Disobedience as Usual: Why Design Activists Need Historians

Abstract

Since the financial crash of 2008, and the resulting rise of the Occupy, Indignados, and other anti-capitalist movements, a flurry of academic publications devoted to design activism has also resulted.1 Publishers recognize a hungry student readership wanting to be reassured that, once they graduate, there may be alternatives to “working for the giant,” something other than selling their souls in service of capital. Of course, this isn’t the first time that a narrative of social change has inhabited the history of design. Indeed, a rather “standard” history of design—from William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, through the early Bauhaus, postwar reconstruction, Italian radical design to present-day design activism—may be recounted as one of socially committed design and the crafting of alternative visions.2‘The history of design is a history of activism’. Discuss. might be an examination question for an undergraduate History of Design program general paper. The late 1960s and early 1970s have gained special attention lately.3 This might be because many of the emergent activities of the period, including participatory processes and community engagement, as well as design as refusal, critical practice, and autonomous action, have found a new relevance for design activists today. These accounts underpin the suggestion that the most interesting design in history has been disobedient. Given all this, one sometimes wonders why there seems to be such a wide gap between these noble intentions and what we have in daily life.