DESIGN POLITICS BEYOND
THE MICROPOLITICAL

Poststructuralism drew attention to the political

- the more personal and material discourses in
which new political possibilities were fostered -
as opposed to formal realm of politics - electoral
politics and a parliamentary politicians [9]. This
focus opened the way to seeing how design
was political, concreting power relations into
everyday environments and practices, but also
affording niches for experimenting with new
ways of living and working [10]. On this side of
Brexit and Trump, etc, it feels like in attending
to the political, there was an attending away
from politics. There was, sometimes, amistaken
assumption that democratic systems, though
flawed, were pretty inviolable and sonot needing
focused defending; or that democratic systems
were eroding in the postmodern condition and,
as a result, the only games left to the play were
micro-political ones.

Formal politics has now reasserted itself, as
the active threatening of democracy. Those
democratically supported forms of anti-
democracyare strengthened bya range of racisms
and Nazism on the one hand, and corporate
capitalism on the other. The size and force of
the latter and the extreme danger of the former
demand responses that do not prevaricate. It is
no longer acceptable to say “We do not have to
share exactly the same idea of what democracy
is: to defend it as a core value, it is enough to
recognize the strong convergence between
democracy and design” [11]. The liberal pluralist
version of democracies, fearing that they
might appear sometimes undemocratic, have
allowed the return of the worst of the project of
modernity. But democracy can only, and so must,
be defended undemocratically, by design. And
those designs need to be informed by strong,
clear visions of what they stand for. Designers
standing up for Democracy must take the form
of formal politics, not just (micro)political social
innovations. Designers must strongly articulate
policies that seek to exclude anti-democratic
expressions, whether racist or capitalist.

REFERENCES

{l| Fry, Tony. (2010) Design as Politics. Berg.|°|
Martin, Roger. (2011) Fixing the Game: Bubbles
crashes, and what capitalism can learn from the
NFL.Harvard Business Press.|°| Ehn, Pelle. (1988)
Work-oriented Design of Computer Artifacts. Arbet-
slivscentrum.|4| Bulajewski, Mike. (2013) Squot;The
Agile Labor Union.Squot; West Space Journal 2.|5|
Palmas, Karl, and Otto von Busch. (2015) Squot ;Qua-
si-Quisling: Ca-design and the Assembly of Callab-
orateurs Squot; CoDesign 11, no. 3-4: 236-249. |5|
Fuller, Steve. Squot ;Brexit as the unlikely leading
edge of the anti-expert revolution.Squot; European
Management Journal 36, no. 5 (2017): 576-580. |7|
Callon, Michel. (2009) Acting in an Uncertain World:
An essay on Technological Democracy. MITPress. |3|
Latour, Bruna. (2004) Squot;Why has critique run
out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of
concern .Squot; Critical inquiry 30, no. 2: 226-248.
{9| Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nan-
cy. (1997) Retreating the Political. Routledge. | 10|
Marres, Noortje. (2016) Material Participation:
Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics.
Springer.||1| “Open Letter to the Design Commu-
nity: Stand Up For Democracy.” Democracy and De-
sign Platform, www.democracy-design.org/open-let-
ter-stand-up-democracy/. Kenzidor, Sarah (2016)

“Trump and Putin: The Worst Case Scenario” QZ, Decem-

ber 23, 2016: https://qz.com/8#1436/donald-trump-
nuclear-weapons- putin-and- trump-release- state-
ments-that-hint- at-increased- nuclear-armament/
{1°| Latour, Bruno. (1990) Squot: Technology is So-
ciety made Durable .Squot; The Sociological Review
38, no.l_suppl: 103-131.| 13) Scarry, Elaine. (2014)
Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing between Democracy
and Doom. WW Norton Samp ;Company .

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