Readers of this volume should be prepared to confront sets of provocative argument, polemic and advocacy discussed extensively in the form of three separate yet interrelated essays by scholars of design philosophy, history and education: Clive Dilnot, Tony Fry and Susan Stewart. Published as the first book in Bloomsbury’s series Design, Histories, Futures, the volume appears as a framework for the other titles to come. It is challenging and dense, but ultimately a forceful and inspiringly articulated set of essays arguing that design as a discipline, practice and discourse has neglected what history means in general and exploring how history is made and remade by design in particular. While differing in the politics of their entry into the discussion of history and design, all three authors share the same ontological ground: that design and designing are embedded in history, and direct possibilities of making history within the past, present and future.

This thesis is an interrogation of the contemporary politics of movement and more specifically, migration politics from the perspective of the agency of design and designing. At the core of this thesis lies a series of arguments which invite design researchers and migration scholars to rethink the ways they work with their practices: that states, in order to make effective their abstract notions of borders, nations, citizenship, legal protection and rights are in dire need of what this thesis coins as material articulations. The way these notions are presented to us is seldom associated with artefacts and artefactual relations. It is of importance therefore, as this thesis argues, to speak of such material articulations as acts of designing. To examine the politics of movement and migration politics from such a perspective, this thesis focuses on practices that shape specific material articulations such as passports, camps and borders. At the same time, it discusses the practices that emerge from these articulations. By doing this, it follows the politics that shape these seemingly mundane artefacts and relations as well as the politics that emerge from them. Consequently, it argues that design and politics cannot be discussed and worked on as two separate fields of knowledge but rather as interconnected fields, as design-politics. This thesis unpacks this claim by focusing specifically on the lived experiences and struggles of asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants as well as rearticulating some of the artefacts and artefactual relations involved in the politics of movement and migration.

This paper is a theoretical attempt to formulate an ontological understanding of design as a set of articulations and modes of acting that manipulate the materiality of the world in order to re-direct and re-orient the possible ways of inhabiting, accessing and shaping the world. Such an understanding puts forward a way of approaching the question of politics in, of and for design that design and politics should be understood as a twofold embedded in one environment. This then has consequences both for design and for politics. I argue that these consequences can be understood better through unfolding the political forms made possible by design as well as the material and designed forms that have become necessary given today’s political situation. By drawing on a series of examples, I will argue how design is already a political form and how politics is a form of material articulation. Such an understanding then gives shape to the recognition of the activities and forces that already exist in the world and sketches out possibilities of acting upon that recognition.

The debate around the notion of “Experience Design” is diverse. Although there are many definitions describing the notion, many of which are unclear or ambiguous, it stands beyond doubt that experience design can add value not only in economic terms but also in social aspects of design. Experience design increases the power of design to influence people who engage with its manifestations in society at more profound levels, through psychological, cultural and sociological ways. Because of this, one can ask oneself whether experience design can enable a new kind of design activism which informs society and creates links between people, values and morality of status quo over time, in a more durable way? Can we give people more possibilities to be active players in society beyond being mere consumers by means of experience design as ‘experience of activity’? I will analyse experience design and design activism as such, as well as ways in which experience design can be applied to design activism and aid it in playing its critical role in society more effectively. Through this analysis I will give some examples to assess whether experience design can play a recuperative role in the field of design activism. I will introduce the notion of “experience design as an activity” which depicts how experience design can do this and which future opportunities and limitations there are in this respect.

Practice-based researchers in the design field usually adopt anthropological methods for ‘observing’ or ‘studying’ the field in order to come up with some ‘design solutions’ for a provocative co-designing of socio-political spaces. Usually such approaches move in the direction of legitimization of the ‘design knowledge’. What designers in socio-political action research do is an act of translation, which in various stages of the action gets different shapes (e.g. between their own knowledge and participants’ knowledge). Translation always tries to fill the cracks between an unknown space and a known one. Therefore translation becomes a functional and hierarchical bridge for those who do not know the origin’s language. But such a bridge has many cracks, which in a ‘good translation’ are not visible to readers but only to the translator. Therefore the translator, by hiding these cracks, never allows readers to engage in the work. However these cracks are fundamentally important for understanding the positioning and self-reflexivity occurring during the research. This paper draws a retrospective reflection upon the process of collaboration with women rights activists in Iran and Sweden. By adopting a new politics of translation called ‘free translation’ 5, I argue that action research in the design field needs such a resituational method for formulating actions in other contexts, where the first language is not familiar with the second, third and so on. A free translation brings up questions of ‘qualification’, ‘power’ and ‘legitimization’ and opens a space for more engagement by intensifying the cracks in disciplines, knowledge and contexts.

