘urban transformation’ areas, to be ­redeveloped often by pro-government contractors. The Disaster Law has therefore been criticized for serving government-endorsed ‘ideological, political and economic ­interests’ such as power centralization, population redistribution, conflict management, and the reorganization of land-based interest groups (Özkan/­ Özçevik 2015). Moreover, it has implications for the everyday lives of millions, as flat-­owners whose property is located in a building or area subject to redevelopment under the Disaster Law are left with two choices: either to have their property expropriated if they refuse to agree with fellow residents on the terms of their building’s transformation, or to engage in intense deliberation, survey, and market study to try and stretch those terms as much as possible (Angell 2014). According to Donna Houston, disasters cause an overlap of the everyday and ‘deep time’; whereas these events are often taken for granted as belonging to a domain above and beyond ordinary people’s lives, when they do take place, the fact that they are experienced in vastly uneven ways by different social groups renders explicit their sociopolitical character. It is this overlap between ‘deep time’ and the everyday upon which Houston has built her notion of ‘environmental justice for the Anthropocene’, a project of framing catastrophe in everyday terms – as something people live with and continually strive to transform (ibid.). The predominant way in which the Disaster Law has taken effect in Turkey, however, demonstrates the flipside to Houston’s conceptualization. In this case, catastrophe has been conjured not to empower the everyday as a realm of social and political transformation but to endorse continuous construction and land speculation. If anything, it has coopted the everyday by getting ordinary citizens to materially participate in the process as small-scale real-estate speculators (Parmaksızog ˘ lu 2014). Might the convergence between the catastrophic and the everyday help facilitate other architectural manifestations of publicness than those that render it a quantifiable and chronologically conceived matter of participatory speculation and profiteering? Here one may turn to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘messianic time’, which for him is triggered as soon as catastrophic scenarios are ­declared imminent (Agamben 2005). Importantly, for Agamben, ‘messianic time’ is fundamentally distinct from eschatological or apocalyptic time. Whereas the latter engages

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catastrophe as an authorless and inevitable future approaching chronologically, ‘messianic time’ understands it as what Walter Benjamin calls ‘the continuation of things as they are’ (Robinson 2013). It therefore facilitates the subject’s awareness of – and, indeed, familiarity with – catastrophe as a sociopolitical event that he or she does not merely experience as an object but can act upon as a subject on a daily basis. This is where I would like to turn to examples that have engaged the convergence between the extraordinary and the ordinary in line with just such a notion of ‘messianic time’. These examples concern the work of two design activism collectives, the first of which is Studio Hope Düzce. The collective’s practice concerns the eponymous province of Düzce, the epicenter of one of the two deadly earthquakes which took place in 1999 and which were then used by the authorities as pretext for the Disaster Law. Studio Hope collaborate with a local housing cooperative named Düzce Hope Homes, whose shareholders comprise 234 survivors of the earthquake [Figure 6]. As individuals without property, the members have benefited from a law known as the ‘Slum Prevention Act’ through which groups of low-income families are granted by the state plots on the infrastructural grid. The foundation of Studio Hope Düzce itself was in many ways prompted by this law, as it stipulates that allotted plots shall be reverted to the state if construction fails to reach subbasement level within two years following the allotment. This tight deadline as well as budget limitations led the cooperative to announce an open call to designers and architects, who then led to the Studio Hope collective. Therefore, the collective’s story has from the outset contrasted various other cases of participatory design, which have been criticized as mitigating neoliberal policies of austerity by compensating for the absence of the retreating welfare state. This is evident in the fact that what made the whole process possible was a lawsuit that held the state accountable by obliging it to grant the 42,000-square-meter land plot to the cooperative. Equally inapplicable to the Studio Hope example is another familiar critique of participatory design, one which considers this ‘participation’ an evasion of authorial responsibility and abuse of ordinary citizens as unsalaried workforce. If participation has been a key aspect of Studio Hope, this is due not to a choice made by the designers but to the cooperative members’ distrust of the safety of buildings constructed by external actors – be it the state or private contractors – based on the extensive devastation they witnessed during the 1999 earthquake. Indeed, this faith in the safety of the self-built is evident in the following two conditions of cooperative membership: to work at least one day a week at the construction site, and to participate in project design and management. Therefore, the relationship between safety and publicness here is not necessarily an architecturally deterministic binary of walls versus no walls or formal and programmatic inflexibility versus flexibility. It is a materialist dialectic in which daily and hands-on participation in construction is thought to not represent or enable safety but serve as the very experience of safety. Instead of settling with the idea of ­catastrophe as

