A movement practice: eco-social design in grounded context

Amidst exciting discussions of the emergent eco-social design discipline and its radical possibilities, we must acknowledge an equally radical truth: design as a field and as a profession is still overwhelmingly determined by capitalist social relations of production, and most designers are not entirely free to choose the briefs they are paid for. It will take a wholehearted engagement with this challenge to unleash our power to transform.

As design professionals, the overwhelming number of us are wage-labourers : we sell our labour time in exchange for money which we then exchange for commodities to meet our needs: our clothes, food, housing, health, energy. Our employers and funders hold the purse strings and decide what kinds of briefs we can work on for a wage, and other workers’ bosses and company owners decide what kinds of commodities they can produce for their wages.

The effect of working and designing under wage-labour can be summarised in the concept of alienation. In ourselves, we experience it as dissociation, disengagement, and disorientation. We observe this in others as apathy and hopelessness. In the ‘creative industries,’ alienation separates art from design, politics from practice, and democracy from production.

Over the decades and centuries, in the culture at large and in our conceptualising of design, alienation has become deeply ingrained, folded into the ways we think, relate and act. A global history of dispossession, empire-building and slavery leading to the invention of wage-labour has intergenerationally hazed us into compliance. Our radical observations about the crises and injustices we see, and our ambitions to resolve them, are systematically revised, defanged and reduced down when met with the limits of what capital will be set aside for us. The job market, conferences and funding bodies all tell us: ‘be realistic.’ We settle for what we can get, and a split occurs between what challenges are acceptable, and which remain unspoken of.

Here we all are, in a situation of constructed scarcity, unable to freely choose what to work on, unable to freely meet our needs. Silvio Lorusso summarises the situation well in his book, What Design Can’t Do :

This is the tragic state of design: seeing the field but not being able to modify it… [D]esigners might exert a certain influence over the design but they generally have little or no control over the plan…

In other words, wage-labour restricts us to ‘doing the work right’ rather than doing the right work. If what makes us unfree as designers is what makes the working class (in all its wage-labouring diversity) unfree writ large then, vice-versa, whatever helps design shake itself free of wage-labour is something worth taking as a goal of eco-social design practice to enable. What we are advocating for is nothing less than a direct attack on the structures that make design unfree, in order that we might be free to serve other ends. An attack done alongside those already making this attack. We free others through freeing ourselves. Others assist in our freeing. As Lorusso puts it,

In order to change the plan, design cannot remain design. It has to enter the chaotic realm of agonism and antagonism. That of the plan is an "uneasy space" where action evolves into political action, be that in the form of activism, protest, revolt, etc. In other words, design needs to transubstantiate into a counter-plan, which will in turn generate new designs.

We contrast what we are advocating with two other possible approaches which bring their own fruits but are, alone, insufficient. First, a flight from capitalist relations to an imagined pure utopia, exiting the system by establishing a localised zone of autonomy: the commune in the hills, the strategic exit, secession. This move seems to be an avoidance of the issue, a desire to liberate oneself and one’s friends, or naivety as to how entrenched and unavoidable ultimate contact with capital and the state is. We also draw attention to the failure of such initiatives historically and recently to radically transform wider social relations.

A second possible approach is a retreat into pure theorising in the academy or the para-academic, the art world theory circuit. Like secession we sympathise with the impulse and understand that contemporary academia is hardly free of wage labour, but it remains at a distance from pragmatic change. What we need is material change, institutions and pragmatic action—and at scale —which will involve innovative engagement with different social movement strategies with a proven scorecard.

From our standpoint as members of the not-for-profit worker cooperative Common Knowledge, we will survey different points of the wage-labour system where we have seen collaborators and peers working, redirecting design practices developed within capitalism towards movements for liberation. First, we look at prefigurative ways of working which provide the relational basis of solidarity. Second, we advocate for collective organising in the places where we already live. Third, we point to ‘in and against’ tactics, such as cooperatives which remove the boss to deepen democracy and simplify the antagonism between labour and capital. Finally, we look at how eco-social design practice can work in service of movement ecologies and their growth. In all these ways, designers’ engagement with liberating movements is reciprocal.