This presentation is an explorative study on how materiality in design becomes the distinctive aspect of design practice compare to artistic practice in politically engaged creative actions. The presentation takes a short historical perspective on the notion of materiality in design, aiming to unfold how materiality itself can change the practice and definition of design. By looking to recent critical practices within design discourse, I examine the importance of materiality in critical practices in design as a distinction to critical artistic practices. To this end, the paper takes two examples of critical practice; one within design field and the other known as artistic work both performing on the subject of “undocumentedness.” Therefore the paper tries to examine how much design is different from art in politically engaged works and particularly on works related to undocumented immigrants. Finally it argues that materiality of design generates new forms of action-interaction in coming communities.

In July 2013, Malmö, Sweden, a group of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants initiated a march from Malmö to Stockholm called Asylstafetten. The marchers demanded that their stories of migration, asylum and undocumentedness be heard and transferred into action. Many activities were organised for the duration of the 34 day-long march including the crafting workshops. Through essays and conversations with participants of the march, this publication portrays multiple narratives about the workshops; the spaces they occupied, the practices and ideas they generated as well as their political potential to come. More Info: This text is part of a collaborative book project inspired by a series of crafting workshops held during Asylstafetten - a 34 day-long walking march from Malmö to Stockholm, Sweden during Summer 2013.

The one who stands by the door might invite us to get in and take refuge, but also her or his appearance by the door declares that s/he owns the house and can reject or expel us at any moment. Today States do not stand only at their own made territories and borders to welcome or reject our call for refuge, but they have also gained the power to “welcome” us in the place from where we flee. If hospitality, or in fact “hostipitality” as Derrida would say, has become a challenge for the so-called hosting country, now the host has decided to externalize it, to remove it from its own territory and welcome rejected unaccompanied asylum seeking minors back in their own country – in this case Afghanistan. In this presentation we would like to discuss how the creation of a welcome center in Afghanistan becomes possible and acceptable. We argue that this is yet another attempt by the Swedish authorities to enable deportation of children in a “humanitarian” way and to reduce the number of unaccompanied minors in Sweden. In the early 2000s in Sweden, we were given a portrayed image of asylum seeking parents whom in order to get a residence permit and to avoid deportation “poisoned their children and faked a condition of apathy”. In 2011 we saw the Migration Board commissioning a special issue of Bamse, the famous children’s comic strip, to depict deportation as a good and happy ending of the story. From our experiences of meeting Afghan unaccompanied minors through our engagement in an asylum seekers’ rights activist group, we have also witnessed the use of age assessments by the Migration Board as a way of making minors “adult enough” for deportation. The image of apathetic children faking their condition, the use of Bamse, age assessments and welcome centers is all part of an apparatus where the Rights of the Child can be easily violated without violating them.

Addressing social issues and operating in the public realm, contemporary design engages with the problematics of relating to more diverse people, groups and ‘others’ than those traditionally served by design. Tracing some related concerns within the early Participatory Design movements, we query approaches based on ‘consensus’ and explore an alternative based on ‘dissensus’, as theorized within political philosophy. To discuss critical-political aspects of participation in design, dissensus is a lens applied retrospectively to reflect on an example of our own practice-based research. Carried out with groups of women activists in Iran and Sweden, ‘Forms of Resistance’ was a project in which a design researcher engaged a series of socio-material activities to recognize the experiences and subjectivities of those otherwise excluded from a prevailing political order. Alternative communication and aesthetic practices were developed in response to issues of equity, power and difference within and across research situations and sites, which are discussed in relation to concepts of ‘indisciplinarity’ and ‘free translation’. This paper discusses alternative approaches to framing and staging participation in design, elucidating a series of terms and concepts relevant to social and critical practices of design and design research.

This text articulates doubt over design discourses and practices. This doubt comes from personal experiences of two former Master students in the 'Experience Design' program at Konstfack University College of Arts, Craft and Design in Stockholm, Sweden. Both graduated in the spring of 2011 from the two-year program, one coming from a background of design and visual arts and the other from design research. They shared interest in thinking and doing design differently. Their doubt was based on a gradual understanding of how design education and its practice imposes and reproduces a homogeneous and dominant form of action, which they came to see as being complicit with the dominant form of politics in our societies: the 'politics of fear.' The paper argues how and why the politics of fear functions in design practice and education. It does this via an auto-ethnographical text and the particular case of designing a 'better death', a design course on the 'aesthetics of dying' focused on the last days in a palliative care center. The authors question why design education teaches designers to perpetuate their own habits, and develop an inability to accept what is foreign and why in seeking to solve problems it imposes itself on the other, instead of opening to alternative forms of action and life.

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