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Fig. 6  Düzce Hope Homes construction site as seen in summer 2018.

an anonymous threat that looms over the present and puts it on an infinite loop as a perpetual construction site, participation as such structures a sense of qualitative progress by drawing on past experience of seismic destruction as a political event, turning this into day-to-day action, and averting its recurrence in the future avoidable rather than formidably inevitable. The central role construction has assumed within Studio Hope Düzce as a participatory activity that enables dis-alienation and structural safety is also evident in their serious consideration of the worksite shelter as an architectural project in its own right. To this end, they have collaborated with another one of Turkey’s design activism collectives named ‘Plankton’, who have designed a worksite-­shelter/ community center, capitalizing on the fact that the usual distinction between con­ tudio Hope. struction worker and end-user is significantly blurred in the case of S Importantly, this design stands in marked contrast to the fetishization of perpetual construction that characterizes some of the examples I have discussed earlier. Rather than conceive of the worksite as a continually open-ended phenomenon, Plankton envisages its gradual transformation from shelter proper to community center proper through a clearly phased ten-year process. The final example I would like to discuss is from an Istanbul neighborhood named Küçük Armutlu (henceforth: Armutlu), in which the work of another one

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of Turkey’s design activism collectives, Architects’ Assembly, has recently been based. Armutlu came into existence mainly as a self-built neighborhood developed and inhabited by domestic migrants from central Turkey who moved here in the late 1970s and early 1980s when it was still an unoccupied and partly forested public land. Its founding inhabitants exploited a legal loophole, which entailed that homes built to inhabitable condition overnight on public land without the authorities’ noticing would be protected against demolition. However, following the construction of the second Bosphorus bridge in 1988, whose European end turned out to overlap Armutlu, real estate investors and land speculators set their eyes on the neighborhood. The pressure coming from speculators and investors, alongside many of the residents’ being followers of the Alevi faith, and in that, members of a demographically minor and historically marginalized social group, led Armutlu to increasing politicize throughout the 1990s and 2000s. More recently, the neighborhood was declared as a ‘risky zone’ under the so-called ‘Disaster Law.’ Upon this, the state’s demolition crews began to try and force their way into Armutlu, prompting the residents to defend their neighborhood by way of barricades. Predictably, these barricades often fail as defensive mechanisms, and the authorities enter Armutlu to carry out the legally-stipulated demolition. However, these demolitions are not merely technical events as there is an overtly political character to them. This has been evident in the fact that the authorities not only leave the rubble ­deliberately in place but also prevent trucks and diggers hired by residents from entering the neighborhood. The design collective Architects’ Assembly aims to subvert the existing rhetoric and legal infrastructure driving urban transformation across Turkey as an opportunity for what they call ‘locally driven and in situ improvement.’ They have pursued this aim by organizing an architectural competition for the seven plots of land located along the borders that separate Armutlu both sociopolitically and physically from its surroundings. Recalling the example of Studio Hope, the vision that Architects’ Assembly has for Armutlu involves not only this competition for ideas but also their implementation through participatory means, which in this case is propelled by the neighborhood’s history of intense conflict with both private investors and public authorities as well as by the residents’ expertise in selfbuilt architecture. Design and construction workshops often continue alongside demolition raids, obliging residents and activists to digress and deal with the rubble while also striving to keep the project on track. The rubble issue has over time led to a response that is best described as a ‘descent into the ordinary’ in Veena Das’ sense, as it blurs conventional distinctions between strategies and tactics or program and spontaneity. The primary way in which the residents now cope with the rubble is to recycle it as material for barricades that the neighborhood has long been used to mounting collaboratively, therefore compelling its removal by the same authorities that produce and deliberately leave it behind in the first place.

