design against Design

Signal is an ongoing book series dedicated to documenting and sharing political graphics, creative projects, and cultural production of international resistance and liberation struggles. Signal digs deep through our common history to unearth this often-overlooked but essential role art and culture have played in struggles the world over. Published by PM Press.

We are striving to create design practices that center those who stand to be most adversely impacted by design decisions in design processes. We work to challenge the ways that design and designers harm Indigenous peoples, communities of color, poor and working class people, the sick and disabled, migrants, LGBTQ people, women and femmes. We use design to imagine and build the world we need to live in — one that is safe and just. We do this by producing work that is based on shared principles of design justice, by growing our international network of design practitioners and advocates, creating critical publications, and curating exhibitions.

Design Justice Network Principles

This is a living document.

Design mediates so much of our realities and has tremendous impact on our lives, yet very few of us participate in design processes. In particular, the people who are most adversely affected by design decisions — about visual culture, new technologies, the planning of our communities, or the structure of our political and economic systems — tend to have the least influence on those decisions and how they are made.

Design justice rethinks design processes, centers people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face.

1. We use design to sustain, heal, and empower our communities, as well as to seek liberation from exploitative and oppressive systems.

2. We center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes of the design process.

3. We prioritize design’s impact on the community over the intentions of the designer.

4. We view change as emergent from an accountable, accessible, and collaborative process, rather than as a point at the end of a process.

5. We see the role of the designer as a facilitator rather than an expert.

6. We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and that we all have unique and brilliant contributions to bring to a design process.

7. We share design knowledge and tools with our communities.

8. We work towards sustainable, community-led and -controlled outcomes.

9. We work towards non-exploitative solutions that reconnect us to the earth and to each other.

10. Before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level. We honor and uplift traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge and practices.

The Women’s Design + Research Unit (WD+RU) was founded in 1994 with the intent of raising awareness about women working in the field of visual communication and design education. WD+RU has never operated as a commercial studio but functions more as a collective, collaborating with students or design professionals who join the core team of Siân Cook and Teal Triggs in the realisation of self-initiated projects or responding to specific project invitations.