The Politics of Design

INTRODUCTION

Privilege and Prejudice

Federico Freschi, Jane Venis and Farieda Nazier

Although design totally infuses the material fabric of the world around us, it is almost always rendered invisible by the very thing(s) it brings into being. Tony Fry, 2011 In Design as Politics, Tony Fry argues that in “giv[ing] material form and directionality to the ideological embodiment of a particular politics,” design must be understood as “profoundly political.”1 He argues further that all aspects of design that shape social and cultural experience – built environment, transport systems, information systems, infrastructure and so on – are by their nature ideologically loaded and “predicated on how human beings should be viewed and treated.”2 The longer arc of Fry’s argument is concerned with the urgent need to harness the political power of design to effect positive environmental change, a political transformation that he terms “Sustainment.” Nonetheless, his notion that “design expresses power materially and in ways that shape how people interact and ontologically prefigure their material culture”3 raises provocative questions about how design has historically served to distribute and exercise power. In seeking to understand the causes and ongoing effects of global inequality, the relationship between design and politics deserves particular scrutiny in the postcolonial context. Despite being the product of deliberate political and social intentions, successful design appears ‘natural,’ its ideological biases effectively hidden in plain sight. In former settler-colonial societies, this ‘invisibility’ begs the questions of the historical complicity of design in imposing and maintaining racialised hierarchies of privilege, access, identity and notions of ‘belonging.’ While the former dominions of the British Empire in the southern hemisphere – Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and South Africa – followed different paths to sovereignty, they are united by several common factors. Not least, as Annie E Coombes argues, the ways in which white settlers dealt with Indigenous4 peoples “is the historical factor which has ultimately shaped the cultural and political Privilege and Prejudice

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