Designing Economic Cultures: Cultivating Socially and Politically Engaged Design Practices Against Procedures of Precarisation

Bianca Elzenbaumer

This practice-based doctorate sets out to investigate and intervene in the tense relation between the production of socially as well as politically relevant design work and the socio-economic precariousness many designers experience. Starting from an engagement with the precarious working conditions of designers, their genealogy over the last 30+ years and the role precarisation plays in forming docile creative subjects, the research moves on to a wider critique of the political economy and of its precarising value practices. Based on this analysis, it then considers the strategic use that can be made of concepts around the commons in order to undo procedures of precarisation.

Suggested citation

Elzenbaumer, Bianca. 2014. ‘Designing Economic Cultures: Cultivating Socially and Politically Engaged Design Practices Against Procedures of Precarisation’. London: Goldsmiths, University of London.