Beautiful Strangeness: Design as Activist
Mar 18, 2025
In a world caught between ecological collapse and social disparity, design can no longer remain neutral. It's time to move beyond aesthetics and functionality to something deeper, weirder, more beautiful. This is the realm of design activism, a form of critical imagining that doesn't just make products, but questions systems, nudges behaviors, and proposes bold new futures.
From Production to Provocation
For over 250 years, design has played a key role in materializing capitalism’s vision of progress converting nature and human effort into consumable, culturally acceptable forms. But that story is crumbling. As we face biodiversity loss, climate instability, and widespread inequality, the old design narrative must rupture. Design must now provoke rather than please, connect rather than consume.
What is Design Activism?
Design activism isn’t just about posters and protests. It’s about using design intentionally to create transformation social, ecological, cultural. From community-built infrastructure to speculative artefacts that challenge consumerism, it operates through participation, critical questioning, and co-creation.
It asks:
Who is design serving?
What futures are we enabling?
What needs to be un-designed?
A Designer’s Framework for Activism
Based on Fuad-Luke’s work, here’s a distilled, practical framework for UX and product designers:
1. Intentional Disturbance
Design as disruption. Use your work to question norms like overconsumption, planned obsolescence, or biased algorithms.
2. Co-Futuring
Design with not for communities, environments, or future generations. The goal is collective imagination.
3. Relational Making
Shift focus from product to process. Use methods that connect people, cultures, and ecologies.
4. Material Ethics
Consider every artefact as a carrier of social, ecological, and symbolic capital.
5. Symbolic Counterpower
Create artefacts that carry meaning—narratives that offer alternatives to dominant ideologies.
