Minor Design Activism: Prompting Change from Within

Abstract

Introduction As researchers and practitioners in the field of co-design, we are interested in design activism as a particular mode of engagement that denotes collaboration rather than persuasion. Co-design already has strong connotations to an activist ethos through its historical affinity with the more explicit emancipatory tradition of Scandinavian Participatory Design from the 1970s onward. In this paper we argue that some types of contemporary co-design practices embody a different form of activist agency—one that is experimentally and immanently generated only as the design project unfolds. First, the cases that we describe are delimited in a specific context—namely, the Danish public sector—and they use the co-design methods of the co-design research center at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design. Second, the type of political engagement that this paper examines is one that is intrinsic to the design process itself, rather than being directed by a priori political teloi. To begin a closer examination of such activist positions in co-design, we propose the notion of a minor design activism, inspired by the concept of minoritarian in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.1 We describe a minor design activism as a position in co-design engagements that strives to continuously maintain experimentation. Through this ongoing quest for displacement and change, a minor design activism challenges attempts to stabilize the initial design program around already unified agendas. A minor design activism is not restricted to certain marginal or non-commercial domains.2 In fact, both cases discussed in this paper are firmly situated within public policy-driven initiatives. As such, a minor design activism distinguishes itself from more general assertions of activism in contemporary design,3 insofar as this kind of activism works from within hegemonic public institutions and agendas. From this structurally embedded position and through open-ended experiments, minor design activism seeks to challenge prescriptive agendas and to reconfigure group relations. 1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 2 Although providing an in-depth overview of activism in contemporary design is beyond the scope of this paper, the following definition of design activism proposed in the call for contributions to the 2011 Design History Society Annual Conference, titled “Design Activism and Social Change,” suggests that design activism should indeed “...distance itself from commercial or mainstream public policy-driven approaches. Instead, it embraces marginal, non-profit, or politically engaged ...articulations and actions.” “Design Activism and Social Change,” http://www.historiadeldisseny.org/congres/ (accessed November 21, 2013). 3 Alastair Fuad-Luke, Design Activism Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World (London: Earthscan, 2009); Thomas Markussen, “The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism: Enacting Design Between Art and Politics,” Design Issues 29, no.1 (Winter 2013): 38–50; Guy Julier, “From Design Culture to Design Activism,” Design and Culture 5, no.2 (2013): 215–36.