From Design Culture to Design Activism

ABSTRACT

Design culture has emerged as a broadly applied term in the past decade. Analytically, we can take it to describe the networking of the domains of design, production, and consumption within which questions of value, circulation, and practice reside. The reflexive promotion of design cultures and the enrollment of subjects and objects into its cause are taken to be of particular importance within neoliberalism. Since design cultures are networks, issues of their density and scale and the speed and strength of their interactions are of interest. Design activism has emerged as a movement, partly in response to the recent crises of neoliberalism. However, it is not necessarily independent of mainstream design culture. Instead, it picks up and runs with some of its key themes, including intensification, co-articulation, temporality, and territorialization.

KEYWORDS:

• neoliberalism
• relationality
• value
• ethical surplus
• appropriation