Prefigurative practice within traditional structures

At work and university, at home and in meetings, wage-labour places us in relationships driven by boss/worker and adult/infant dynamics. In the process of social education, we come to subconsciously mimic these power relationships with our colleagues, friends and neighbours. We need not be complicit, and indeed, a truly mature eco-social design practice involves a renegotiation of the designer’s power position in relation to the constituency she serves.

Reclaiming our power to act in solidarity—not charity—is a practice that can begin even in the un-organised contemporary workplace. In her book Going Horizontal , Samantha Slade offers some principles of non-hierarchical practice: acting autonomously and responsibly, with self-clarified purpose, a commitment to deepening relationships, learning and development, democratic but also pragmatic decision making, defaulting to transparency about resources and power, and democratic facilitation that genuinely meets the needs of the group. Practising a non-hierarchical approach to work begins to reshape our default ways of relating to others, whatever our context.

However, individual action is just a first step. Without an analysis of underlying power relations that structure our workplaces and contexts, this practice can lead to a dead end. In the ‘design industry,’ we find ourselves separated from other strata of the workers. In our professionalisation as designers, we are privileged with the wage, dignity and respectability of white-collar status that is not extended to others that we rely on for venue maintenance, food, construction, tech, raw materials and energy.

Across global supply chains of production, populations are allocated to tiers of work subject to systems of discriminant identification like nationalisation, racialisation, gendering, sexualisation, ableism and ageism, amongst myriad others. We cannot take individual responsibility for these global systems, but developing our power analysis allows us to identify the precarities we share and their roots, progressively more and more radical, to seek security beyond the current state of affairs. This practice requires commitment to political self-education. It leads us beyond the logic of design saviourship and acts of charity encouraged by wage-labour, towards the question of shared needs, solidarity-building and collective action.

Identifying shared needs and building collective power

Identifying shared vulnerabilities and analysing power relations offers us pathways towards collective organising. Amongst others, two mutually reinforcing organisational forms available to us offer effective means to dismantle unjust structures: unions and cooperatives.

Unions

As with all other industries, creative work is increasingly casualised, atomised and precarious. Finding oneself a good job cannot on its own address this industry- and society-wide problem. Instead, we can look to unionisation. Beginning with our own workplaces, studios and departments, we can invite our peers to discuss ways we can support each other, educate ourselves on our rights, call out exploitative practices and campaign for better working conditions. Establishing union branches affords us more legal rights and organising with other workplace branches allows us to campaign and collectively bargain across whole sectors.

Job loss represents a real vulnerability because living is costly. Rent is many workers’ single biggest expense, and high rent and precarious work represent two sides of the same wage-labour coin. We are more and more reliant on month-to-month income, which swings the balance of power towards management and away from workers and our need for good conditions, free expression and democratic decision making. Tenant unions are powerful vehicles for social change that collectivise the power of renters against landlords to negotiate fairer housing policy, regulations and rent caps. Unionising at home empowers us as workers in the workplace.

In the history of collective organising in social reproduction (the life after work, that prepares you to work again) there have been debtor unions, community unions, student unions and many others. Eco-social designers ought to be proactive in supporting their peers to unionise in all of these ways and more, so that they are empowered by relations of solidarity to design more freely and boldly.

Cooperatives and commons

Another way to prefigure different ways of working outside of traditional wage-labour structures is to set up or join a worker cooperative. Common Knowledge is a worker cooperative because we think that how we work, support ourselves and collaborate with each other hugely impacts what we make.

Cooperatives are autonomous self-help initiatives, in which people unite voluntarily to meet their individual and common needs. In cooperatives, autonomy and interdependence are two sides of the same coin — you help others to help yourself. This isn’t about erasing the individual or putting the collective before the individual, but about recognising how working with others can be a means to benefit oneself. Individual freedom is realised through mutual interdependence. Cooperatives also demonstrate the logic of commoning: returning ownership to the collective from where, historically, it came.

