Design and Political Dissent

Spaces, Visuals, Materialities

Jilly Traganou, Jilly Traganou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351187978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del design

This book examines, through an interdisciplinary lens, the relationship between political dissent and processes of designing.

In the past twenty years, theorists of social movements have noted a diversity of visual and performative manifestations taking place in protest, while the fields of design, broadly defined, have been characterized by a growing interest in activism. The book's premise stems from the recognition that material engagement and artifacts have the capacity to articulate political arguments or establish positions of disagreement. Its contributors look at a wide array of material practices generated by both professional and nonprofessional design actors around the globe, exploring case studies that vary from street protests and encampments to design pedagogy and community-empowerment projects.

For students and scholars of design studies, urbanism, visual culture, politics, and social movements, this book opens up new perspectives on design and its place in contemporary politics.

1 Introduction

Jilly Traganou

I vividly recall the moment when it all clicked: that afternoon in the spring of 2014, when Quizayra arrived at my office to discuss her thesis on the materiality of bodegas. Typical of students in New York, who leave home in the morning with plans for a day full of action, she always carried a lot of stuff. But that particular day, I noticed something strange spilling out of Quizayra’s bag—something unusually soft and fluffy. A stuffed animal, I thought as she started unpacking, taking out her notebook and placing the blobby thing on the table. I couldn’t stop myself from asking, of course.

“I brought my pillow,” she said, “because my mattress was too heavy.”

This answer was both surprising and confusing. Our brief exchange on the matter, however, soon led to my “aha” moment. A protest was taking place in the city that day against universities’ refusal to act appropriately after allegations of on-campus sexual assault.¹ The act of protest was realized by carrying one’s own mattress—or, in Quizayra’s case, her pillow—into the streets. Even though I didn’t properly understand the specific cause and mechanics of this protest, I suddenly recognized the power of protesting with things, not words, that act in support of our grievances.

This confirmed an insight stemming from my research at the time, although it was on a very different subject: the abysmal worlds created by the Olympic Games. I had come to understand that design and creativity are not tools merely in the hands of those authorized to create the impactful projects that accompany a mega-event. Despite having disproportionately less power, counter-Olympics activists also display an abundance of creativity, which in their hands is mobilized toward dissenting rather than enabling the Olympics. And that day in my office, Quizayra and her pillow assured me that protesting with things was in fact a thing! Here on my table was an object of creative resistance. It was nothing but a pillow, a trivial, passive object—and yet it was everything but that.

How is design associated with a pillow protest? one might ask. Or in other words, what are we talking about when we talk about “design and dissent”? Here, in this book, we are referring not only to the specific processes of creating objects that are meant to participate in dissent. The essays and discussions that follow consider acts of material engagement as much more than just producing design; these acts also include assembling, appropriating, and collecting artifacts, from objects and spaces to images and imaginaries. We also include material practices that happen in various spaces, from the street and the square to a school or a theater, and the remaking of these spaces to enable dissent.

To put it differently, this book examines nonverbal repertoires of political contention that are anchored in the physical world: disobedient objects, insurgent practices in occupied spaces, archives of material artifacts that embody dissent, and various creative assemblages that enact disagreement. We look at how they are made and used in protest or in spearheading dissent at various sites, the ways they are archived or commemorated, the methods used by activists and designers to extract lessons from them as agents of new political affiliations. We do this in order to shed light on the materialities involved in dissent, and to understand their trajectories, their potential, and their limits.

In the second decade of the 21st century, the world witnessed a rise in dissent due to the expansion of inequality, oppression, and discrimination.² It also saw an increase in the diversity of protest tactics, including creative, performative, and materially established forms of dissent.³ Images of encampments from the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, performative action from the World Trade Organization protests, and “disobedient objects” from the student uprising in Hong Kong circulated extensively in social media and spread virally around the globe. These protests coalesced a multitude of causes, and even though some were critiqued as “strategies of withdrawal,”⁴ they are of particular interest because they evoked a multivocality in the articulation of dissent that far exceeded the activists’ verbal demands or speech actions.

