Disarming Design: Politics of Participatory Practices

An eloquent plea for sustainable collaborations and rooted connections--through design

How can design be a tool for emancipation and solidarity? How can design catalyze the activation and imagination of locally anchored knowledge? What can we learn from this? How can others use this book to define questions, stepping stones and "scratching posts" to set up their own way of starting a project and work on participatory design trajectories? Disarming Design takes as its starting points three projects that show the intricacies, questions and challenges that these political participatory processes incur: 1) Subjective Editions (publishing platform); 2) Disarming Design from Palestine (design label); 3) Disarming Design (temporary master's program at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam). This book centers on these projects (co-)initiated by Dutch designer, educator and researcher Annelys de Vet (born 1974) that engage with social and political struggles, attuned to relational ways of being-in-the-world.