At the same time, these tensions were understood to play out at a distance, i.e., at a different time, with a relationship that was not in the room at the time, and/or with a different organisation. When we asked participants to map out their feelings while working on a particular project or within the organization, we began to get a hint of how participants brought tensions with them throughout their careers. In many cases, this spoke to the generativity of what is carried forward, even if not explicitly. For example, at a different workshop with the team at Outlandish one member discussed how internal relationship tensions created emotional highs and lows, but also how both unpredictable elements (Covid-19, shifting finances) and changing practices (of care, of negotiation) interacted to change relationship dynamics in the community. 

This initial glimpse into the challenges that community co-design faces has become the basis for a new project called “Uncommon Knowledge” to elaborate on Modes of Community Organising activities we’ve developed during this work and informs the final event that we will host as part of the Counter-Framing Design project.  This in-person interactive installation will focus on countering as a practice in design movements and is set to run on Friday, February 3^rd at 14:00 at the Chisenhale Dance Space in London. Spaces are limited, but if you’d like to come get in touch or register at the Eventbrite link to explore the work so far.  

It’s time to take stock of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. Most research projects are beholden to funders or other entities that ask for deliverables, including an update on what the project actually achieved. Proposal writing always encourages a clear path and a focus on feasibility- perhaps in part because they know that the end result will be far more complicated. Indeed, the influence of funding institutions on research communities is a longstanding conversation within participatory design, both in terms of how it affects relationships between designers and their participatory communities (Björgvinsson et al 2012) and how it directly affects the outcomes of design projects (Kyng 2010, Whittle 2014). Therefore, we would be wary of research that doesn’t evolve and respond to insights and knowledge produced along the way. Good research involving people is often messy, sometimes disjointed, but always improving upon itself and, therefore, always changing.  

Our project is no different. Our initial exploration into counter-frames led us to focusing on counter-actions. We were interested in how counter-frames could be mobilised to unsettle institutionalised frames and practices, as a means of community building through constructive opposition and dissensus (Prendeville, Syperek and Santamaria, Forthcoming). In attempting to unpack these counter-actions with our partner organisations, we found that these framing actions were evidence of something larger, the way those organisations and their networks were challenging and reinforcing values and practices. This often included a way of naming those values and practices, such as a sociocracy or a cooperatives, particularly horizontal practices and critiques on the horizontalism/verticalism binary (Nunes 2021, Süß 2021). The more we broke down the defining features of these two frameworks, the more we realized that we needed to move away from horizontalism and verticalism as two discrete types of practices, the former being disruptive to the later. For instance, we might encounter an organisation that works to strengthen leadership  within local communities, as a grassroots operation, but is still beholden to a strong hierarchy of governmental power brokers to enact policy change. Therefore, we started to focus on the reality of daily practices within an organisation—or any community for that matter. Organisational structures, like cooperatives, sociocracies, and democracies, all contain moments, interactions, and bits of daily life that may be ‘horizontal’, ‘vertical’, both, and neither. It is more significant for us to investigate these moments and see what they can tell us about where dissensus lies, and what that dissensus can teach us. 

 In that vein, we have begun planning workshops informed by our design research approach that will dive deep into organisational structuring, as a process that (re)creates these organisations and their communities through everyday moments and practices. We also propose that instead of attempting to turn dissensus into consensus, we work toward productive dissensus. Our initial idea, that frames always act in relation to other frames and that they can fluctuate to accommodate the desires and interests of other groups, is still embedded in the research. We are still talking about interactions which often involve framing (like an organisation pitching to a funder, appealing to a political party, or searching for collaborators), but it is not just that kind of interaction that is significant. Alignments are formed in other ways, hierarchies are reinforced or broken, consensus is made and unmade, solidarities are reinforced, and so on.  

Where will we go from here? We will begin workshopping with partners and collaborators to see how small, everyday practices inform their organisational structuring, how they understand themselves, and how they might be framed by others in their respective fields. In so doing, we hope to extend our project outside of its timeline through generative design that can be reproduced within other organisations and broader communities.  If you are interested in collaborating with us on future iterations of the workshop, please get in touch via our website or social media platforms.  

The concepts we choose instruct how we consider, approach and conceive of the collective. The question of the multifarious ways in which individuals may or may not act in concert with others is a relevant and ongoing question in design theory concerned with processes of democratisation, self-determination and social transformation. Following Anderson, any framing of a collective, is a structural framing of agency, be it a community, public, commons, nation, or movement.  