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Such a mechanism of coping with the entanglement between destruction and construction has also been at work in the case of a park Architects’ Assembly have built together with residents. After experiencing numerous cycles of demolition and rebuilding, the design-activists have come to see the repeatedly ransacked premises of the park as more than just an obliteration that requires reprisal. Their research into how best to appropriate the jumble resulting from each episode of demolition has led them to turn it into a potato field, which indeed requires this sort of aerated soil and is considerably difficult to uproot. Simultaneously, the activists have also begun to build six or seven smaller parks across the neighborhood’s margins instead of a single park at its center, to spatially disorientate and marginalize the authorities’ further potential attempts to intervene in Armutlu. This approach is therefore both fundamentally different from various popular examples of tactical urbanism or guerilla gardening and immune from the criticism these examples have been subjected to, in that it is neither about resisting power nor about retaliating it with counter-power but about miring it in its own aggression. I would like to conclude by returning to the photograph with which I started, albeit this time to focus on the man. Rather than be alarmed or agitated by the steel castle, he walks at a leisurely pace. He has got one hand in his pocket and the day’s paper in the other. In the face of this design which originates in the extra­ ordinary scenario of a catastrophic event and which is now deployed on a sociopolitically charged occasion, the man’s posture is that of an ordinary citizen going about his daily business as opposed to a fearful or defiant individual anticipating turmoil. But if he does not directly engage with the steel castle, he doesn’t avoid it, either. In what might appear an absurd gesture vis-à-vis the barrier’s nullification of the streetscape, the man crosses the street at the zebra crossing just as he perhaps does every morning on his way to work. He is not indifferent to the steel castle, but neither is it the center of his world. He does glance at it but only as an oddity – nothing worth interrupting his daily routine even momentarily. If he undermines the steel castle, this is less through resistance or counter-power than through ‘descent into the everyday’ as a realm of incremental and gradual qualitative progress vis-à-vis attempts to overwhelm it by way of continuous and self-serving physical change in the environment. I would like to see the man’s encounter with the steel castle as a microcosmic example of the contestation over design and architecture’s publicness in an age of official policies that attempt to reshape public space and political participation through extraordinary scenarios of catastrophic disaster. If such attempts flatten the everyday into a continuously looped prelude to future apocalypse, it is not by horizontal but by vertical movements in time – like ‘a descent into the ordinary’ – that this flatness may be unsettled.

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Acknowledgements This chapter is an annotated version of a lecture delivered on 23 February 2017 as part of the V&A/RCA History of Design series at the Royal College of Art, London. I am sincerely grateful to the hosts and attendees, including Sarah Teasley, Josie Kane, Miranda Clow, and Chiara Barbieri, for giving me the opportunity to present and debate these ideas.

1

2

3 4

Another example resembling the steel castle in this respect is the ‘Modular Physical Border Security System’ set up along the Syrian border. Touted for its modularity and flexibility, this wall has later reappeared during the state’s armed operations against Kurdish insurgents in the country’s southeast. My criticism of a Certeauian pitting of time against space (Certeau 1984) builds on Doreen Massey (2005), while I follow Sarah Sharma (2014) in attending to the theoretical pitfalls of considering time only as a quantitative phenomenon. In using these terms, I am thinking of Reinhart Kosseleck’s study of the increasing divergence between expectation and experience around the millennial turn: ‘The lesser the experience, the greater the expectation’ – ‘the greater the experience, the more cautious one is, but also the more open is the future’ (Kosseleck 2004, 274). For a detailed and theoretically grounded discussion of spatial publicness in 2010s’ Turkey, see Çaylı 2019. The Disaster Law defines three urban-architectural categories as its purview: (1) ‘risky areas,’ i.e., zones identified as at risk of causing damage to lives and property due to their soil composition or the characteristics of the buildings they host; (2) ‘risky buildings,’ i.e., buildings which, while not necessarily located within risky areas, have ‘completed their economic lifespan’ or have been ‘scientifically proven’ to be at risk of falling down or receiving severe damage in case of disaster; (3) ‘reserve building areas,’ i.e., zones identified as safe for new settlement (Resmi Gazete 2012).

