Project

Discipline

Design Thinking; Urban Planning; Governing ; Infrastructures; Smartness; Resilience; Recursive Publics; Wicked Problems; Ecology; Decolonization ; Planning

Lead
Internationale Institutionen wie die UNO versuchen sich mittels Design Thinking neu aufzustellen; infrastrukturelle Planung firmiert unter dem Begriff urbanes Design; und ökologisches Handeln wird zunehmend zu einer Frage adäquater Programmierung. Das vorliegende Projekt untersucht, inwiefern Methoden und Praktiken aus Gestaltung und Design politisches Denken und Handeln in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts beeinflusst und verändert haben und widmet sich aktuellen Formen des Regierens durch Gestaltung. Die Forschenden erweitern das Feld der Designforschung damit um eine interdisziplinäre Perspektive und beleuchten gleichzeitig die zunehmende Politisierung von Design.
Lay summary
Inhalt und Ziel des Forschungsprojekts Eine interdisziplinäre Gruppe von Forschenden der Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz (Institut für Experimentelle Design- und Medienkulturen), der Universität Basel (Fachbereich Urban Studies) und der Concordia University Montréal (Department of Sociology and Anthropology) widmet sich der Untersuchung von Designstrategien in der Gestaltung von internationalen Institutionen und Entscheidungsprozessen, in der infrastrukturellen Umgestaltung von urbanen Zentren und ländlichen Räumen, sowie im computergesteuerten Management von sozialen und ökologischen Prozessen. Zentral für das Projekt ist eine bottom-up Perspektive: anstatt von global einheitlichen Designpolitiken auszugehen, kombinieren die Forschenden Feldstudien und Archivaufenthalte in Afrika, Asien, Europa, und Nordamerika um lokal spezifische Verbindungen von Design, infrastruktureller Planung, und politischer Steuerung zu untersuchen. Ziel des Projekts ist es, ein neues Feld der interdisziplinären Designforschung zu etablieren und aktiv an gesellschaftlichen Debatten teilzunehmen. Wissenschaftlicher und gesellschaftlicher Kontext ‘Governing through Design’ verbindet Perspektiven und Methoden aus Designwissenschaft, Urban Studies, Medienwissenschaft, Anthropologie, Soziologie, Politikwissenschaft und Wissenschaftsforschung um zeitgenössische Verschränkungen von Design und Politik zu untersuchen. Das Projekt greift damit aktiv in aktuelle Debatten um Handlungsmöglichkeiten im Zeitalter des Anthropozän ein und sucht die zumeist global gedachten Lösungsansätze mit Untersuchungen lokaler Zusammenhänge zu konfrontieren.

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Last update: 14.12.2019

Natural persons

Active participation

Self-organised

Active participation

Self-organised

Communication	Title	Media	Place	Year

Title	Year

The central question of this grant is: How does design govern today? We ask what work design - as an interdisciplinary approach to solving social, political and environmental problems - has done throughout the second half of the twentieth century to transform governmentality, and how the values of design continue to define governmental strategies in the 21st century. Since the postwar period, “design” has been increasingly called upon to solve problems caused by economic restructuring, political instability, and environmental disaster. Against this background, we do not take design simply as a product-oriented discipline but suggest that through its becoming central to governmentality, it requires a wider definition today. “Governing through Design” will be the first global and interdisciplinary study of how design governs in the 21st century. Such a study requires expertise from design studies, urban studies, architectural history, media studies, cultural anthropology, political science, and science and technology studies. Our team brings these disciplinary perspectives together in order to be able to examine the interdisciplinary nature of design today. Our research consortium consists of the Institute for Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design Basel, the faculty of Urban Studies at the University of Basel and the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology at Concordia University, Montréal. In order to grasp design as an interdisciplinary phenomenon, we have identified three major trajectories through which we can observe the modalities and effects of this new governmentality from the mid-twentieth century to today. We will concentrate on three exemplary cases where design has come to govern: 1) by turning publics and the public domain recursive, 2) by rendering territories and their populations resilient, and 3) by augmenting environments with smart computational technologies. We have organized our research into three main research clusters and twelve subprojects, each cluster led by one of the PIs. Cluster A) recursive publics examines design as a site for a new kind of political practice and vice versa, where technocratic ideas of progress and the desire for a new, “non-foundational” politics are reciprocally articulated. Cluster B) resilient territories revolves around the question about how territories and their populations are reorganized around specific infrastructures, to enforce resilience on a planetary scale. Cluster C) smart environments focuses on how infrastructure, design, and computing are increasingly integrated to manage the environment and urbanization. Drawing on the concept of “global assemblages” (Ong/Collier 2005) we want to situate contemporary approaches to governing social, political, and environmental risks and uncertainties through design by assembling a set of intersectional and temporally distributed case studies, situated in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Our methods include archival research, qualitative interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and contemporary mapping techniques. In order to strengthen the interdisciplinary collaboration and explore novel ways of disseminating research, we will cooperate with a group of renowned architects and designers throughout the project. It is thus unique in producing reflexive feedback between scholarship, design research and pedagogy, and public engagement.The projected outcomes of our research will include: 1) two PhD theses, 2) individual peer-reviewed articles, 3) a co-authored publication by the PIs, postdocs and advanced researchers on the topic of the grant, 4) a concluding international conference, and 5) a web based publica-tion of the project’s results in cooperation with designers of Marshall Brown Projects, Lateral Of-fice, and M-A-D. All research outputs and publications will be published open access.