Equally, recent work by Christopher Kelty (2018) conceives of ‘the participant’ within the collective as formed through ‘contributory autonomy’, whereby participation is a type of ephemeral, affective experience. This might be compared with Arturo Escobar’s (2017) autonomous design wherein communities (re)produce themselves, in the process creating new worlds (or recreating preserved and reimagined old worlds). This autonomy is dependent upon the interplay of communities with one another, as well as with other structures, systems, organisms and environments. Here communities as collectives aim not to change or contribute to the world, but rather to make room for many relational worlds – the design of a pluriverse.  

At the same time, there is a need to interrogate the manifold paradoxes and deficiencies of the work on this topic to-date. Illustratively, designers have been actively engaging in questions of collectives through making publics. Yet, the problematics of ‘the public’ have been interrogated by feminist theorists, amongst others, for its totalizing tendencies if not taken as the various and mutable construct that it is, subsequently proposing the ‘subaltern counterpublic’ (Fraser, 1990). Equally, critical and urgent questions of borders and nation states can be taken in contrast to the necessitation for the construction of a delimited collective, such as articulated by theorists of the commons.  

This seminar series will bring together four design theorists and practitioners who are engaging with radical thought and practice to seek to interrogate these questions and concerns within their work and their relevance for contemporary collective praxis.  

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Refelections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Escobar, A. (2017). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Independence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the Public Sphere : A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy Published by : Duke University Press Stable URL : http://www.jstor.com/stable/466240 Democracy ’ Rethinking the Public Sphere : A Contr. Social Text, 26(25), 56–80.

Kelty, C. (2020). The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Seminars

Seminar 1—Design (Research) as Radical Social Practice

Dr Oliver Vodeb 

25th November at 10am GMT

Abstract

The realization of the importance to connect theory, research and philosophy with social movements has manifested in the streets of Paris in the 1960’ with the slogan “Mao, Marx, Marcuse” and it was clear that Situationist theory would not make much sense without its communization. But how to communize knowledge and design practice today? How can we think about what we can call “radical design” if a) design is predominantly professionalized knowledge production, if b) the academization of design faces a constant threat of the destruction of the “academic” within the neoliberal university and c) if the community, the communal seems to have the potential to generate a radical intimacy, as a particular  non–extractive relationality between people AND at the same time a special quality of closeness/proximity to the subject of designing and investigating (researching), crucial for facing key existential problems today.  These potentials will be explored through the lens of Memefest’s extradisciplinary methodology. The lecture is based on a chapter from the book Radical Intimacies, edited, written, and curated by Oliver Vodeb, forthcoming with Intellect Books and Memefest in 2022.  

Dr Oliver Vodeb is a Slovenian and Australian critical design theorist, creative practice researcher, student and educator. He mostly operates between the university, design practice and social movements and his approach is extra/intradisciplinary. He is senior lecturer at the RMIT School of Design in Melbourne, teaching in the Master of communication design. Oliver co-founded Memefest in 2002 and is the principal curator of the Memefest festival and facilitator of the Memefest international network. He has published extensively, has lectured internationally, and has designed and directed dozens of public campaigns and social interventions across the world. He’s latest book is Food Democracy, published by Intellect Books. He is currently working on a new book Radical Intimacies, also by Intellect Books. More info about Oliver can be found here. 

Seminar 2—Designing For/Designing Against

Dr Frederick Van Amstel

9th December at 1400pm GMT

Register for the online seminar here.

Abstract
Most design theories and design methods are crafted to support the current hegemonies in society. While trying to sustain these hegemonies, designers eventually realize they are unsustainable, unfair, or dehumanizing. Among them, designers who develop a bit of critical consciousness rightly feel the need to shift from designing for to designing against hegemonies. More often than not, they immediately lose critical consciousness by countering hegemony through naiveté: by rejecting design theories and methods entirely. Unequipped, designing against stay at the safe side of speculating reactions without taking consequential measures. Guided by the Latin American tradition of critical thinking, the Laboratory of Design against Oppression (LADO) at UTFPR does not reject design theories and methods but redefines their purposes. In this lab, the decolonization of design epistemologies goes hand in hand with the hybridization of design methodologies. In this talk, selected projects from LADO and from the Design & Oppression network will be displayed to illustrate this point. Related work:
 
Van Amstel, Frederick; Batista e Silva, Sâmia; Serpa, Bibiana Oliveira; Mazzarotto, Marco; Carvalho, Ricardo Artur; Gonzatto; Rodrigo Freese. (in press). Insurgent design coalitions: the history of the Design & Oppression network. Proceedings of the II PIVOT 2021 Virtual Conference. Design Research Society. http://fredvanamstel.com/publications/insurgent-design-coalitions-the-history-of-the-design-oppression-network 
 
Van Amstel, Frederick M.C., and Rodrigo Freese Gonzatto. (2016) “Design Livre: designing locally, cannibalizing globally.” XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 22(4), p.46-50. http://fredvanamstel.com/journal/design-livre-designing-locally-cannibalizing-globally 
 
Angelon, Rafaela and Van Amstel, Frederick M.C. (2021) Monster aesthetics as an expression of decolonizing the design body. Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 20(1), pp. 83-102(20). 

