5. Ranciere
• The sans papiers > the sans receipts
• Philosopher and his poor
• The police
• The ‘distribution of the sensible’
• Dissensus
• Emancipation
6. Political Design
• Critique of existing design practice
• Focus on individuals and individual ‘needs’ or representations or
problems, rather than community-wide perspectives (Blyth and Kimbell
2011)
• Apolitical stance of much of design (DiSalvo 2010)
• Alignment with consumerist and unsustainable modes of living (Margolin
2002; Thorpe 2012)
• Political design/ adversarial design/ design activism/ critical
making
• However,
• Markussen’s (2011) political design largely engages with elites
• Design produce small-scale installations that are not co-designed by the
people in whose community they are located
9. Rancierean emancipation via political
design
Criteria Engagement
Political, provocative and re-distribute the sensible in a
manner that is fairer and more democratic
The identified marginalized individuals and groups are
substantively included in the research and development
of the practical activity
How and to where is the sensible redistributed?
20. Tax&Spend
• Create an AR layer that enables businesses to
record:
• Where they pay tax
• How much tax they pay per month, as a ratio of
total income
• Representation of what this pays for
• What contracts their staff are on – zero hour?
• Other CSR activities
22. Rancierean Emancipation?
Criteria Engagement
Political,
provocative…
• Makes payment of tax visible
• However, the limitations of consumer activism
• Entangled issues: tax locally but the global supply
chains and ecological damage from smart phones…
Inclusive… • Process: No, but this is a scenario/ fiction
• Product: It uses AR, smart phones, web browsers
Re-distribution? • Emphasis on tax and contribution
• What about people who don’t contribute?
• Potential for well-financed reaction
24. • Beating the commons and complexity
• Research in architecture in design has shifted from behaviour
to sensibility (McCullough 2013)
• “architecture “arranges interpersonal distances in space, configures
everyday processes, represents organisations, and shapes everyday
habits within them, it also unobtrusively supports sensemaking”
• Democratic sensibilities/ sensemaking?
• Consciousness and reflection as integral…
• Changing the perceptual co-ordinates? Then what?
Parting thoughts
Notas do Editor
Historic levels of socio-economic inequality (Davies 2006; Dorling 2009; Harvey 2012)
Considerable consequences for well-being and social cohesion (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010)
Inequality thrown into sharp relief in the city
The sans papiers … add definition
Philosopher and his poor
Police “The police, to begin with, is defined as an organisational system of coordinates that establishes a distribution of the sensible or a law that divides the community into groups, social positions and functions. This law implicitly separates those who take part from those who are excluded, and it includes a prior aesthetic division between the visible and invisible, the audible and inaudible, the sayable and unsayable.”
The ‘distribution of the sensible’: a law that divides the community into groups, social positions and functions”
Dissensus: POLITICS… add Mouffe’s notion of agonistic democracy
Emancipation: A Rancierean project of emancipation involves transforming the perceptual coordinates or aesthetic field of the community, making the invisible and inaudible visible and heard in conditions of equality (Ranciere 2010).
Intro: changing the perceptual coordinates of the community through political design
Similar terms: Political design/ adversarial design/ design activism/ critical making…
There are, of course, different types of design and in guiding our engagement we learn from an extant critique of design practices in relation to engaging complex social issues. These are that design tends to: focus on individuals and individual ‘needs’ or representations or problems, rather than community-wide perspectives (Blyth and Kimbell 2011); involve privileged designers temporarily visiting a place instead of embedding the design processes in the community (Blyth and Kimbell 2011); adopt an apolitical stance of much of design (DiSalvo 2010) and its alignment with consumerist and unsustainable modes of living (Margolin 2002; Thorpe 2012).
There is however a separate strand of design thinking – political design – that seeks to engage with the biases and apparent constraints of mainstream design thinking. The proposed research engages with the political and radical projects of democracy (refs) and emancipation through political or politicised design (DiSalvo xxxx; Fry). There is an exciting seam of research and practice in which designers seek to politicise design and align it with more radical projects such as adversarial design for agonistic democracy (DiSalvo xx) or design that creates spaces of ‘dissensus’ (Keshavarz and Maze 2013). In these forms of politicised design the role of the designer, the process and artefacts of design are explicitly to,
reveal and confront power relations and influence, political design identifies new terms and themes for contestation and new trajectories for action. (DiSalvo)
Similarly, Levin (2014) describes political design project in terms of,
A product-as-provocation, a working tool, that allows people to actively question widely-unexamined assumptions…
A crucial feature of political design is that the project presents both a critique of the existing system and a ‘fix’ for making or illuminating ways of making things better.
[discuss examples]
We are also informed by Markussen’s (2011) concerns that political design largely engages with elites, and proposes urban design activism that employs design for changing how normal people experience everyday urban spaces. Furthermore it is of note that both forms of design produce small-scale installations that are not co-designed by the people in whose community they are located.
The imperative to include ‘marginalised’ individuals in processes of political design raises a number of potential issues:
Competence and education… although some ideas can be quite simple
Provocation and value… activism that pays or trains
The identified marginalized individuals and groups are substantively included in the research and development of the practical activity
How is the sensible redistributed? The sensible is redistributed but not to full equality but instead it includes some and excludes others
The identified marginalized individuals and groups are substantively included in the research and development of the practical activity ----- CAN’T DO THIS NOW?
Tax is a political issue
Things have gone on “in the same old way” sounds odd… given the Internet etc… but we still buy (some) things in shops
There are certain forms of information/ signals provided to help us make our decision: brand, a nice inside, prices, food on display, fair trade information, a community board
The thing is WE KNOW…
Ambient commons =
Hobo signs…
Hobo Signs go QR Code Stencils! QR_STENCILER and QR_HOBO_CODES from Golan Levin and Asa Foster III ~ everything you need to start spreading your own (try it with spray chalk!) ~ from free wifi to bad coffee, they have you covered.
Tax&Spend (maybe the name is too American?)
Quite complicated arrangements
Starbucks staff are partners
Franchises
A normative framework
Issues with consumer activism (refs)
Steps of regression
Simplest with shops and tax
We are proposing a new normative set of standards for assessing a business
Design fiction… the future mundane and the monstrous
BUT…
Corporations use think tanks and ‘astroturf’ organisations to create alternative systems that are self-regulated according to and so not challenging their interests. So there is the Fairtrade standard, with its own problems, but companies like Tesco come up with the Rainbow Alliance. Then there are groups like the Tax Payers Alliance. So it would be interesting to think through how corporate interests would influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp the project? The way we envision the system is socially or societally positive, based on our normative view that companies should pay tax because that means there is more money in the system. The obverse view is that there will be more money in the system, not if taxpayers pay more tax into it but if, there is less waste from public sector organisations. I forget the detail but as part of the open data commitment public sector organisations have to publically provide detail on all purchases over £500. It would be quite easy for a campaign sponsored by ‘interested, law-abiding citizens’ to scrape something together that has how much something cost, how much cheaper you could buy it for elsewhere, and the location. So walking around a town would be like walking through an Ikea catalogue of government waste, e.g., this pack of lightbulbs was £75!