Reflecting on the proliferation of “repertoires of contention”⁵ in the 21st century so far, this book examines the relationship between political dissent and acts of design. Its premise stems from the recognition that dissent often happens through things—that material practices and artifacts have the capacity to articulate political arguments and act politically.⁶ The word “things” here stands for a broader nexus of materiality that includes not only objects but also visual culture and spaces. Our attention is focused on both the realm of production (the acts of conceiving and creating such things) and the realm of use, appropriation, and dissemination—the effects, diffusion, preservation, and afterlives of these things. Even beyond that, things appear in this book as having their own active capacity, as artifacts with politics, to echo an influential piece by Langdon Winner.⁷

Bracketing the notion of design as an actor in political dissent is where our contribution to the burgeoning field of protest culture and social movement studies lies. In this book, we are motivated by a dual question: what in design might be conducive to dissent, and where is design in dissent? “Design” might not be the most obvious word to use in contexts of dissent. Here, we do not talk simply about form-giving or about work by professional designers, but rather about an epistemological category. Designing is considered by design theorist Nigel Cross as the core figurative capability and knowledge employed in actions that have to do with change, expanding Herbert Simon’s proposition that design is an interdisciplinary component “accessible to all those involved in the creative activity of making the artificial world,”⁸ and the “core of all professional training … architecture, business, education, law, and medicine.”⁹

Thus, this volume recognizes design as a capacity that expands from the work of professional designers to encompass practices of “diffuse design” by non-experts, such as grassroots organizations, cultural activists, and everyday practitioners.¹⁰ It considers acts of dissent that use methods of design (such as “planning, inventing, making, and doing”¹¹), even when realized by non-designers, to achieve goals that are inherently political and that stem from—or more often, establish—a position of disagreement. We present design as the central experience of the creative process, at the core of a wider array of intentional practices of material or performative figuration that evoke political disagreement, ranging from street protests and encampments to design activism and community empowerment. And we explore the affective domains of relationality between human and non-human actors before, during, and after acts of designing.

While designers are not typically perceived as radical or revolutionary,¹² the core of design offers a potentiality akin to change. One might argue that design oscillates between two ways of producing change: first, masking compliance with novelty, which is typical in the design of commodities, and second, subverting the norm by articulating new courses of action, and processes of becoming. In this book, we examine mostly the latter: dissenting designers (or non-experts who tap into their “designerly”¹³ capacity) using methods and tropes of design to oppose a political decision, reveal new information, demand change, disrupt the status quo, propose alternatives, or prototype desirable futures. Yet we do not present design as a liberating force per se. Given the clear systemic problems and reactionary politics within the design establishment, we do not claim designers are by definition self-sacrificing idealists who strive only for the public good. In fact, we also look at design activists who change allegiance depending on circumstances, including personal and political opportunity. And we look at designers’ acts of dissent that are coopted by or siding with entities which they initially opposed.

Our approach comprises multiple disciplinary perspectives, including design studies, visual studies, urbanism, architecture, aesthetics, communication, media and technology studies, political science, anthropology, and sociology; assumes qualitative research methodologies based on the analysis of case studies from around the globe, and offers responses by two scholars: US-based sociologist James Jasper, whose work has focused on the cultural and emotional aspects of social movements, and Brazil-based Zoy Anastassakis, who is trained in both anthropology and design. Through these frameworks, we investigate the relationship in recent decades between design and dissent from two different but converging trajectories.

A Converging Two-Directional Inquiry

The first trajectory through which we will analyze the relationship between design and dissent is that of social movements. Since entering a pivotal new era beginning with the WTO protests (“Battle of Seattle”), theorists of social movements have noted a “diversity of tactics”¹⁴ and “new languages” taking place in protest.¹⁵ This trajectory includes imaginative and creative forms of protest, such as street performance, puppet theater, and encampments, while revealing a new type of political organizing that differs from hierarchical structures of the past, which had emerged out of contention toward s...