Unfolding the political capacities of design

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to explore some of the ways in which design can matter politically. More specifically, we want to explore the capacity of design to reorganize what counts as political in our everyday lives. The usual way to explore this question has been to focus on what we would like to call the “enfolding capacities” of design. That is, the capacity of design to inscribe, congeal, or hardwire different political programs and power relations into materials, spaces, and bodies. As a result of this focus, most discussions about the politics of design have typically oscillated between two extreme and seemingly irreconcilable groups: the apologists, who see design and its enfolding capacities as a powerful tool to engineer social, cultural, or economic change; and the critics, who see these enfolding capacities as an insidious “ruse of Power” through which different forms of coercion and domination are silently exerted. In this chapter, we would like to explore an alternative way of thinking about how design can matter politically. To do so, we will focus on a different, and largely ignored, set of capacities, what we would like to call the “unfolding capacities” of design. By “unfolding,” we refer here to the capacity of design to propose and generate new entities and relations. In shifting our attention to unfolding, we aim to open a new way of exploring the political valence of design, one that revolves around its ability, not to prescribe and hardwire politics into bodies, spaces, or material, but to broaden the range of bodies, spaces, and material that constitute the cosmos of the political. This shift, we argue, opens not only a new way of thinking about design but also, and much more importantly, a different way of practicing design as a form of cosmopolitics.