Design and Culture Special Issue: Designing Against Infrastructures of Harm
Co-edited with historian Paula Austin, this special issue of Design and Culture brings together scholars, organizers, designers, and artists working across history and design to imagine what it looks like to design against infrastructures of harm.
Check out the issue here.
And download the Introduction here.
“In this issue, we argue for modes of historical and design practices that facilitate the dismantling of infrastructures of harm through contextualizing clearly how these systems emerge and are maintained, and sharing means for doing and making – or infrastructuring – differently. We invited authors to look across design and history as practices, methodologies, and propositional approaches, undertaken and engaged by people through formal research and making as well as through informal daily living. The artists, organizers, and scholar-activists in these pages demonstrate kinds of radical worldmaking in action, highlighting the relevance of what people make, including when it takes sometimes routinized, temporary, or even silent forms: a refusal performed with one’s body, one’s name, or a proposed rewriting of unacceptable rules. In spotlighting dynamic worldmaking, many authors grapple with tensions between reform and abolition, averring that irresolvability does not preclude action.” – from the Introduction