Much of the power of cooperatives comes from their fractal nature, reflected in the sixth principle: ‘cooperation between cooperatives’. We aren’t just practising solidarity and cooperation between members of our own co-op, we are actively building relationships with other co-ops in our network: passing on work, sharing resources, initiating action learning groups and operating strategically together through federations like workers.coop.

However, cooperatives are not inherently radical. While they are a means of enjoying more economic freedoms on a personal level, the risk is that workers who are part of cooperatives stop organising for collective liberation because their own immediate needs have been met. Cooperatives must keep in sight the wider horizon of collective freedom. This means facing outwards, and opening cooperatives to movement ecologies.

Ecologies of collective power

From housing to food to energy to transportation: we can organise to meet all of our needs on the basis of solidarity not charity, united in cooperation and common ownership. These webs of solidarity can grow in scale, depth and complexity to replace contemporary capitalist relations, and can ease our sense of precarity, but we will need new ideas to replace the logics and stories of scarcity and markets we are leaving behind.

Instead, we can think of in ecological terms—the notion of a movement ecology. Within this ecology, different organisations and institutions perform different roles, different niches and approaches on how to get free and meet our needs. These efforts are complementary, feeding one another, while not dominating, or trying to do everything. Thinking about movements in ecological terms allows us to make deliberate interventions in a field of complexity.

Take unions and cooperatives as species in the ecology. Unions allow us as workers to face our managers and bosses together, providing a vehicle to practise the collective logic that ‘an injury to one is an injury to all.’ Cooperatives take the possibility of collective action several steps further, removing the boss and allowing us to practise the logic of collective control and ownership, realising democracy within the workplace and becoming familiar with this new way of relating to our livelihoods and shared resources.

Whilst unions and cooperatives take root in individual workplaces, they can proliferate to encompass whole supply chains, industries and sectors, popularising the practice of these relational logics. Transitioning to an economy built upon unionised and cooperative labour would represent a critical point of departure: we can shift the dominant social logic of scarcity and boss tactics to a therapeutic logic ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ These material shifts and logical shifts allow space for new approaches to livelihood, a prospect that warrants deeper engagement from the eco-social design field: how can we understand our practice in a social movement ecological context, where strategic investment of our discipline’s attention can transform society and our practice together?

This is the prefigurative principle which asks us to consider how we can intervene now in a way that can outlast the struggle to seed the new world. Recently Common Knowledge participated in a Scottish movement infrastructure forum with representatives from social centres, kitchens, legal aid and advice organisations, medical aid, educators, labour unions and other movement actors. These organisations emerged across many cycles of struggle and all mutually support one another in an ecology that facilitates new campaigns and collectives to emerge. We support these organisations with their digital tools and infrastructure and accompanying organisational methodologies, looking for patterns and shared infrastructural needs.

One valuable exercise you could repeat is to imagine a near future where the government, its communication infrastructure and services have collapsed: can we make a map of how we would meet our needs, with the movement infrastructure and resources we have right now? What gaps and siloes do we notice in the ecology and what interventions could resolve them?

Designers’ role within movement ecologies

In Joyful Militancy , carla bergman and Nick Montgomery suggest that

We always begin in the middle: amid our situations, in our neighborhoods, with our own penchants, habits, loves, complicities, and connections. There is no individual that comes before the dense network of relations in which we’re embedded.

Examine where you stand: what is your living situation? What do you struggle with in everyday life? Do your friends, colleagues and neighbours struggle with the same problems? What organisations exist nearby? Turn up in these spaces and get involved with what they’re doing, setting aside your professional identity for the moment.

As you immerse yourself, you might observe unmet needs that you could apply a design lens to. Where can we find inspiration from other people, places and times who are striving in the same direction? Design at its best is a collaborative, propositional and iterative practice—no different than the practice of movement-building. We listen to people, ask questions and respond, making sketches and prototypes that help them reflect and make decisions. These characteristics can be immediately useful to movements, but only once we shift our mindset around the role of the designer: from architect to gardener, from expert to facilitator, from design strategy to emergent strategy.

