Design Struggles

This volume offers an intersectional account of design's history and of the debates that surround it, drawing on feminist, decolonial, anti-racist, activist, non-Western and Indigenous viewpoints. It weighs how design has contributed to social, political and environmental problems, both in earlier periods and today, and how it has helped keep them in place.

Its central aim is to turn the discipline against its own grain. It questions Western assumptions about what design is and calls for situated, decolonial and queer-feminist ways for designers to scrutinise their own field. The essays draw on social and cultural theory, design history, activism, sociology, anthropology, and critical and political studies, and they examine design through the overlapping lenses of gender, culture, ethnicity and class.

Contributors include Claudia Mareis, Nina Paim, Danah Abdulla, Tanveer Ahmed, Zoy Anastassakis, Brave New Alps, Johannes Bruder, Cheryl Buckley, Sria Chatterjee, Alison J. Clarke, common-interest, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Decolonising Design, Bianca Elzenbaumer, Arturo Escobar, Kjetil Fallan, Griselda Flesler, Paola De Martin, Ramia Mazée, Tania Messell, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Rebecca Ross, Nan O'Sullivan and Mia Charlene White.