Queerness challenges simple narratives and universal truths. What happens when you apply it to a discipline that seeks to build a clear, single source of truth?
Queer Technologies | Are.na Editorial
Artworks exploring the nexus of queerness, the body, and technology
Southland Institute
Through engaging questions of how approaches of progressive, critical, queer, and antiracist pedagogical traditions might be applied to interdisciplinary programming in typography, graphic design, and critical art-making, we are working to assemble a growing toolkit of pedagogies -- all of which are intended to be used, shared, recombined, interpreted, and questioned -- as part of the perpetual project of exploring approaches to sharing and transmitting knowledge.
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
Weird Studies
Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel host a series of conversations on art and philosophy, dwelling on ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call "reality."
Welcome to the Relational Design Lab | LX Cast | 19 comments
Today I am VERY excited to share with all of you about my new home, Relational Design Lab! This R&D studio brings together a number of projects and will, I hope, grow to encompass many more. I imagine this lab as a gathering place for curious people who want to think about systems, and not in the typical mechanistic way they are described and implemented in technology. Instead, we'll feel into living systems, fractal ways of being, where the how is as important as the what. Over time, I hope the Lab will be a home or a waypoint for designers, researchers, community organizations, artists, storytellers, and technologists to explore togetherness together. Our 'theory of change' focuses on paradigm shift. Big change takes practice and possibility. Paradoxically, paradigm shift is a result of many small changes and repetitions in our behaviour and belief systems. We embrace emergence, mutual support, collective practice, and storytelling. One thing feels pretty clear, we need technology that is designed in solidarity with mutual care, does not depend on the whims of big corporations or its surveillance, and is joyful to use. To live in this reality, we also need to consider how business, funding, governance, scale, and context affect our work. We need embodied ways of knowing and sharing knowledge alongside our technical reasoning. And we need to face the reality of the consequences of our actions and those of our ancestors. This is not a project that aims to solve all the world's problems, but instead, to nurture the capacity for doing things together. We support and practice responding with curiosity and care, not with answers or attachment to ideals that no longer make sense amid collapsing systems. We are not "hiring" for this project now but there are many ways to get involved and would welcome opportunities to collaborate. Some of the projects we're holding include Folk Tech, Spacious, SEED Founding, and Relational Source License. We're also developing a very cool workshop process to help other organizations explore relational design through a community-driven futurism process. As ecosystem supporters, we are developing relationships with many aligned groups and projects as well. There will be more communications coming! If this all sounds like something you would like to support, contribute to, keep track of, or develop relationship with, for now you can subscribe to our calendar here https://lnkd.in/gPRFW7zC and message me directly! | 19 comments on LinkedIn
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.
Design Harder by Erik Carter / Interactive Version
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.
Home
Inclusive LGBTQ+ sexual and reproductive health info, stories and services — created by and for our communities at Word on the Sheets.
Home
Inclusive LGBTQ+ sexual and reproductive health info, stories and services — created by and for our communities at Word on the Sheets.
Relationship Design
Peter McGraw sits with Jessalyn Dean to discuss relationship design. Tune in as they challenge societal norms and craft connections beyond convention.
Barefoot Developers
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology. Reading time: ~2 minute read | Published: Mar 17, 2025 | Updated: Oct 4, 2026
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.
Disability Dongle
Disability Dongles are contemporary fairy tales that appeal to the abled imagination by presenting a heroic designer-protagonist whose prototype provides a techno-utopian (re)solution to the design problem. Disability Dongle rhetoric instills in students the value of a quick fix over structural change, thus preventing them from seeking out, participating in, and contributing to existing inquiry. By labeling these material-discursive phenomena—the designed artifacts and the discourse through which their meaning is constituted—we work to shift the focus from their misguided concern about our bodies to their under-analyzed intentions and ambitions.
