Design activism in South Africa : design interventions as invented spaces to encourage activist citizenship

Abstract

Design as a vehicle for social and political intervention is not a recent invention. There are many historical precedents of design interventions as reform or resistance, specifically during times of social unrest and economic instability. The call for design reform by the likes of William Morris at the turn of the twentieth century and later Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek serve as important milestones in this regard.1 Similarly, antidesign movements in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, Ken Garland’s First Things First manifesto, and the work of Adbusters in the 1990s speak to the notion of design as advocacy. Moreover, since the so-called reflective turn in design from the 1980s, the discipline has witnessed a broader conceptualization. No longer defined solely as a material practice that results from rational problem-solving activities, design’s political power is being harnessed more intentionally to lead sustainable social change. The implication for designers is that they are not concerned merely with the functional and aesthetic sensibility of their work when innovating solutions but are increasingly concerned with the relationships and interactions of their design outcomes in the broader social, economic, ecological, and political contexts in which they exist. This stance highlights design as a situated practice in the real world, which in turn emphasizes design’s particular and probable nature that lends itself to tackling wicked problems in more relevant and appropriate ways.