How Do We Want to Work Together as Socially Engaged Designers, Students and Neighbors in Neoliberal Times gathers five years of community-based design practice and an international research festival into a single, urgent reckoning with how designers work, who they serve, and what structures they reproduce.
About This Book
Since 2011, Studio Experimentelles Design at HFBK Hamburg has operated Public Design Support in St. Pauli — a student-led initiative that places design assistance directly in the hands of people typically excluded from its processes. This publication extends that partisan practice into broader territory. Drawing on a three-week online research festival hosted by the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin's Design Lab #6 in 2020, the book assembles conversations, lectures, debates, and project documentation that confront design's entanglement with neoliberal labour conditions: precarity, creative self-exploitation, immaterial labour, and the limits of project logic. For designers, students, and academics who take the social and economic dimensions of design practice seriously, this is a rare document of a sustained, collectively organised alternative.
Key Features
- 528 pages of conversations, lectures, research essays, performance documentation, and project records spanning both the Public Design Support initiative and the 2020 research festival
- Edited by Jesko Fezer, Studio Experimentelles Design, and Claudia Banz
- Contributions by Silvia Federici, Diedrich Diederichsen, Angela McRobbie, Lucy Kimbell & Guy Julier, Brave New Alps, Silvio Lorusso, Stavros Stavrides, Pelin Tan, Oli Mould, and many others
- Published by Sternberg Press, 2020
What You'll Discover
- How community-based and cooperative design practice challenges the assumption that design is something done to — rather than with — its subjects
- The structural conditions that produce precarity and creative self-exploitation within design, art, and the broader aesthetic economy
- How self-organising academia and artistic collectivism operate as practical responses to the formal economy's exclusions
- The tensions between care work, immaterial labour, and the problem of the art strike as examined through talks, performances, and activist perspectives
About the Author
Jesko Fezer leads Studio Experimentelles Design at HFBK Hamburg, where since 2011 the studio has developed the Public Design Support initiative in St. Pauli — a community design assistance programme built on cooperative, participatory principles. Claudia Banz co-edited this volume and is associated with the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin's Design Lab programme, which hosted the 2020 research festival from which this publication draws.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 528
- Dimensions: 149 x 211mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783956796043
- Publisher: Sternberg Press
- Publication Date: 2020
Perfect For: Design educators, socially engaged practitioners, architecture and design students interested in participatory and community-centred practice, and researchers working across design theory, labour politics, and the sociology of creative work.