References Agamben, Giorgio (2005). The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Angell, Elizabeth (2014). ‘Assembling disaster: Earthquakes and Urban Politics in Istanbul.’ City, vol. 18, no. 6. Benjamin, Walter (1999). The Arcades Project. Trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Catling, Charlotte Skene (2014). ‘The Naked Truth: Architecture or Revolution.’ Architectural Review, vol. 236, no. 1412. Çaylı, Eray (2013). ‘The New Monuments of Taksim Square or ‘Ruins in Reverse. Failed Architecture.’ November 7, 2013. Accessed January 10, 2020. failedarchitecture.com/the-new-monuments-of-taksimsquare-or-ruins-in-reverse/. Çaylı, Eray (2019). ‘Making Violence Public: Spatializing (Counter)publicness through the 1993 Sivas Arson ­Attack, Turkey.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 43, no. 6. Certeau, Michel de (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Stanford, CA: University of California Press. Das, Veena (2007). Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and London: University of California Press. Dean, Jodi (2016). Crowds and Party. London: Verso. Debord, Guy (1997). Theory of the Dérive. Kent: Atlantic Books.

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Houston, Donna (2013). ‘Crisis is Where We Live: Environmental Justice for the Anthropocene.’ Globalizations, vol. 10, no. 3. Jeffrey, Alex, Colin McFarlane, / Alex Vasudevan (2012). ‘Rethinking Enclosure: Space, Subjectivity and the Commons.’ Antipode, vol. 44, no. 4. Koselleck, Reinhart (2004). Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. Keith Tribe. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lydon, Mike, and Anthony Garcia (2015). Tactical Urbanism: Short Term Actions for Long-Term Change. ­Washington, DC: Island Press. Massey, Doreen (2005). For Space. London: Sage. Miessen, Markus (2011). The Nightmare of Participation. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Özkan Eren, Miray, and Özlem Özçevik, (2015). ‘Institutionalization of Disaster Risk Discourse in Reproducing UrbanSpace in Istanbul.’ ITU A|Z, vol. 12, no. 1. Parmaksızlog˘lu, Duygu (2014). ‘From Home to Real Estate: Urban Redevelopment on the Axis of Speculation in Istanbul.’ Jadaliyya. October 6, 2014. Accessed January 10, 2020. www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/19508/from-home-to-real-estate_urban-redevelopment-on-th. Rancière, Jacques (2010). Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum. Resmi Gazete [Turkey’s official legislative bulletin] (2012). ‘6306 sayılı Afet Riski Altındaki Alanların Dönüs˛türülmesi Hakkında Kanun.’ Resmi Gazete, No. 28309. May 31, 2012. Accessed January 10, 2020. resmigazete.gov.tr/eskiler/2012/05/20120531-1.htm. Robinson, Andrew (2013). ‘Walter Benjamin: Messianism and Revolution – Theses on History.’ Ceasefire. ­November 15, 2013. Accessed January 10, 2020. ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-messianism-revolution-theses-history/. Sharma, Sarah (2014). In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Slack, Chris (2011). ‘The Tin Blue Line: Met Unveils Revolutionary Police Barrier to Prevent Anti-Cuts Demonstrators Marching on the Houses of Parliament.’ Daily Mail. December 1, 2011.Accessed January 10, 2020. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2068180/Public-sector-strikes-Incredible-police-barrier-used-anti-cuts-demonstrators.html. Smithson, Robert (1967). ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic.’ Artforum, vol. 4. New Jersey.

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THE AUTHORS TOM BIELING is a postdoc senior researcher and lecturer at Zentrum für Design­

forschung (HAW Hamburg). He has been visiting professor at the University of Trento and the German University in Cairo, and has been teaching internationally since 2007. In his research he mainly focuses on the social and political dimensions of design. ­Research fellow (Social Design) at Design Research Lab/Berlin University of the Arts (2010–2019), where he earned a doctoral degree, previously at T-Labs/TU Berlin (2007– 2010). He is editor-in-chief at DESIGNABILITIES Design Research Journal/Design­ forschung.org, which he founded in 2008. He is Co-Editor of the book series Design Meanings (Mimesis), founding member of the Design Research Network, and founder of the Institute for A ­ pplied Fantasies. He is a regular member of juries, research and expert committees (­i­­­ncluding the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Institute for Human, Ethics and Science), and author of numerous publications. He was elected ‘Young Innovator of the Year’ by the Falling Walls consortium. His work, which has received several awards, is exhibited worldwide. Recent books: Design (&) Activism (Mimesis, 2019); Gender (&) D ­ esign (Mimesis, 2020), and Inklusion als Entwurf (Birk­häuser/ BIRD, 2019). www.tombieling.com FRIEDRICH VON BORRIES is an architect and professor of Design Theory at the HFBK Hamburg. In Berlin and Havelberg he runs Projektbüro Friedrich von Borries, an interdisciplinary and undisciplined think tank operating on the edge of art, design, and ­architecture. Currently he is conducting research projects about Bauhaus-Scholar and Resistance-Fighter Franz Ehrlich (funded by DFG). His last book (with Benjamin ­Kasten) Die Stadt der Zukunft. Wege in die Gigalopolis is published by Fischer Verlag in ­autumn 2019. ERAY ÇAYLI, PhD (University College London, 2015), studies the material and spatial leg-

