Postgraduate Course: dLab(5): Design for Political Change (DESI11199)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh College of Art |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | dLab(5): Design for Political Change interrogates the complex interweaving of design and politics. It invites students to develop a nuanced appreciation of how all efforts to bring about change through design materialise specific value systems as well as, conversely, of how value systems respond to existing material conditions. The course addresses both what is political about design and what is designerly about politics: it examines the many ways in which societal organisation is directed and redirected largely through design, as well as how designing participates in the production, reproduction, and contestation of the political sphere itself at various scales. |
| Course description |
Faced with burgeoning eco-social crises, designers must come to terms with the political implications of their practices. Attending to this responsibility, dLab(5) confronts political questions and categories relevant to contemporary modes of designing. It urges students to critically reflect on the desirability of change itself in specific contexts by considering the material and ideological interests driving it, and to appreciate political participation as a space for creative experimentation. On this course you will learn how to analyse the politics at play in the professional and informal design of artefacts, services, and infrastructures. Moreover, you will be introduced to a wide range of activist methods and explore how the interplay between complementary approaches to designing for change can best respond to today's wicked problems. You will then apply this enhanced political literacy in the development of your own vision and process, building effective coalitions and situating your work within a rich ecology of engaged practices.
The course is delivered in weekly half-day blocks. The first half of the course features taught and participatory lectures. Two parallel lecture series provide bite-size introductions to key political concepts - such as power, agency, decoloniality, globalisation, degrowth - and present you with an array of methodological approaches to political change - ranging from awareness-raising campaigning and technologies for advocacy, to mutual aid and prefigurative practices. You will then experiment, hands-on, with these new ideas and methods in participatory sessions. In the second half of the course, which alternates between participatory lectures, group tutorials, and crit-style presentations, you will develop your main dLab(5) group project by working collaboratively and partaking in debates and coalition-building exercises.
Throughout the course, you will be asked to produce pieces of analytic and positional writing (e.g. manifestos), to make and test-out material prototypes or other visual and performative propositions, as well as to engage in scenario-based activities.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
|
Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | The nature of studio courses is such that there is reasonable expectation of materials being consumed and deployed in the development of prototypes, models, and visualisations (including printing). For this course, a reasonable expectation is that students may spend an average of £50, but these costs fluctuate significantly depending upon individual projects and student choices of materials involved with project execution. |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2024/25, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 26 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 21,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 6,
Feedback/Feedforward Hours 6,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
163 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
This course has 3 components of assessment.
Component 1: Positional statement (1,000 words) Week 4-5 (30%)
Component 2: Peer support Report (1,000 words) Week 8-10 (20%)
Component 3: Group portfolio (15 x A3 pages max.) May exam diet (50%)
Component 1 Write a multimedia creative essay or manifesto, integrating textual and visual elements as appropriate. You are asked to express the core values underpinning your own practice and critically reflect on your political position in relation to your field or context. The component is equally assessed against LO1/LO2/LO3.
Component 2 Compile a collection of short, appropriately researched forward-feeding and constructive recommendations, in written and visual form, in response to other students' or groups' projects, to effectively support the learning experience of the cohort as a whole. The component is assessed against LO1/LO4.
Component 3 Create a Group multimedia portfolio, in response to an open brief that each group will autonomously interpret and focalise. The portfolio should balance written and visual material, and document the research, ideation, process, prototyping, and experimental enactment of an intervention for political change. The component is equally assessed against LO1/LO2/LO3 and is subject to an inter-group peer moderation against LO4, assessed through WebPA.
The components strike an even balance between individual and group work, which is essential given the course's focus and philosophy. |
| Feedback |
Formative Feedback:
Formative feedback will be offered verbally, primarily ahead of submission of summative components 2 & 3 during work-in-progress events or 'crit-style' presentation sessions. This formative feedback is geared to highlight merits and potential areas for improvement, to comment on questions of scope, direction, feasibility, adherence to the brief, and ethical implications, and to make recommendations for future development and relevant resources. Further formative feedback is regularly provided throughout the duration of the course by way of informal cohort-wide discussion.
Summative Feedback:
The summative feedback for components 1 & 2 will feed directly into component 3.
Students will receive individual written feedback and grades on their summative submissions, which will be provided via Learn VLE 15 working days after submission, as per university regulations. Summative feedback will briefly explain how the work was assessed against the LOs and constructively point to potential future developments that might be worth considering. Active peer-to-peer feedback is also formally required and written into the second summative assessment component. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Critically examine the politics of designing at various scales through relevant research, demonstrating knowledge of key theoretical and methodological frameworks in politically-engaged design.
- Synthesise and apply a political appraisal of complex issues in their own practice through activist design methods, to generate design-led propositions, provocations, interventions, and experimental scenarios.
- Communicate bold visions of political change to a professional standard, in written and visual form and by using a range of dissemination platforms and styles, to coherently present their design propositions and the values underpinning them.
- Constructively support other students in the development of their work by actively contributing to group-work, cohort-level debate, negotiation of diverging goals and expectations, and peer-to-peer forward-feeding suggestions.
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Reading List
Bieling, Tom, ed. (2019). Design (&) Activism: Perspectives on Design as Activism and Activism as Design. (Milan: Mimesis).
Costanza-Chock, Sasha. (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Hickel, Jason. (2020). Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. (London: Penguin).
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, ed. (2017). The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. (Durham, NC: Duke UP).
Spade, Dean. (2020). Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). (London: Verso).
Tunstall, Dori. (2023). Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Students on the course possess and/or wish to develop a number of key attributes and skills, both on a personal and a professional level.
- Outlook & Engagement: dLab(5) students are curious towards and committed to engage with the specificity of local communities, while also connecting and situating these within a global context. This mindset leads them to positively impact and ethically contribute to the lived experience of the audiences, communities, and constituencies affected by their work, and to carefully consider the political implications of designing for change.
- Personal Effectiveness: dLab(5) students are sensitive to different circumstances as they can be effective agents for change at different scales and in a variety of capacities. They can draw on the assorted set of leadership, stewardship, collaboration, and facilitation methods and concepts encountered on the course to positively influence courses of action.
- Communication: dLab(5) students are capable of synthesising complex ideas through a broad range of communication means and platforms. They are sensitive to socio-cultural diversity and find ways to disseminate their work that are appropriate to reach a variety of audiences, communities, and constituencies. |
| Keywords | Design Politics,Activism,Participatory Design,Prefiguration,Publics |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Giovanni Marmont
Tel:
Email: |
Course secretary | Mrs Abbie Humphreys
Tel: (01316) 502306
Email: |
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