Dr. Frederick (Fred) van Amstel (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of Service Design and Experience Design at the Industrial Design Academic Department (DADIN), Federal University of Technology – Paraná (UTFPR), Brazil. His PhD thesis, accepted by the University of Twente, maps the contradictions faced by architectural design and service design in contemporary practice. Instead of eliminating them, expansive design harnesses contradictions as a source of change. His most recent research deals with the contradiction of oppression and the possibility of designing for liberation. Among the many projects he developed to explore this very possibility, Corais Platform stands out as the best example so far. Created in 2011, it hosts more than 700 collaborative projects run by social movements, indigenous communities, art collectives, and popular educators associated with the Brazilian digital culture movement. In 2020, Frederick co-founded the Design & Oppression network and, in 2021, the Laboratory of Design against Oppression (LADO). 

Seminar 3—Prefigurative Politics as Events of Radical Materiality: Three Acts of Embodied Infrastructures

Dr Jilly Traganou

16th December at 1500pm GMT

Registration for the online seminar here.

Abstract

In this talk, I will discuss research for my next book that looks at the role of space, design and materiality in prefigurative politics. I define prefigurative politics as a repertoire of sociotechnical action that presents a distinct modality of resistance: dissenting through making. Participants in occupied spaces, protest camps, and self-organized communities prefigure new politics through their collective and horizontally-structured creation of material forms, spaces and infrastructures that enact desired futures in the present (Boggs 1977; Breines 1981). The processes of materiality, in which participants in these movements are involved, include collective acts of maintenance and affective labor, in which both humans and things are deployed in precarious but dynamic relations. Central in these environments is a feminist materialist action, both because of women’s leading role in movements of prefiguration, and the anti-patriarchal principles embedded in their overall practices. During my talk, I will focus on the notion of “embodied infrastructures,” as sociotechnical assemblages of humans and things that support prefiguration.

Dr Jilly Traganou (Dipl. Arch. Eng., PhD) is an architect, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at Parsons School of Design, The New School, in New York, and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Design and Culture. She is author of Designing the Olympics: Representation, Participation, Contestation (Routledge, 2016) and The Tokaido Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004)—and editor of Design and Political Dissent (Routledge, 2020); and Travel, Space, Architecture, co-edited with Miodrag Mitrašinovic (Ashgate, 2009). Her current work focuses on the role of space, maintenance, and materiality in prefigurative politics. 

Seminar 4—Dissensus within Organisational Structures: Negotiating Radical Horizontalism

Dr Anaïs Parada

27th January at 1000am GMT

Registration for the online seminar here

Abstract

To negotiate tensions between organisational discourses and practices on the ground, we are constructing design interventions that challenge binary understandings of horizontalism and verticalism. We instead rearticulate organizational structures as continuously reproduced and co-constructed processes, which do not fit neatly into hierarchical or peer to peer models. In so doing, we also discover an ebb and flow of alignment and dissensus between and within organisations, communities, and social justice fields. These ‘frontiers’, the spaces where people and institutions meet and/or conflict, are sites of potential radical change. As such, we employ participatory design to uncover where these frontiers are and how to make dissensus at these frontiers productive for substantial shifts in radical practice.

Dr Anaïs Parada is trained as a cultural anthropologist with an interdisciplinary focus on aesthetics as social justice, material culture- particularly fashion, boundaries of belonging and systems of value across economies at various scales. She completed a PhD at the University of South Carolina, looking at the significance of dress as a semiotic process that supported autonomy for the Puruhá community in Ecuador. She has since moved towards critique of her previous work, including the academic de-fanging of decolonization, and asks how the intersection of design and anthropology can constitute co-conspiratorial work for emerging social justice movements. She is a research associate on the AHRC funded project, Counter-Framing Design, invested in developing new ways of forming communities by experimenting with creative organising principles, while coming to grips with necessary and productive dissensus that exists across communities through frames.

This article documents and shares insights from a design research workshop to ‘Map Frames for Strategic Action’, hosted on 26^th May 2021, with invited participants from a community of ‘new economy’ activists in the UK, as well as academics with expertise in areas of design, economics, sustainability, participation, peer-to-peer, commons and political economy. 

The purpose was to explore how a better understanding of socio-political framing can support design for strategic action, through hands-on design activities emphasising the embodied and material dimensions of frames.  