acies of political violence in Turkey anthropologically. His current research concerns how these legacies shape and is shaped by contemporary imaginaries of disaster and resilience. Çaylı is Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow (2018–21) at the London School of Economics and Political Science where he also teaches the postgraduate course ­Imaging Violence, Imagining Europe. He is currently completing a monograph titled ‘­Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of ‘Confronting the Past’ in Turkey’, co-editing the volume Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement, Catastrophe¸ and editing a special issue of the International Journal of Islamic ­Architecture themed ‘Field as Archive/Archive as Field’. Çaylı is a co-founder of Amed Urban Workshop, an independent academy for critical spatial research based in the city of Amed (officially known as Diyarbakır) in Turkey’s Kurdistan.

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CARL DISALVO is an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with joint appointments in the School of Interactive Computing and the School of Literature, ­Media, and Communication. DiSalvo’s scholarship draws together theories and methods from design, the social sciences, and the humanities to analyze the social and political qualities of design, and to prototype experimental systems and services. DiSalvo publishes regularly in design and human-computer interaction journals and conference proceedings. His first book,  Adversarial Design, is part of the  Design Thinking, Design Theory series at MIT Press. He is also a co-editor of the MIT Press journal Design Issues. DiSalvo’s experimental design work has been exhibited and supported by the ZKM (Center for Art & Media, Karlsruhe, Germany), Grey Area Foundation for the Arts (San Francisco), Times Square Arts Alliance, Science Gallery Dublin, and the Walker Arts ­Center (Minneapolis). MICHAEL ERLHOFF is a German design expert, art theoretician, and versatile author. In 1991, he was appointed founding dean of the Köln International School of Design in ­Cologne where he taught design history and design theory until 2013. Since 2016, he has been an honorary professor at the Braunschweig University of Art/HBK Braunschweig. Erlhoff studied at the University of Hanover (Germany), where he completed his PhD in German ­Literature and Sociology. Together with Uta Brandes he published the magazine ‘zweitschrift’; he published, among others, an annual Kurt Schwitters Almanach for more than ten years and he was a member of the advisory committee for documenta 8 (1987). From 1985 to 1990, he was director of the German Design Council in Frankfurt am Main. From 1990 to 2001, he was the president of the Raymond Loewy Foundation (Germany and International). Together with Uta Brandes he organised the St. Moritz ­Design Summit (2000–2006). He is a founding member of the German Association for Design Theory and Research/DGTF, a member of the international Gender Design Network/iGDN, and of AICA. He regularly lectures and runs workshops at international ­universities (e.g. in Tokyo, Nagoya, Fukuoka, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, Sydney, and New York). SASKIA HEBERT was trained as an architect in Hamburg and Berlin and founded her office ‘architektur & stadtforschung’ together with Matthias Lohmann in 2000. After finishing her PhD in 2012 she additionally established the ‘lived/space/lab’ at the University of the Arts in Berlin which she operated until 2015. Since then, she teaches in the Master Program of Transformation Design at Braunschweig University of Arts. She was co-editor of the ‘Futurzwei Zukunftsalmanach 2017/18’ with Dana Giesecke and Harald Welzer and the publication ‘un/certain futures’ with Wolfgang Jonas, Marius Forster, and Mona Hofmann. Saskia Hebert regularly speaks or writes about aspects of (urban) transformation design and experiments with participative formats at the interface between research, education, and practice.