In Composers as Gardeners , Brian Eno writes about shifting our creative approach from that of an architect to that of a gardener. As designers, we tend towards the “architect” approach, preferring to strategize and make blueprints before acting. We need to relinquish this illusion of control and instead design in response to emergent needs, within complex and unpredictable circumstances. Part of this is about letting go of the idea of designer as expert and instead seeing ourselves as facilitators, as suggested in the Design Justice principles .

Design can be most effective as a tool for building political power when it facilitates people to come together, build relationships with others and develop their own personal and collective power. This approach is more about creating the conditions for something to emerge than it is about controlling an outcome. This mindset shift opens us up to a fluid collaboration between designers and movement actors, in part because the designer is now themselves part of the movements, an equal participant and a co-owner. The designer moves like “water in water” . Through observation and listening, you can start to shape your own design briefs based on movement needs, starting from within the movement itself rather than replicating the same separation between designer and client or designer and user. This is a shared struggle for liberation, not a design brief with a neat solution to be found.

Establishing new design processes and infrastructures for shared liberation

As well as working individually in service to movement needs, designers can initiate their own collectives and projects that respond to movement needs in creative and joyful ways. This is about applying design methodologies to processes as much as to the outcomes themselves.

One example of this is Autonomous Design Group , a design collective that creates open source art that can be printed by anyone and pasted up in the street in order to propagate revolutionary ideas as widely as possible. Their posters and stickers communicate radical ideas in a simple and accessible way, using joyful, colourful aesthetics to appeal to a broad audience.

Another is the People’s Prop Department , a collective that creates large-scale mannequins, signs, banners and other creative outputs for left-wing political organisations to use at protests, strikes and celebrations. They make these pieces in a shared workshop in the centre of London, facilitating movement needs through establishing shared infrastructure and access to tools.

There is a long history of community printers and workshops enabling people to access the design tools needed to spread their message quickly and cheaply, like The See Red Women's Workshop , a radical feminist collective that produced screen-printed posters critiquing patriarchal structures, and Atelier Populaire, a printmaking workshop that emerged during the May 1968 protests to enable the mass production and distribution of radical messages throughout Paris. A contemporary example of this in London is Rabbits Road Press , which provides printing infrastructure and training on how to use the printers so that people can create materials themselves. This is design in service of movements, by way of reconnecting people with their own agency and creative power.

Our friends at Migrants in Culture do this kind of agency-building well. Not only do they take visual notes at organising meetings, conferences and protests, they also train organisers and cultural workers in these creative skills so that they can use them in their own organising work. We can also think of May Day Rooms’ archival collection of political ephemera and their efforts to activate this archive through creative and participatory workshops and publishing. They are not only preserving the collective memory of movements, but also facilitating people to learn from and engage with the ideas and strategies within.

Meeting ambition with practise

Eco-social transformation is a critical goal, global and historic in its remit. Its design practice must be equally bold if we are to meet the scale of the challenge. The more we look, the more we see how we, our livelihoods and our crises are bound up. Our challenge is to release ourselves from the confines of professional worker identity to consider how we are, primarily, precarious constituents ourselves—and then refocus our design practice on this more intimate eco-social truth, asking: how can we get free, together?

Commonplace workplace taboos—on discussing salaries, budgets and resources—must be overcome, and we can challenge ambiguous or downright threatening organisational policy that, for example, restricts our calls for a free Palestine and the withdrawal of support for genocide. We can collectively organise as workers to deter individual reprisals by management, and we can encourage our peers to do so in other workplaces to build powerful alliances. We can collectively organise security against other threats and common access to resources.

We can take an ecological view of all of these campaigns, asking: what do we have, what needs are going unmet? As eco-social designers, we can apply our practice to these challenges and cross-pollinate interventions, to cultivate broader, deeper and larger-scale movements for liberation, starting with our feet firmly resting on the ground.