We commenced the workshop by presenting our project focus: to understand the relationship between socio-political framing and strategic action in the field of sustainability, to develop a novel design approach for social change. Specifically, our work has been focusing on the movement for ‘new economics’, which we take to mean innovative community-led approaches to sustaining livelihoods and wellbeing. We see ‘sustainability’ as an intersecting set of issues concerning multiple communities, including marginalised groups. ​ 

We introduced our project partners, Citizens UK, Public Works and ECHO; the academic project mentors Prof John Wood, Prof Paul Rodgers, Dr Kersty Hobson, Prof Tracy Bhamra and Prof Thomas Tufte; and the project research undertaken to-date through interviews, critical discourse analysis and desk research focused on new economy organising. You can view the slides used on the day here.

The workshop activities were run on Zoom and MIRO and involved four design research activities. Participants worked in groups together to build up layers of information according to each step. Each step was guided by some instructions and questions. Participants worked together through the activities, sometimes adapting or circumventing the initial instructions. What follows are reflections and insights specific to community organising practitioners working with frames, as well as outcomes that will inform our next steps.

Context and Set-Up: New Economics

We set the agenda for the day by sharing initial insights on our research undertaken to-date and posing questions in relation to some of the emerging discourse of new economics. We provided a brief introduction to frames and counter-frames as well as some examples from the community of practitioners.

 For instance, 

• the 2018 NEON, NEF, PIRC, Frameworks Institute report ‘Framing the Economy’ report featured research into common frames that reveal the economy as a cognitive hole or ‘black box’ in the popular imagination;
• whilst the concept of the embedded economy, as popularised in Kate Raworth’s wildly influential ‘Doughnut Economics’, is seen as keeping the black box intact by some theorists;²
• meanwhile, Hilary Cottam’s Welfare 5.0 report comments on the prioritisation of economic over social structures post-Covid, thus revealing their separation.

As lecturer in economic philosophy Alex Douglas says, ‘the challenge is to break out of the paradigm’.³  Interviews undertaken for the Counter-Framing Design project have emphasised the social and community relations constituting the emerging new economy. As design researchers, our focus is how we can use design and creative methods to support the challenges to envision things differently. 

Activities 

Activities 1&2: Object Framing & Mapping 

The goal of our first set of activities was for participants to introduce themselves and their organisations and practices whilst beginning to identify some of the frames that emerge in their work, harnessing these within material objects.  

Prior to the workshop, we invited participants to bring an object that represents an aspect of their practice, either positive or negative. It could be a cup, a t-shirt, a toy, or a hand tool.⁸ For example, Sharon chose this ‘low-tech’ lamp, and Pandora chose this ‘new normal’ pamphlet:  

Participants were asked to map frames onto their object of choice on an individual ‘place setting’ in a group Miro board, with four participants per group. As well as dragging and dropping any relevant pre-filled ‘frame cards’ from a list of around 30, based on our research to date, participants were encouraged to add their own frames using blank cards, and to add comments to elaborate on any reasons for choosing certain frames or the connections therein. Finally, they were asked to map relationships between frames by clustering them and drawing connecting lines.  

Activities 3&4: Solidarities & Conflicts 

For activity three, we asked participants to identify and build on the overlaps and shared themes between their individual frame maps. In activity four we asked them to explore the conflicts and antagonisms that came up within and between frames.  The intention was to use design research to explore mechanisms of counter-framing we had identified as: time, scale, embodiment, intersectionality and metaphor. We presented these mechanisms with ‘countering cards’, which dissented against some of the frames identified. 

Insights and Reflections 

In this section, we share early analysis organised thematically according to an excerpt from a draft typology of frames on new economics; frame clusters; resonant frames; contradictory, co-opted or divisive frames; and finally, frames of solidarity.  

Frame Categories, Hierarchies, and Interdependencies 

The summary of frame cards generated during activity one shows the most prominent frames as anti-capitalism, sustainable and inclusive growth, community wealth building, people and planet, new economy and optimism/hope. Within this cluster of frames are many contradictory ideas. Other frames that are prominent include wealth inequality, fairness, green new deal, guerilla localism, climate justice, converging crises and pragmatism. Most of the frames provided were used at least once, and some new frames were created by participants, notably: DIY activism, local knows best, people power, land justice, heritage and peer-to-peer. Interestingly, sustainability itself was a relatively unpopular frame. This reflects our research findings, in which interviewees⁵ said they found the term unhelpful as it has been rendered meaningless by overuse and co-option by corporate powers.  

In our (draft) typology of frames (excerpt in Table 1), we have developed a working categorisation of frames. ‘Response frames’ include those that respond to climate and interlinked crises or Covid, such as optimism/hope or pragmatism. ‘Master frames’⁶ are recurring frames under which other frames may fall, an example being the fairness or rights frame, encompassing the right to repair, civil rights, women’s rights and rights of nature frames. ‘Localism frames’ include community wealth building, and  ‘naturalised frames’, such as wealth inequality, where there is a degree of supposed normativity or ‘common sense’. These various frame types regularly intersect.  