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WOLFGANG JONAS holds a PhD in Naval Architecture from Berlin Technical University

and a postdoctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation) for Design Theory from Wuppertal University. He has been professor for Process Design in Halle, for Design Theory in Bremen and for System Design in Kassel. From 2010 to 2018 he has been professor for ‘Designwissenschaft’ and head of the Institute for Design Research at Braunschweig University of Art, where he initiated the Master in Transformation ­Design. His main working areas are systems thinking and methodology, futures studies, and scenario a ­ pproaches and the development of the concept Research through ­Design. RAMIA MAZÉ is Professor in Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability at London

College of Communication, University of the Arts London, United Kingdom. Previously, in Finland, she was a professor and head of education in the Department of Design at Aalto University and, prior to that, she worked at Konstfack College of Arts, Crafts, and Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the national doctoral school Designfakulteten, and the Interactive Institute in Sweden. A designer and architect by training, her PhD is in interaction design. Specializing in participatory, critical, and politically-engaged design practices, recent projects include ‘Designing Social Innovation’ survey of projects in the US and Europe, and the cultural program and book ‘DESIGN ACT: Socially- and politically-­ engaged design today.’ AMANDA MENG’S research lies at the intersect of civics and technology, data, and so-

cial justice. Currently, she collaborates with Dr. Ellen Zegura and Dr. Carl DiSalvo ­ onducting data science projects with partners in the Westside of Atlanta and the c City of Atlanta. She completed her PhD in the International Affairs, Science, and Tech­nology program in 2017. Her doctoral research investigated the social impact of open government data through a comparative study of social movements’ use of open government data in Hong Kong, Chile, and the Dominican Republic. Throughout her ­career as a practitioner and academic, she has evaluated and implemented civic tech projects in the Dominican Republic, India, Ghana, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Chile, and ­Argentina. AGUSTIN PEREYRA DECARA (MSc ) is a service design advocate, currently consulting

­governments in delivering meaningful public experiences. Trained at Politecnico di Milano, he holds a diploma in Product Service System Design. He continuously builds his background by actively working in healthcare digital transformation for the Italian public services. Within five years of experience, he works side by side with public servants boosting their creative confidence by bringing into play design thinking methodologies and a humanity-centered approach.

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LAURA POPPLOW is professor for Designing Technological Futures at the Köln International School of Design and Code & Context at TH Köln. In her PhD with the title ‘co.making – design participation in transformation?’ (University of Art and Design Linz) she blended experimental research by design with historic discourse research, combining perspectives from Participatory Design, Transformation Design and STS. Since 2010 she has been teaching and exhibiting internationally. She has published on locative media, bio-electronics, design research, participation by design and participatory design. She was a fellow at the Social Impact Lab Frankfurt, the Media Lab Prado and was a visiting PhD at CODE, Co-Design Research Center in Copenhagen. She is a co-founder of the ­urban design consultancy co.city lab. MAZIAR REZAI is a design-activist, design researcher and strategist, and film critic.

Holding a master’s degree in industrial design from the Islamic Azad University in Tehran and having studied as a PhD joint student at Köln International School of Design (KISD), he currently is a PhD candidate at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) and previously a guest lecturer in the Art University of Tehran in Iran. He has given lectures and published numerous papers and articles in both English and Persian on a range of topics including issues of sustainable design and design activism. Beside his more academic work, he also works as creative director and design counselor and has led several consulting projects in Iran. He is a member of The International Research Network on Design (and) Activism which was founded in 2017 by Tom Bieling (HAW Hamburg) & Andréa Poshar (Politecnico di Milano), at the Design Research Lab in Berlin University of the Arts. THE 27E RÉGION is an independent non-profit think- and action-tank co-founded by

Stephane Vincent in 2008, and based in Paris. The 27e Région develops action-research activities and explores alternative ways to build and manage public policies, inspired by design, ethnography, social innovation, and public-commons partnership. As part of the core team of La 27e Région for seven years, Julien Defait and Laura Pandelle are now ­independent designers specialized in the field of public transformation and social innovation. The 27e Région is co-founder of States of Change, an international network of public innovation practitioners. ANDREAS UNTEIDIG is a design researcher living and working in Berlin. He is currently

acting professor for design studies at HBK Braunschweig, predominantly teaching in the MA program Transformation Design. He also serves as a postdoctoral scholar at the

Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society/University of the Arts Berlin, where he leads the research group ‘Inequality and digital sovereignty’. He studied Design at Köln International School of Design (Cologne, Germany) and Parsons The New School for ­Design (New York, USA), and earned a doctoral degree from Berlin University of Arts. In his research, he is currently focused on the development of networks and alliances ­between designers, technologists, activists, and policymakers to collectively create,

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­appropriate and discuss just, sustainable and socially progressive approaches to technology and processes of digitalization. He has been teaching design research and theory since 2013, co-founded the transdisciplinary research group Civic Infrastructures, helped acquiring and leading several EU-funded research projects (such as MAZI/ H2020) and published a wide range of academic articles and conference papers. His work has been presented at international exhibitions, such as Transmediale, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Radical Networks exhibition and the German Embassy of New York.

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Integrative Design Design reflects social developments in those issues which are also embraced by design researchers. A key concept for how designers position themselves in the future, according to the editor’s thesis, may well be integrative design. This term denotes design’s potential for the integrative development of a society, a potential imperatively linked with economic and political positions. Integrative Design collects basic essays on aspects of Integrative Design, including design after ownership, inclusion, design as an interface with society, the ­integration of design and technology, and the political agenda of design. The associated website documents current and recently completed research projects that expand on these aspects. Ralf Michel In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Board of International Research in Design 152 Seiten 16,8 × 22,4 cm Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-03821-644-5 English

Inklusion als Entwurf Teilhabeorientierte Forschung über, für und durch Design Wie wir Dinge gestalten, hat einen maßgeblichen Einfluss darauf, was oder wen wir als „normal“ oder „normabweichend“ empfinden. Design markiert somit die Grenzbereiche zwischen In- und Exklusion, indem es implizit Rollen- und Wertebilder konfiguriert und dabei gleichermaßen in den Herstellungs- und Deutungsprozess von Normalität involviert ist. Wenn solche Normvorstellungen durch Design mitkonstruiert werden, bedeutet das im Umkehrschluss jedoch auch, dass sie sich durch Design dekonstruieren, also kritisch hinterfragen und verändern lassen: Design kann auch Gegenmodelle entwickeln. Tom Bieling deckt auf zahlreichen Ebenen Verbindungen von Design und Inklusion auf und leitet daraus nicht nur neue Operationsbereiche für Designer ab, sondern liefert auch Anknüpfungspunkte für andere Praxis- und Wissensfelder. Tom Bieling In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Board of International Research in Design 320 Seiten 16,8 × 22,4 cm Gebunden ISBN: 978-3-0356-2020-7 Deutsch

Politics of Things In a state of ontological crisis, all boundaries have been ruptured between nature and culture, human and machine, and object and subject. We find ourselves exhaustively tackling the turmoil of our own designed circumstances, as we emerge to become extensions of the extensions that we built. In this practice-based design theory project, the authors share their experiments in negotiating power with things, hacking mundane objects, and thus their own everyday lives, allowing themselves to be swayed and misled, disrupted and called into question. The experiments delineate a mode of critical cultural inquiry where design and sociology collide to elicit critical perspectives on the ‘designer’ and the ‘designed’ as we act within an entangled politics of things. Michelle Christensen, Florian Conradi In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Board of International Research in Design 352 Seiten 16,8 × 22,4 cm Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-0356-2053-5 English

Urban Transformation Design Unsere Zukunft entscheidet sich in den Städten: Urbane Räume gelten als Treiber und als Betroffene globaler Umweltveränderungen, als wichtiger Teil des Problems und der Lösung zentraler Herausforderungen des 21. Jahrhunderts. Die urbanen Lebensräume und die Art ihrer Gestaltung werden sich in jedem Fall ­radikal ändern; die Frage ist, ob by Disaster or by Design. Diese „große Transformation“ einer urbanisierten Weltgesellschaft setzt ein „Change of Urban Design" voraus, da unser bisheriges Urban Design-Verständnis wesentlich für die heutige Krise mitverantwortlich ist. Die Arbeit fragt deshalb nach Bedeutung und Aufgabe guten Urban Designs und zielt auf die systematische und theoretisch fundierte Formulierung eines zeitgemäßen und zukunftsgewandten Urban Design-Verständnisses. His¸ar Schönfeld In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Board of International Research in Design 200 Seiten 16,8 × 22,4 cm Gebunden ISBN: 978-3-0356-2050-4 Deutsch

