Read the full text of Design Harder, a book by Erik Carter, as an interactive website. Published by Book Ideas, Design Harder examines design’s cultural and ethical challenges through seven interconnected essays that reframe the discipline’s future.
Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds
"Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory by arguing for the creation of what he calls 'autonomous design'--a design practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth"--Publisher description
Difficulty is about trust and communication, not ‘hard’ vs. ‘easy’
Why game designers and players talk about difficulty very differently
On Design Thinking | Maggie Gram
By embracing “design thinking,” we attribute to design a kind of superior epistemology: a way of knowing, of “solving,” that is better than the old and local and blue-collar and municipal and unionized and customary ways. We bring in “design thinkers” — some of them designers by trade, many of them members of adjacent knowledge fields — to “empathize” with Kaiser hospital nurses, Gainesville city workers, church leaders, young mothers, and guerrilla fighters the world over.
Fundamental design principles for non-designers
By Anna 4erepawko Mészáros This one is for all the content creators out there who can’t afford to pay a professional designer, as well as for non-designers on a team where designers are always too busy to help. If you can follow these simple steps, I...
Read the Principles — Design Justice Network
Design mediates so much of our realities and has tremendous impact on our lives, yet very few of us participate in design processes. In particular, the people who are most adversely affected by design decisions — about visual culture, new technologies, the planning of our communities, or the structure of our political and economic systems — tend to have the least influence on those decisions and how they are made.
What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem | Aeon Essays
Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time
The Politics of Design: A (Not So) Global Design Manual for Visual Communication
A (Not So) Global Design Manual for Visual Communication
Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival. What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world. This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Knowledge Unlatched and the MIT Press Frank Urbanowski Memorial Fund.
Sensibilities as Knowledge in Design Research
As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.
Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological su
The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet
How Anthropic’s new tool, Claude Design, is creating overnight web-design clichés.
%20(1).jpg)
Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider
Read the free, open access editionBuy: Amazon, Bookshop, Narrow Gauge Book Co-op, UC Press
Design Justice
An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.
Design Justice
An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.