These different frames act variously on policy, mindsets, communities and social groups or broader society and the government and as such work at different scales. Our draft typology is a step towards understanding the hierarchies that exist between frames and their interdependencies. For instance, localism might also be understood as a response frame, when it is interpreted as a type of ‘retreat’ from global issues.  

Frame Debates 

This speaks to the complexity of frames, which we introduced through some of the frame debates we have identified in our research so far, for example concerning the optimism/hope frame with regards to climate and dissenting ‘doomist’ frames, the conflicts therein revolving around the timescale of ecological and societal breakdown and the privileged position of those who can choose to retreat, or even profit from collapse narratives. Another cluster of response frames we have identified emerges around the idea of ‘going back to normal’ or the ‘new normal’ in contrast with countering frames such as ‘build back better’ (which has subsequently been co-opted by conservative politics) and ‘normal wasn’t working’, a frame which challenges the upholding of normal as a privileged and ultimately placating position. 

Through the workshop, a new frame cluster was identified within the emerging ‘new economy’ discourse and includes the frames of ‘community wealth building’, ‘community wealth’ and ‘wealth inequality’. Some interviewees problematised the naturalised frame of ‘wealth inequality’ as a red herring in lieu of which ‘assets’ and ‘debt’ should stand. For instance, one interviewee spoke of ‘monetary inequality’ to address ‘liquid money’ as a preferable frame to ‘wealth inequality’. Others proposed to reclaim the meaning of ‘wealth’, as relating to sources of happiness and wellbeing. Or how issues and frames might be bridged through ideas of ‘health inequality’ or ‘mental wealth’.⁷   These new economy frames are selective and reflective of the participants we have engaged.

Resonant and Dissonant Frames 

Activities resulted in insightful discussions within groups around what constitutes a frame and their characteristics. The discussion touched on how frames are subverted (or in our term, ‘countered’) to gain mass appeal – for example the right to repair is a more resonant mobilising frame than circular economy – whether frames are unconscious or strategic or both, and how frames may fluctuate or move along a spectrum at different points in time in a group’s work. Frame resonance is an important concept in the literature. Simplistically, this requires considering aspects such as credibility of the frame makers (expertise, charisma, credentials), the properties of a given frame (consistency, cultural relevance), and the political, moral and ideological orientation of frame receivers.⁸  

The object activity facilitated insights into the complexity of the socio-material and socio-political systems around frames to transcend the field of practice, in which organisers typically limit their practices of framing to a form of sloganeering. Frames are understood to ‘script’ behaviour in our daily lives, meaning simply they can determine the roles we play. For example, that several people’s objects represented mass-produced tools, which are in direct conflict with the ideals of their work, generated reflection on this type of dissonance, which is also reflected in the seeming contradiction between the top frames of anti-capitalism and sustainable and inclusive growth – represented, for example, by one participant’s object, a selection of seeds and pulses. Similarly, localist frames face challenges when applied at a larger societal scale. To this end, the object activity offers opportunities to elaborate on hierarchies, interdependencies and sources of dissonance in making frames and as such conceive of more resonant and thereby effective frames. 

Contradictory, Co-opted and Divisive Frames 

In addition to the frames identified and created, participants discussed inclusion and boundaries and the nature of collaboration. Frames can be contradictory within a single context, co-opted and divisive. Many considered the power of hope and optimism, and of acting locally. However, these discussions also gave rise to reflection on the contradictions that emerge, for example tensions between pragmatism and system transformation, and between system change and a romantic ‘retreat’ to localism. Others discussed how frames can extend from schematic to pragmatic, from idealist to personal, as well as how they are tailored to different audiences. Furthermore, participants discussed how frames can backfire, for example within immigration discourse, ‘no one is illegal’ may be said to either naturalise or validate the illegal frame, in a similar vein to criticisms of the degrowth frame validating growth⁹. Participants also reflected on the co-option of frames as a strategy within capitalism in the face of subdivisions on the left according to identity frames, which fragment and distance grassroots organising from larger shared goals of (for example) community wealth building and reducing inequality. However, such generalised frames can erase difference, leading to further marginalisation for certain groups. 

Frames and Strategies for Solidarity 

On the other hand, one participant commented that if we’re to see beyond the black box, we must account for how we envision the other’s imagination. In the literature, the idea of building solidarities across communities by connecting agendas and issues is known as ‘frame bridging’.¹⁰ How we materialise frames (for example through the object activity) may offer ways to respond to this need, because of how objects can elicit the cultural as well as scripting nature of frames. The scripting capacity of frames is well understood in the literature and simply means that different frames elicit different behaviours or roles (by providing a ’script’ for ’a role’) in different contexts.¹¹  

Furthermore, the tensions between theorising and idealising activism and making an impact on the ground through pragmatic action was a key discussion point and central to the purpose of the workshop, which brought together academics and campaigners. Participants also discussed how frames can fluctuate from pragmatic to utopian and even sometimes dystopic. 