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Entwerferische Dinge Neue Ansätze integrativer Gestaltung im Design Offene und kooperative Vorgänge von Gestaltung gelten zurecht als ein Garant für zukunftsfähige Erzeugnisse und Dienstleistungen. Welchen Beitrag leisten dabei Designer und Designerinnen? Helge Oders Studie thematisiert die Akteure solch offener, kooperativer Prozesse, indem sie ihr sinnlich-ästhetisches Vermögen in den Blick nimmt. Sie versöhnt die lange als unvereinbar geltenden Pole der diversen disziplinären K ­ ompetenzen des Entwerfens und des ganzheitlich-konzeptionellen Zugangs für die Gestaltung zukunftsfähiger kultureller Kontexte. Und sie beantwortet die zentrale Frage: Was sind angesichts überbordender Komplexität die Gegenstände, denen unser Erkenntnisbemühen gelten muss?, aus dem Möglichkeitsraum des Sinnlich-Ästhetischen heraus – mit seinen „dunklen Phasen“ und „entwerferischen Dingen“. Helge Oder In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Board of International Research in Design 224 Seiten 16,8 × 22,4 cm Gebunden ISBN: 978-3-0356-2162-4 Deutsch

Designing Objects in Motion Exploring Kinaesthetic Empathy The movement of designed objects is not just something purely functional but also triggers a wide range of sensations. A curtain moving gently in the wind can cause the onlooker to feel at ease and relaxed, as if it were them floating in the air. This imagined projection caused by the perception of moving objects is called ‘kinaesthetic empathy’. In this study, based on a dissertation at the Royal College of Art, London, the author investigates the aesthetics of movement by documenting his own design-based learning and research process in terms of ‘research through design’, using the experimental cooperation with puppeteers as an example. He thereby creates a framework that enables designers to observe the aesthetics of objects in motion as a trigger of feelings, and, eventually, encouraging them to incorporate this valuable knowledge in the design of moving artefacts. Kensho Miyoshi In collaboration with the Board of International Research in Design 216 pages 16,8 × 22,4 cm Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-0356-1931-7 English

NERD – New Experimental Research in Design Positions and Perspectives Design has long expressed and established itself as an independent research competence – a fact that also companies, institutions and politicians have come to acknowledge. What is still needed, however, is a stronger public platform for design to confidently reflect upon this process and to establish and communicate the specific innovative and experimental dimension of design research. For this reason, BIRD, the Board of International Research in Design, has developed the New Experimental Research in Design / NERD format. The edited conference contributions of twelve young researchers from all over the world provide an impressive and diverse and insightful range of intelligent and inspiring approaches in design research, giving rise to further debate and action in the rapidly evolving field. Michael Erlhoff, Wolfgang Jonas (Eds.) In collaboration with the Board of International Research in Design 240 pages 16,8 × 22,4 cm Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-0356-1680-4 English

NERD – New Experimental Research in Design 2 Positions and Perspectives Design is inextricably interwoven with all aspects of life and has even produced its own astonishing genre of research. Design research opens up new perspectives of interdisciplinary empiricism, joining with economics, sociology, technology, and philosophy to produce analyses and syntheses that get to the heart of daily life. The twelve contributions from international authors that comprise this book ­vividly make this case. They cover the relationship between subject and object, animation, all forms of representation, design activism, and many other themes. This book is intended to inspire discussion. Its target reader is anyone seeking to expand their understanding of design, to fundamentally improve their praxis, and to more deeply appreciate life in all of its aspects. Michelle Christensen, Wolfgang Jonas, Ralf Michel (Eds.) In collaboration with the Board of International Research in Design 192 pages 16,8 × 22,4 cm Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-0356-2365-9 English

Project Management: Freya Mohr Production: Amelie Solbrig Layout and typography: Sven Schrape Design Concept BIRD: Christian Riis Ruggaber, Formal Paper: 110g/m2 Offset Lithography: LVD Gesellschaft für Datenverarbeitung mbH, Berlin Printing: Beltz Grafische Betriebe GmbH, Bad Langensalza Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932961 Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. Image rights if not otherwise indicated belong to the authors. ISBN 978-3-0356-2282-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-0356-2283-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-0356-2285-0 © 2021 Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel P.O. Box 44, 4009 Basel, Switzerland Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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