The Festival of New

What does social and political work look like today? Arturo Escobar’s recent book, Designs for the Pluriverse, and Bruno Latour’s talk “A cautious Prometheus” both point to a form of nonfoundational politics in an unexpected place: design. This seems to be a surprising diagnosis. To most social scientists, design hardly seems an appropriate practice in which to locate a form of politics for pluralistic and pluriversal non-modernist politics. After all, critics have long lamented design’s lack of criticality, its excessive emphasis on problem-orientation over more far-reaching social and political goals, and its (inadvertent) reproduction of social divisions. And yet, we live in an age where designers are actively participating in political movements for social justice and against climate change. They work in government and on public issues, passionately organizing concerned publics and conducting participatory forums, often explicitly including underserved or historically marginalized groups. In light of these divergent accounts, what are we to make of the ways in which designers have begun to shape the political?

While it has become commonplace to question the role of academic social research in actualizing political transformations, design presents an entirely different challenge to the way social scientific work has historically functioned. In its focus on problem articulation, design has long suggested that knowledge division along traditional disciplinary lines, in the natural as well as the social sciences cannot address the complex wicked problems of our age. Is social scientific and design research incommensurable or can these two spheres benefit from each other’s methods and approaches?

In this event, we will explore the process and goal of research in design and the social sciences. Bringing designers into conversation with social scientists, this discussion aims to shed light on what it means to do critical research in an age in which the problems toward which we turn our analytical eye habitually spill over the boundaries we set for ourselves and which are set for us in our professional practices.