These discussions speak to where broader coalitions might be meaningful, as well as to what meaningful compromises may look like against instrumental framing strategies. For instance, the ‘radical’ frame (in our project used in the proper sense of the term, meaning to get to the root of the problem) is pitted against pragmatic practices. At the same time, ‘seeking to be successful in terms used by institutional power holders will always carry costs in marginalising certain frames and the real needs they express’.¹² In many cases, those supposed marginalised frames have not been understood as radical in recent memory (e.g., anti-racism), in the popular political meaning of the word. To this end lawyer and activist Dean Spade offers guiding questions relevant for strategic action for community solidarity that may aid community activists in this respect: 

• ‘Does it provide material relief?’ 
• ‘Does it leave out an especially marginalised part of the effected group?
• ‘Does it expand a system we are trying to dismantle?’ 
• ‘Does it mobilise people, especially those most directly impacted, for ongoing struggle?’¹⁷ 

Key Outcomes and Next Steps:

Further Work

Other important questions to emerge during the session were: 

• How can we anticipate unintended consequences of frames? 
• How can frames shirk marginal positions? 
• How can we understand if frames are obfuscating or illuminating? 
• How can frames respond to and prioritise feelings, rather than instrumentalise or exploit them?  
• How can frames help to navigate between pluralism and the disintegration of a movement? 
• How to prevent the co-option of frames? 
• Equally, how to gain popular appeal without being co-opted? 

While this set of activities yielded interesting and useful results as far as the above, it did not prove useful for generating new frames. Participants found the instructions and online format to be complex and part of that discussion and feedback informs improvements in the methodology used on the day, to support the activities, methods and countering mechanisms devised and how they can be harnessed to more effectively challenge dominant frames. 

Overall, our design research activities generated insights on a range of practical and conceptual issues and themes. This includes community issues and challenges, including current frame debates (e.g., emerging new economy frame clusters relating to ‘wealth’), as well as grappling with the characteristics and nature of frames and framing processes. 

Insights for practitioners relate to how:

• A (draft) typology of frames relevant to the emergent ‘new economy’ may support under standing movement positions and types of frames
• Identifying frame debates can be helpful for disentangling debates and positions within a movement, such as which frames might inadvertently validate a dominant frame 
• Considering frame debates (e.g., ‘wealth’) against response frames (e.g., hope/doom) offers opportunities to interpret frames, how they might be co-opted or counter-productive
• Engaging with the materiality of frames supports understanding of how frames shape everyday practices, and as such can be useful for community organising
• A better understanding of framing can support strategies to win material gains now, without compromising broader social change, by seeking frames that don’t inadvertently foreclose further action. 

Conceptual and methodological insights relate to how:

• Considering material dimensions of frames, as well as discursive, aids understanding of the complexity of frames, such as how frames play out in our daily lives, their ideological basis and how they elicit dissonance; 
• Identifying and exploring frame debates could aid with anticipating contradictory frames, those which might easily be co-opted, be self-neutralising or prove divisive in unproductive ways; 
• The potential of design research methods for eliciting understanding of the characteristics of frames and engaging in new frame-making practices and processes is evident in the breadth of insight here presented

As we develop a design approach based on counter-framing, we endeavour to continue to respond to some of these questions and issues. 

Footnotes

[1] For more on theories of framing in relation to the project, including the distinction from ideology and discourse, see Prendeville, S. & Syperek, P. (2021), ‘Counter-Framing Design: Politics of the New Normal’, NORDES (forthcoming).

[2] Vidal, M., & Peck, J. (2012). Sociological Institutionalism and the Socially Constructed Economy. The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography, 594–611. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118384497.ch38 

[3] We’ve given a longer talk on Counter-Framing the New Economy, which you can view at: https://designandeconomics.com/2021/04/19/counter-framing-the-new-economy-hosted-by-sharon-prendeville/. 

[4} This activity was inspired by Drazin’s ‘design concepts’ whereby cultural knowledge embedded in socio-material artefacts such as objects, recordings, texts, diagrams, video and visualisations offer a means through which the socio-political context of frames can be put into dialogue. Drazin, A. (2016). The Social Life of Concepts in Design Anthropology. In Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice (Vol. 23, pp. 1–11). https://doi.org/10.1111/gena.12013 

[5] Interviewees and workshop participants were chosen purposefully based on their specific expertise and active practices, i.e., not through random sampling. 

