Re-framing the Politics of Design

Re-Framing the Politics of Design is a research, exhibition and book project exploring the role of designers in collaboratively giving shape to future changes addressing complex challenges such as climate change, mobility and migration. By looking at concrete, situated case studies, this book explores the current need for designers to re-frame their political agency, engaging with the deep relationality connecting us all, humans (and not only those who already have a voice in society and are represented) but also more-than-human actors

AEsOP: Applied Engagement for Community Participation

AEsOP (Applied Engagement for Community Participation) is a serious game that was developed as part of a study to examine whether interactive video games can have a quantifiable positive impact on levels of civic engagement with public authorities. The game was created with the objective of providing a tool that can be used to engage with communities including those that traditionally are underrepresented, lack ‘voice’ or feel underacknowledged by police and perhaps where trust relationships with public authorities may need improvement. The game was thus developed with a double focus: as engagement tool as well as a setting for research. This chapter discusses the conceptual thinking that went into the game as well as how the practical challenge of improving community-police relationships informed the design of the game

Beyond polarisation: reimagining communities through the imperfect act of ontologising

In participatory design (PD) processes driven by institutions, designers struggle in reaching out to silent and/or silenced human and more-than-human voices within local communities. This can in a long run contribute to polarisation in the design process. This paper explores how to reimagine designing with communities beyond polarisation, by rethinking the PD practice of ‘infrastructuring’ (i.e. ‘commoning’ and ‘institutioning’) from within the perspective of the ontological turn. This process of ‘ontologising’ infrastructuring aims to enable designers to design with and for radical interdependence and reach out to (ontologically) diverse actors who might in first instance seem unrelated if not antagonistic. We situate and evaluate this process in a concrete case study in urban planning in the Low Countries where we used mappings and platforms to map and engage with radical interdependencies. Rather than crystallising ‘ontologising’ as a PD practice, in this paper we aim to foreground it as a set of capabilities that designers may use to steer and evaluate their PD process with close attention to its politics

The Politics of Nature. Introducing re-worlding. DESIS Philosophy Talk# 7.5

Today’s socio-environmental challenges have been made more evident by the current COVID-19 crisis, with implications on various scale levels, intensifying cultural, social, political and environmental questions. Those questions must be addressed in a combined and not distinct way, requiring specific efforts in terms of thinking/acting in designing. In this DESIS Philosophy Talk, we want to explore which of our design competences we need to strengthen in order to create shared worlds that span different scale levels by developing what we call here “Re- worlding platforms”. It will build on a rich cultural tradition in Participatory Design of bridging people and groups together, including silent and silenced actors (human and non-human ones). While in the last years some attention has been paid in how to care for the non-human to be part of the political discourse, with the idea of Re-worlding we also underline that many silent and silenced human actors still need to be given a voice