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.

Regeringen föreslår nio åtgärder för att hitta och utvisa papperslösa. Det kommer att slå hårt och främst gå ut över redan svaga och jagade människor. Vi uppmanar därför regeringen att ta tillbaka åtgärderna, skriver 43 forskare.

While mundane for the privileged few, passports, as discussed in the first part of this paper (DPP vol. 13, no. 2), are rather strong, thick and extensive devices of articulating, partitioning and producing possibilities of access, movement and inhabitations in the world. They have emerged from a certain intersection of social and material forces and continue to produce and provide new environments of power relations. It was proposed that these articulations are better to be renamed as passporting, which recognizes the regimes of practices involved in such environments beyond the single artifact of passport. Part II takes much further this analysis through proposing four lines of reading the passporting regime: materialities; sensibilities; part-taking; and translating. These lines, which point to the ontological qualities of passporting, can also be enacted for intervening into the passporting regime which articulates to the current hegemonic order of mobility. I trace such possible interventions in the acts of forgery of passports. Forgery uses, enables, dissents and rearticulates these very four lines of the passporting regime in other directions than the ones imagined by their initial design. By discussing the practices of passport forgery in relation to the passporting regime, this article offers a material and critical understanding of the notions of citizenship and nationality.

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 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.

In this paper, passports are investigated as socio-technical artifacts with the capacity of interrogating the relation between design and politics. While they might appear as ‘trivial’ objects for some, passports tend to speak to the current political regime of mobility and more importantly immobility that produces refugee populations and undocumented migrants waiting in camps, transit zones or precarious clandestinity for several months and years. This inquiry in two parts aims to interrogate the artifacts of passport and its artifactual relations and practices – which I call passporting – in relation to the ways in which mobilities and immobilities are organized, controlled, regulated and shaped. Part I presents three interrelated ways of looking at passports: first, the historicity of passports and the ways in which technologies and material practices merge with the political, social and economic interests of specific times and spaces; second, the ways passports function and perform in a network of relations and ecologies which produce continuity as well as uncertainty with different effects, forms and scales in different environments; third, how passports and bodies change their positions constantly in the world in which the difficulties and uncertainties to locate either and/or become desirable space and time for manipulating and exercising power over undesired groups and individuals in local sites through a global rationale.

I juli 2013, Malmö, tog en grupp asylsökande och papperslösa migranter initiativet till en vandring från Malmö till Stockholm – Asylstafetten. Vandrarna krävde att deras berättelser om migration, asyl och papperslöshet skulle höras och transformeras till handling. Ett flertal aktiviteter organiserades under den 34-dagars långa marschen, där hantverks-workshoppar ingick. Genom texter och konversationer med deltagare i vandringen, porträtterar den här publikationen flera skildringar av dessa workshoppar; platserna de intog, utövandet och idéerna de frambringade liksom dess kommande politiska potential.

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.

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.