Design and Political Dissent: Spaces, Visuals, Materialities

Abstract

Although it is easy as well as tempting to reduce the politics of designed objects to Manichean binaries – the good versus the bad – this lively and timely volume avoids the temptation. In its pages, the semiotic and the material appear and act with a deftness and subtlety that suggest design scholarship is improving its grip on the complex ways that power travels through design culture. In nineteen chapters of different formats – case studies, interviews, responses – with sixteen color plates and generous black-and-white illustrations throughout, engaging with both professional and non-professional design practice, the volume is a welcome addition to the growing literature on design and politics. It will interest researchers and teachers of design as well as social life, while also being accessible, at least in part, to a more practice-oriented readership. The volume underscores that design research has great potential to contribute significantly to the study of the dissenting political activities that have flourished around the world in the last decade or two, and, in particular, of the creative material interventions these activities have involved. Although activist practices are an established research focus in design history, grappling with the contradictory consequences of contemporary “world making” (5) through design arguably demands new conceptual tools and vocabularies. The book is a concerted intervention into this state of affairs, aimed at engaging with political contention that is anchored in the physical world and often operates at the nonverbal level. The ambition is important quite simply because contemporary life and its spatial, visual, and material dimensions – to echo the subtitle – increasingly fail to make sense, as several authors suggest. (Ana Helena da Fonseca and Barbara Szaniecki’s chapter on the contradiction of urban construction in Rio de Janeiro is one example.) The book gives good indication that design, whether in urbanism, architecture, or product and service design, is beginning to confront its own role in the production of a disturbing sensorium. This idea, in turn, challenges conventional epistemological and political institutions, at least in the Western tradition, based as it has been around promises of technological progress and social improvement. Neither naïve nor celebratory about design, the book as a whole adopts a tone that acknowledges design’s role in creating appalling worlds and supporting practices that destroy viable and cherished ways of life. In putting such Eeva Berglund is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Design at Aalto University, Finland. eeva.berglund@aalto.fi © 2021 Eeva Berglund DOI: 10.1080/ 17547075.2021.1975961 Book Reviews