People, Place and Policy Conference: Governing social and spatial inequalities under enduring austerity, 15th September 2016, Sheffield, UK, 2016
This paper will reflect on the role of design approaches, in a time of austerity and a time when ... more This paper will reflect on the role of design approaches, in a time of austerity and a time when this practice is more and more used by Governments and communities around the world to influence what next for our societies. By building on the case study of Mind, a UK based mental health charity, and their vision of embedding Design in the organisation, the paper will present and reflect on the opportunities and risks of introducing collaborative forms of design in public services and in society.
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One way to approach such difficulties is through an intra-disciplinary engagement not with the fields of design and politics but with the effects that design and politics produce through a series of internal, mutual co-relations. These effects are manifested and produced not merely through legislative and institutional practices, but through designed artefacts, spaces, sites and technologies. Ranging from gentrified public squares to high security checkpoints, from precarious production lines to everyday gendered goods, such material co-enactments of design and politics regulate and manipulate people’s bodies, abilities, movements, inhabitations and life conditions in various ways, based on their race, ethnicity, social and legal status, gender and sexuality. From this perspective, the concept of intersectionality can be a useful frame and method to interrogate how design and politics co-shape each other through power relations across race, gender and class, as well as other identity attributions. Intersectionality teaches us that politics cannot be only understood through rigid power categories but through a matrix of forces and relations that produce different effects in different sites and moments, with different bodies and positions. Scholars in postcolonial feminism have discussed the concept of intersectionality widely and have used it as a method to interrogate various sites and spaces of power.
This symposium is an attempt to initiate a space of thinking for discussing the concept of intersectionality from the agency of design and designing in particular and materiality in general. It seems that intersectionality could be a useful method for understanding the politics and political agency of design:
- How do design and designing participate and reinforce power structures in an intersectional way through and across race, gender and class?
- How can design and designing offer novel ways to understand the ways in which power operates in intersectional ways?
- And possibly how can design and designing propose ways of intervening in such complex and intersectional power relations?
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Building on the critical accounts raised by scholars within the field of design for ‘making publics’ I propose, in this work, a departure from the thinking of John Dewey and an exploration into another strand of thought, that also investigates the link between democracy and social creativity, and which is based on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis.
Dewey and Castoriadis moved from very similar concerns but the two thinkers also differed on key points, and the main difference between their two strands of thought could be found in the fact that whilst Dewey attempted to ‘socialise the political’, Castoriadis aim was rather to ‘politicise the social’.
I open this monograph articulating the reasons for design practitioners and scholars to look into the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and I continue in my writing to describe what I have learnt by exploring how and if design has a role to play - through its repertoire of creative tactics – in order to advance creative democracy as an everyday practice. I will describe the issues I encountered in my two field-works within the area of design for mental health and I will articulate what I discovered about the limitations of current conceptions of creativity, as elaborated and practiced within neo-liberal modes of design practices.
Through this work I will advance as my main contribution to knowledge a proposal for a renovated mode of design, which I have called ‘Design for the Radical Imagination’ and which has - as its main ambition - the creation and the nurturing of a collective subject that can interpret and change the world politically.