Re-Framing The Politics of Design

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Re-Framing the Politics of Design is a research, an exhibition and a book project, discussing the role of designers in triggering and contributing to collaboratively give shape to future changes that can make a better contribution to some of the most complex and timely challenges such as for instance climate change, mobility and migration. What we are increasingly experiencing is that those challenges are often the trigger for polarisations in society. The consequence of this process is that we are driving towards a society which is even more fragmented, characterised by entanglements of social and environmental injustices. In detail, the aim of this three-faced project is to explore how we can move and thus design beyond and across the current polarising debates around these complex challenges, and possibly anticipate future ones. We argue that this can be done by carefully (De la Bellacasa, 2017) paying attention to the politics of these processes, which entails designing with and for the radical interdepencies (Escobar, 2018) between the various actors and collectives (not yet) involved in it. This project thus explores how designers in their design processes for the above-mentioned challenges can more actively recognise how all those actors - included the ones that often are excluded - actually inter-depend from one another. This is explored in three chapters: the politics of care, the politics of translation and ontologising as a political attitude.