[6] Benford, R. D. (2013). Master Frame. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, (Markowitz 2009). https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470674871.wbespm126 

[7] See Dark Matter Labs (2021). ‘Building Mental Wealth’ https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/building-mental-wealth-34441f638e3b. 

[8] Noakes, J. A., & Johnston, H. (2005). Frames of Protest: A Road Map to a Perspective. In Frames of Protest: Social Movements and the Framing Perspective (First). Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers Inc. 

[9] Additionally, for commentary on this debate see: https://timotheeparrique.com/category/debate/

[10] Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26(1), 611–639. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611 

[11] Shank, Roger C. and Robert P. Abelson 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals in Understanding: an inquiry into human knowledge. Hillsdale N.J.: Erlbaum. 

[12] Ferree, M. M. (2003). Resonance and Radicalism: Feminist Framing in the Abortion Debates of the United States and Germany. American Journal of Sociology, 109(2), 304–344. https://doi.org/10.1086/378343 

[13] Spade, D. (2020). Solidarity not charity: Mutual aid for mobilization and survival. Social Text, 38(1), 131–151. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7971139 

We heard from members of the community who have been affected by these issues and benefited from the respective campaigns, in the presence of external representatives, such as Cllr Carole Williams, an Amazon community engagement officer and a member of the Metropolitan Police taskforce. Their moving stories exemplified how community organising can use personal storytelling instrumentally as a form of participation and to mobilise policy change. Amongst other forms of activism, many of the campaign successes were in part realised through the act of members sharing their stories with stakeholders and power brokers, putting into action storytelling as a mode of participation and method of producing social change.  

With the dawn of 2021, there was a sense of optimism. In his report on the assembly, Citizens UK Community Organiser and Counter-Framing Design advisor Froi Legaspi quoted Amanda Gorman’s poem she performed at the recent US presidential inauguration: 

We know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright. 

As Citizens UK moves into the new year of campaigning, we look forward to engaging with activities such as the Settle Our Status campaign, looking at intersecting issues and frames of new economy, climate and migration. This campaign arose out of the precarious position many undocumented migrants found themselves in upon the first UK lockdown. Prohibited from participating in the economy and public life, they were unable to support themselves and their families, to contribute to their communities or to seek medical and other necessary social services. A 2020 NEON report, showed the decline in climate mobilisation at the outset of the crisis and the corresponding rise in mobilisation around migration and housing, surfacing the challenges in developing ‘cross-cutting movements’.* 

 Our fieldwork will engage with the campaign through co-design and participatory methods, including a policy workshop, which together will allow us to map the field of issues and debates on new economy, climate and migration and develop preliminary design interventions to support navigating competing frames and counter-frames, and facilitate and sustain more integrated ways of organising.  

*NEON. Covid-19 Social Movements Report. (2020). Available at: https://neweconomyorganisers.org/covid-19-social-movements-report/  

Image Credit: Sherry R. Arnstein, ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’, JAIP, Vol. 35, No. 4, July 1969, pp. 216-224. Licensed under CC BY 3.0

Sharing our project vision – to understand the relationship between socio-political framing and strategic action in the field of sustainability to develop a novel design approach to support design for social change theory and practice – we set out our meta-design concepts: design anthropological methods, working within an extended time horizon, mapping practices and design tactics. We outlined the field of grassroots organisations and issues comprising the new economics with which we are engaging, including creative commons, universal basic income, decarbonisation, migration, housing, land stewardship, solidarity and transitions movements, the repair movement and sustainable arts and culture. This was followed by an analysis of the competing frames we have identified within the field, which form the basis of our critical discourse analysis. 

We homed in on the frames and counter-frames of ‘the New Normal’ and debates around going back to normal, when the pandemic has revealed such profound structural inequalities – where does this position the rhetoric and campaigns to ‘build back better’? Similarly, we considered tensions between criticisms of climate injustice and the whitewashing of the environmental movement, with calls for unity and to overlook differences to come together in an age of division. While the ‘counter-frames’ at the centre of our research include intersectionality, decolonising, Indigenous worldviews, anti-capitalism, sociocratic models, radical openness, storytelling tactics and green recovery, between these frames exist points of conflict and tension. 

To consider visual and material as well as textual aspects of discourse, we looked at these frames in the context of a case study: Extinction Rebellion. XR has an interesting relationship to our counter-frames, as its aim is to normalise mass civil disobedience, and it has received criticism for a lack of intersectionality within both its membership and its methods, despite (or perhaps, in part, due to) its decentralised, self-organising structure. The movement is particularly relevant to our project, as it arose out of research in organisation design as a practice of subversion, and its widespread success has largely been down to its strong design principles, including its name, its famous logo and its uniquely embodied and replicable protest actions (think: the Red Brigade), readily likened with Anne Thorpe’s design tactics.¹ Extinction Rebellion refused to be included in the 2019 Beazley Designs of the Year awards, as it accused the Design Museum of ‘artwashing’ the insurance company’s activities.

