[Nettime-nl] JvE: Design negation -- Design, political engagement and populist politics

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

JvE: Design negation -- Design, political engagement and populist 
politics

New research project: Design negation
Daniël van der Velden, advising researcher in the Design department, 
initiated

A new research project: Design negation. Design, political engagement 
and populist politics. This project is about finding new vocabularies 
and aesthetic possibilities for design to formulate a political 
negation. It aims to respond to the current wave of populist public 
opinion and politics in the Netherlands.

Currently, most design gestures fulfill, even if they are ‘dressed in 
dissent’, an affirmative role in relation to their social and political 
surroundings. The potentially critical stance in design has 
increasingly become a matter of armchair debates among experts. Design 
has withdrawn its political potential from everyday reality – that 
requires not only judgments but also decisions – in order to 
concentrate on abstract goals associated with ‘the good’, i.e. 
universal ethics and human rights. It turns out that many of these 
abstract goals are now served by the principles of marketing and 
advertising, and as such fail to grasp the particularities of 
situations.

Design negation will consist of creative, intellectual and practical 
research and production that look for possibilities to set up a design 
regime of negation. The project will further design for a number of 
organisations in the Netherlands and abroad whose social and political 
objectives would benefit from dedicated artistic research.

The project will formulate and execute a series of media campaigns in 
response to the curious breed of rightist politicians that has come 
into being in the Netherlands in the post-Fortuyn years. These 
politicians claim that they have simple and effective answers to the 
social, political and cultural implications of immigration.
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* Contact: Menno Grootveld (rabotnik@xs4all.nl).