Design Justice - A Reading List

“Design is] an ethical praxis of worldmaking” - Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse

What does ’design’ have to do with social justice, ecology, indigenous struggles, climate change, or spirituality? Well, design theory has stuff to say about the processes by which we decide how things in society should be - and that includes not just posters, chairs and buildings but also cities, governments, corporations, ideologies and narratives that together create almost the entire world you live in. It almost sounds a bit… relevant to social life, research and activism right?

The texts I’ve picked out are all about looking at design theory with the goal of understanding how it can be applied in that broad and hard-to-summarise task we all share, at least in our politicised communities - roughly, ‘making the world a good place for everyone to live’. The first one is published by the Design Justice Network a grassroots network of design (and other) practitioners aiming to use their work to push towards liberatory futures. The ‘Design Justice Principles’ are their foundational statement on what a design process should look like when we centre that above goal - I found them really powerful.

The second text is an interview with Sasha Costanza-Chock - design theorist, activist, trans woman, cofounder of the Design Justice Network and author of a book called ‘Design Justice’ - on a pretty cute geeky podcast I like called ‘Radical AI’, which is all about the intersection of AI and tech more broadly with ethics and social justice. The podcast is a nice conversational introduction to this notion of ‘Design Justice’, and digs a bit into how critical design theory can be applied in social movements and activism relating to emerging technologies that are set to exert a lot of power over the lives of marginalised people.

Ok, so now we’ve established that design theory has useful stuff to say… it’s time to go big. Let’s redesign all of society.

The third text, a chapter from ‘Designs for the Pluriverse’ by interdisciplinary social researcher Arturo Escobar, explores exactly that. Particularly it looks at ‘transition designs’ - that is, grand civilisation-scale transitions from our current oppressive dominator society to one that is… better. But better how? Answering that question is where design theory comes in, particularly its analysis of how design processes implicitly or explicitly rest on cultural values, norms, and even more fundamental ideas about what matters, what is real and what is possible. The risk then, in creating a grand framework for societal transition, is that we uncritically assume the centrality of a (likely Western, modern, anthropocentric) cultural framework and despite our best intentions, ultimately end up contributing to the erasure and destruction of indigenous, local and relational cultures. We don’t want to build a ‘one-world world’, but a ‘pluriversal’ world in which many worlds fit, to paraphrase the Zapatistas. The task taken up in this chapter is outlining, comparing and analysing the most promising frameworks arising from both the global North and global South for designing a sustainable and liveable future for human civilisation itself, in a way that preserves and enables the flourishing of that pluriverse.

It turns out that that’s a pretty hard task, so I will warn you that this chapter is not exactly a light read. It also builds a bit on previous chapters, particularly discussion of ‘political ontology’ and ‘ontological design’, which I might have found a bit confusing if I was jumping into this chapter with no context. I hope this little glossary helps:

Ontology - philosophical questions about what is real, what exists, what is the world, what is possible. An ‘ontology’ can also refer to a particular world, or set of specific ideas about what exists

Political ontology - whether things exist, or are possible, or not is a political question. Whether revolution is possible is in some sense ‘ontological’. Whether ancestor spirits watch over us, or whether trees and rocks and rivers have ‘lives’ that matter, whether relational networks are legible or not: these are all ontological questions that become political when other ontologies come in on tall ships and start trying to ‘educate’ you. As a field of research, political ontology looks at how realities are ‘enacted’ within social and ecological networks.

Ontological design - consider that what it means to ‘be human’ within modern society is thoroughly designed, by us and by others. Education, work and technology produce subjects whose sense of reality is conveniently aligned with the need for this capitalist society to continue endlessly extracting. Ontological design asks, can we re-design our ontologies to produce ourselves as subjects more capable of living relationally, ethically and acting in solidarity?

I hope that’s helpful!! If you can somehow find the time and energy to really sit with this text and give it your full attention, I think you will find it really rewarding. This book is really the main reason I wanted to curate this session of readmakeshare - it has introduced me to a galaxy of ideas and areas of research that I’ve found deeply exciting and inspiring, and over the course of reading the book two and a half times now I have found that it has thoroughly transformed the way I think about political struggles, solidarity, participatory democracy, collaboration but also modernity, ecology, living on stolen land, relationality and spirituality. I would so deeply love to share this with you.

WEB PAGE: Design Justice Network - Principles

PODCAST: Radical AI - Design Justice 101 with Sasha Costanza-Chock

BOOK CHAPTER: Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse - chapter 5: ‘Design for Transitions’