Design as Politics

Tony Fry

Design as Politics confronts the inadequacy of contemporary politics to deal with unsustainability. Current 'solutions' to unsustainability are analysed as utterly insufficient for dealing with the problems but, further than this, the book questions the very ability of democracy to deliver a sustainable future.

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Design as an Attitude

Alice Rawsthron

Design as an Attitude explains how design is responding to an age of intense economic, political, and ecological instability. It shows how resourceful designers are using new digital tools to help to tackle the environmental and refugee crises, and to reinvent dysfunctional social services.

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Lo—TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism

Julia Watson

In an era of high-tech and climate extremes, we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Enter Lo—TEK, a design movement building on indigenous philosophy and vernacular infrastructure to generate sustainable, resilient, nature-based technology. With a foreword by anthropologist Wade Davis and spanning 18 countries from Peru and the Philippines to Tanzania and Iran, this book explores millennia-old human ingenuity on how to live in symbiosis with nature. Manifesting the disclosure of hidden knowledge, the book’s artful Swiss binding showcases an open spine, revealing the construction of the book.

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The Politics of Design

Ruben Pater

The Politics of Design explores the cultural and political context of the typography, colours, photography, symbols, and information graphics that we use every day. This book examines cultural contexts and stereotypes with visual examples from around the world. It demonstrates that communication tools are never neutral, and encourages its users to rethink global cultural understanding. Additional works by contemporary artists and designers show that political awareness does not limit creativity, but opens up new explorations for a critical visual culture.

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Discursive Design: Critical, Speculative, and Alternative Things

Bruce M. Tharp and Stephanie M. Tharp

Exploring how design can be used for good—prompting self-reflection, igniting the imagination, and effecting positive social change. 

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Designs for Different Futures

Kathryn B. Hiesinger, Michelle Millar Fisher, Emmet Byrne, Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, and Zoë Ryan

Designs for Different Futures records the concrete ideas and abstract dreams of designers, artists, academics, and scientists exploring how design might reframe our futures, socially, ethically, and aesthetically. With perspectives ranging from historical visions of the future to the use of biological materials in production processes, this is essential reading for anyone interested in how design might shape the world to come. 

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︎ Additional article from the book: The Design Imagination by Zoë Ryan

The Politics of Design

Victor Papanek

This book documents countless photographs, artistic works and designs, objects, drawings, letters, and other materials, some of which are published here for the first time. Papanek’s close exchange with contemporaries such as Richard Buckminster Fuller, George Nelson, and Marshall McLuhan is also examined. Contemporary work by Tomás Saraceno, Catherine Sarah Young, Gabriel Ann Maher, Thomas Thwaites, and Forensic Architecture, as well as Flui Coletivo and Questtonó, among others, rounds off the publication and demonstrates that Papanek’s interpretation of design as a tool for social transformation is as relevant as ever and continues to shape debate on social design, critical design, and design thinking. 

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Designing Peace :
Building a Better Future Now

Cynthia E. Smith

Offering perspectives on peace through essays, interviews, critical maps, project profiles, data visualizations, and art, this book conveys the momentum that design can gain in effecting a peace-filled future. From activists, scholars, and architects to policymakers and graphic, game, and landscape designers, Designing Peace flips the conversation: peace is not simply a passive state signifying the absence of war, it is a dynamic concept that requires effort, expertise, and multidimensional solutions to address its complexity. This publication aims to expand the discourse on what is possible if society were to design for peace. 

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CAPS LOCK
HOW CAPITALISM TOOK HOLD OF GRAPHIC DESIGN AND HOW TO ESCAPE FROM IT

Ruben Pater

CAPS LOCK uses clear language and striking visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. The book contains many case studies of designed objects related to capitalist societies and cultures, and also examines how the education and professional practice of (graphic) designers supports the market economy and how design practice is caught within that very system.

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Culture Strike:Art and Museums in an Age of Protest

Laura Raicovich
In this book, Raicovich explains some of the key museum flashpoints, and she also provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding capitalist values. And she suggests how museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.

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Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change

Victor Papanek
Design for the Real World has, since its first appearance twenty-five years ago, become a classic. Translated into twenty-three languages, it is one of the world's most widely read books on design. In this edition, Victor Papanek examines the attempts by designers to combat the tawdry, the unsafe, the frivolous, the useless product, once again providing a blueprint for sensible, responsible design in this world which is deficient in resources and energy.

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