Design As Politics

The great design movements in design history were, for the most part, guided by utopian, political, or at least reformist aims. They combined the question of what today is called 'material culture' with the more general question of how we want to live. Today, faced with the global challenge of creating sustainable economies and societies, design has rediscovered its ethical, social and critical tradition. However, due to their global nature, today's problems have reached an unprecedented level of complexity and inertia. These problems are deeply ingrained into global policies – and the chances to face them are the highest when employing political means. As a consequence, if design aims to contribute in these challenging domains, it has to conceive itself as political.

In the age of post-capitalism, what is the value of design? Is value defined by economic potential? Or is it something far less tangible? Now more than ever design has the ability to engage us in economic, political and cultural debate, to actively resist the monotony of daily life, and to counteract the precarious situation on which modern society seems to rest. Positioning itself as a lens through which to view the world, design allows us, and in some cases, even forces us to reflect on the many aspects of the societies in which we live.
Divided into three chapters, GOING REAL positions itself in relation to the works of Marc Jongen, Maurizio Lazzarato, Adam Greenfield and Tiziana Terranova, among others. However, unlike the abovementioned authors, this book draws on the works of selected designers and artists to reflect on the economic, political and cultural aspects of our post-capitalist societies. Beginning with an in-depth case study of Detroit during the downfall of the industrial era, this volume moves on to a timely and provocative insight into the human crises surrounding current migration trends with a particular focus on Calais. Finally, in the third chapter, the human body itself is laid bare as the authors analyse how and why the most personal of ‘spaces’ became not only the ultimate marketplace for businesses but also an object of control for governments.

Technologies play crucial roles in security politics. In a recent push to understand the dynamic interplay between technologies and politics, IR scholars increasingly draw on reflexive research traditions. The aim is to understand the social and political practices that influence the shape, design and use of security technologies instead of assuming that technologies have linear, independent effects on politics. This SPSR debate draws on this new perspective and applies it to topics salient in Swiss public debate. Its contributions analyze how cybersecurity, predictive policing, drones, artificial intelligence, targeted sanctions, urban design and spyware are deliberated, negotiated, programmed and critiqued in Switzerland. They chart different analytical avenues with which to address the recursive and non-linear relationship between security politics and technologies, and, by familiarizing readers with the tenets and diversity of reflexive political science research, seek to give that longstanding scholarly research tradition better visibility in the Swiss political science community.

Technologien spielen in der Sicherheitspolitik eine entscheidende Rolle. Um das Zusammenspiel von Technologie und Politik besser zu verstehen, greift die IB-Forschung zunehmend auf reflexive Forschungsansätze zurück. Ziel ist es dabei, die sozialen und politischen Faktoren und Praktiken zu verstehen, die Einfluss auf die Form, das Design und den Einsatz von Sicherheitstechnologien haben, anstatt davon auszugehen, dass Technologien lineare, unabhängige Auswirkungen auf die Politik haben. Diese SPSR-Debatte wendet diese neue Perspektive auf Themen an, die heute im öffentlichen Diskurs der Schweiz eine wichtige Rolle spielen. Ihre sieben Beiträge analysieren, wie Cybersicherheit, Predictive Policing, Drohnen, künstliche Intelligenz, Sanktionen, Städtebau und Spyware in der Schweiz diskutiert, verhandelt, programmiert und kritisiert werden. Sie zeigen verschiedene analytische Wege auf, um die rekursive und nichtlineare Beziehung zwischen Sicherheitspolitik und -technologien greifbar zu machen, und macht der Schweizer Politikwissenschaft die Grundsätze und die Vielfalt der reflexiven politikwissenschaftlichen Forschung besser vertraut.

Les technologies jouent un rôle primordial dans la politique de sécurité. Pour mieux comprendre l’interaction dynamique entre technologie et politique, la recherche en Relations Internationales s’appuie de plus en plus sur les traditions réflexives de recherche politique. Son objectif est de mieux comprendre les pratiques sociales et politiques qui influencent la forme, la conception et l’utilisation des technologies de sécurité, au lieu de supposer que les technologies ont des effets linéaires et indépendants sur la politique. Ce débat applique cette nouvelle perspective à des sujets fortement discutés en Suisse. Sept contributions analysent comment la cybersécurité, la police prédictive, les drones, l’intelligence artificielle, les sanctions, l’urbanisme et la spyware sont délibérés, négociés, programmés et critiqués en Suisse. Elles tracent des voies analytiques permettant d’aborder les relations entre politique et technologie et donnent une meilleure visibilité aux traditions de recherche réflexive au sein de la communauté suisse des sciences politiques.

The Chilean Cybersyn project, an attempt to manage a nation's economy by cybernetic methods, has evoked more and more interest in recent years. The project's design lead and several team members were alumni of the Ulm School of Design-an institution that has been labelled "Bauhaus successor" and today is famous for a no-arts and method-led design approach with strong societal aspirations. The school also influenced the emerging design discipline in Latin America during the 1960s and 70s. This article reviews topics in the Ulm curriculum that influenced "Ulmian" thinking, but often remained unnoticed in design centred publications. Cybernetics, Operations Research and Information Theory and their relation to design are discussed and the related scholars are portrayed critically.

This article introduces designers to the dilemma that arises when twin aspects of social innovation—social means and social ends—do not align. Some academics have noted the antisocial , anti-political, and anti-inventive effects emerging from the spread of microfinance practices. We discuss the tendency for social design and innovation literature to focus on design processes rather than outcomes, and introduce ideas from realist political theory to account for the corruptibility of social innovations. We suggest that designers can prevent the corruption of social outcomes by shifting from idealist " what if " scenarios to realist " who whom? " questions instead.

This paper discusses power relations (Arendt 1970) between citizens and technologies induced by new communication structures for self-organization within a participatory design project: the " Mit-Mach-Stadt Brandis” (“Participatory City”). It questions how citizens use and adapt new digital means that have the potential to strengthen local and social structures. Referring to Latour’s actor network theory (ANT) and the equation of power between human and non-human actors, the current inquiry addresses the impact of digital technologies on citizens. According to Latour, citizens, categorized as human actors, lose power in a digitized and connected urban environment. To counter this tendency, we develop socio-material infrastructures (Star, Ruhleder 1996, Ehn 2008) with and for citizens. Thereby, an empowered position for dealing with increasing digitization should come within the citizens’ reach. We analyze the relation between citizens and technologies before, during, and after ...

The Chilean Cybersyn project, an attempt to manage a nation’s economy by cybernetic methods, has evoked more and more interest in recent years. The project’s design lead and several team members were alumni of the Ulm School of Design—an institution that has been labelled “Bauhaus successor” and today is famous for a no-arts and method-led design approach with strong societal aspirations. The school also influenced the emerging design discipline in Latin America during the 1960s and 70s. This article reviews topics in the Ulm curriculum that influenced “Ulmian” thinking, but often remained unnoticed in design centred publications. Cybernetics, Operations Research and Information Theory and their relation to design are discussed and the related scholars are portrayed critically.