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Many designers today (including ourselves) are experimenting with how their practice can engage in meaningful ways with the complexity of pressing social and environmental issues. Being very much concerned with the politics and power relations that run through such issues, in this paper we will explore what points of orientation the framework of the 'commons' and that of 'community economies' – seen from an autonomist and feminist Marxist perspective – can offer when working on socially and politically engaged projects. We mobilise these two frameworks as possible entry points through which eco-socially just modes of reproducing livelihoods can be fostered. Moreover, we will consider how they can encourage designers to more directly activate their skills to support human activities that move our societies towards eco-social justice.

Design embeds ideas in communication and artefacts in subtle and psychologically powerful ways. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term 'symbolic violence' to describe how powerful ideologies, priorities, values and even sensibilities are constructed and reproduced through cultural institutions, processes and practices. Through symbolic violence, individuals learn to consider unjust conditions as natural and even come to value customs and ideas that are oppressive.Design functions as symbolic violence when it is involved with the creation and reproduction of ideas, practices, tools and processes that result in structural and other types of violence (including ecocide). Breaking symbolic violence involves discovering how it works and building capacities to challenge and transform dysfunctional ideologies, structures and institutions. This conversation will give participants an opportunity to discuss, critique and/or develop the theory of design as symbolic violence as a basis for the development of design strategies for social justice.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Critical by design? An introduction -- Genealogies -- What is a critical object? Design as «desubjugation» (after Foucault) -- The vitality of the negative: critical design between social philosophy and conceptual art -- Ask what can be! Modal critique and design as drivers of accidence -- What are the politics of ontological design? A critical reflection on the mutual becoming of «the human» and «the world» -- Engaging in epistemic disobedience: on the decolonialization of design discourses -- Practices -- Unsettling individualized design practice through collaboration -- «Ci concimiamo a vicenda»: building support structures as part of design practice -- Re-visioning pelvic care through design -- Trojan horses: ambiguity as a critical design strategy -- Grey design: critical practices of design at the peripheries of the discipline -- Positions -- The ineliminable aesthetic dimension of art -- Design culture as critical practice -- What might be the speculative social? -- Biased design, or the misery of neutrality -- Undesign and understanding -- Epilogue -- The life and death of critical and speculative design: post-disciplinarity, post-truth, post-self and post-capital -- Appendix -- Critical by design? The book's design as SF figures -- List of Figures & Tables -- Biographies -- Imprint