It was useful to think with Torange and the Cultural Commons students and their material and aesthetic practices, engaging with topics ranging from chemical and noise pollution to use of communal spaces on a council estate and facilitating children’s communication through design. We discussed how actions can intersect with and support emergent frames in grassroots organising around the concept of a new economy, and where they might conflict. Design has traditionally ‘re-framed’ problems without challenging underlying hegemonic epistemologies that can undermine progress on sustainability, but critique is necessary to establishing alternative ways of building this ‘new economy’. In a similar way, the commons can function on assumptions of privilege, both in terms of capital – the expectation of free labour – and aesthetics – ideals of rewilded greenspace, for example, often suit the tastes of a certain demographic. Yet, at the same time, we recognised the need for synergy between different groups, while asking, à la Chantal Mouffe, is consensus even feasible, or indeed necessary?²

Such debates will continue to inform our project as we proceed with design research methods that are diachronic, norm-critical and dissensual.  The session gave us an opportunity to consolidate our research to-date, before we enter our next stage of field work with project partners Public Works, Citizens UK and ECHO. We were also able to trial some of our initial findings and design concepts in advance of the design anthropology workshop we are planning for the New Year. This workshop will use design concepts of mapping to convey and initiate a discussion on the relationships, tensions and contradictions between the range of frames that we identify in the field. 

1 Thorpe, A. (2019). Design Activism in the Context of Transport and Mobility. In Tom Bieling (Ed.), Design & Activism (First, pp. 198–202). Mimesis International.

2 Mouffe, C. (2016). Democratic Conflict and Politics: An Agonistic Approach. 9, http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/pc.12322227.0009.011

More information available here

Cottam, H. (2020). Welfare 5.0: Why we need a social revolution and how to make it happen.

Speaker: Dr Cindy Kohtala

(Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Design, Aalto University, FI)

Cindy Kohtala studies DIY makers who design, make, invent and innovate in shared community technology workshops (fab labs, makerspaces, hacklabs and other niche spaces), from a Science & Technology Studies perspective foregrounding design and socio-environmental sustainability. She examines makers’ techno-utopian imaginaries in enacting a ‘new industrial revolution’ and how makers self-organize and act to democratize and localize material production.

She also lectures and writes about design-for-sustainability, Product-Service System design, open design, co-design, distributed economies and design activism, and she has been involved in several urban activism initiatives in Helsinki. 

Speaker: Torange Khonsari

(Director Public Works, Course Leader MA Design for the Cultural Commons, The Cass)

Dr Torange Khonsari is Co-Founder and Director of the art and architecture practice Public Works since 2004, an interdisciplinary practice working on the threshold of participatory and performative art, architecture anthropology and politics. Her projects directly impact public space, working with local organisation, communities, government bodies and stakeholders. Torange has currently written and is course leader of Design for the Cultural Commons Masters at The Cass (London Metropolitan University). She has taught at international universities such as UMA school of architecture in Sweden, unit leader at Royal College of Arty – London, as well as a visiting professor at Barbican and Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Speaker: Dr Alison Powell

(Associate Professor Media and Communication, Director JUST AI Network at the Ada Lovelace Institute)

Alison Powell is the Director of the JUST AI network. She is Associate Professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. Her research examines how people’s values influence the way technology is built, and how ethics in practice unfolds in technology design contexts. Alison experiments with participatory and public engagement methods to investigate how we generate knowledge about technology, citizenship, and our futures.

Her previous projects include the Horizon 2020-funded VIRT-EU, which examined ways to develop ethics in practice among Internet of Things developer communities, and Understanding Automated Decisions, which considered the possibility and consequences of explaining how algorithms work using design methods and an interactive public exhibition. Alison also shares her insights about how people make knowledge about the city through ‘data walking’ – and her public writing at http://www.alisonpowell.ca. 

Speaker: Dr Maurizio Teli

(Associate Professor of Techno-Anthropology at the Aalborg University, Denmark)

Maurizio has been working in interdisciplinary teams for almost 15 years, focusing on the social and collaborative aspects of digital technologies. He has published at the international level throughout his career, and he has been involved in many conferences and journals in the field of participatory and co-design.

In 2018, he was General Co-Chair of PDC2018, the Participatory Design Conference. He has been involved in many international research projects. For example, he was Scientific Coordinator of the FP7 MIC-My Ideal City project (ga° 230554), a project using digital technologies to open up the curatorial process in science centers, and Research and Innovation Coordinator of the H2020 PIE News/Commonfare project (ga°687922): https://vbn.aau.dk/en/persons/144490.