Abstract
This paper interrogates the persistent claim of design’s neutrality by tracing how notions of the political have surfaced, receded, and re-emerged across design discourses in Western contexts from the late 1960s to the present. Building on Arendt’s understanding of the political as the space of collective world-making through human plurality, and Mouffe’s agonistic perspective that foregrounds conflict and power, the paper proposes a genealogy revealing how design has always been entangled with ideological, economic, and socio-technical transformations. The analysis maps political trajectories across Radical Design, Participatory Design, Critical and Speculative Design, Social Design, Design for Social Innovation, Design Activism, Adversarial Design, Transition Design, Design for the Pluriverse, and Design Justice. Rather than treating these movements as isolated, the paper tracks their shared political imaginaries and tensions, arguing that the political is not a late addition to design discourse but a constitutive dimension of the discipline itself, whatever in research, practice or education.
Keywords
the political, agonism, genealogy, design history
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1215
Citation
Cantalupi, S., De Rosa, A., and Galluzzo, L. (2026) The “P” in Design: Towards a Genealogy of the Political in the Field, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1215
Creative Commons License
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Included in
The “P” in Design: Towards a Genealogy of the Political in the Field
This paper interrogates the persistent claim of design’s neutrality by tracing how notions of the political have surfaced, receded, and re-emerged across design discourses in Western contexts from the late 1960s to the present. Building on Arendt’s understanding of the political as the space of collective world-making through human plurality, and Mouffe’s agonistic perspective that foregrounds conflict and power, the paper proposes a genealogy revealing how design has always been entangled with ideological, economic, and socio-technical transformations. The analysis maps political trajectories across Radical Design, Participatory Design, Critical and Speculative Design, Social Design, Design for Social Innovation, Design Activism, Adversarial Design, Transition Design, Design for the Pluriverse, and Design Justice. Rather than treating these movements as isolated, the paper tracks their shared political imaginaries and tensions, arguing that the political is not a late addition to design discourse but a constitutive dimension of the discipline itself, whatever in research, practice or education.