design activism

Is it something about October? Or is activism really taking off in the design community?

Architectural Record offers a special issue on socially responsible design for October 2008,

In this series I’ve tried to highlight a range of ethical issues that underpin design activism. At the start I referred you to my colleague, Tim Jordan. He says that whatever activist do, their underlying motivation is a sense of what is morally better than the status quo. Often activists even put forward a vision […]

In the past couple of days I’ve come across two new publications on the theme of design activism, and interestingly one comes from a product design perspective, Design for Social Impact, (namely IDEO with the Rockefeller Foundation) and the other comes from the architecture perspective, Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism (Metropolis books by way of […]

In previous posts in this series I’ve dealt with the ethics underlying design activism in terms of professional ethics and the ethics of production (labor, environment, consumer). In this post I’m looking at ethical issues associated with vulnerable populations. Since I’ve argued in part 1 that activism, for my purposes, typically results from an ethical […]