Radicalise Me

This volume investigates the use of the word ‘radical’ in design education, discourse and practice, tracing precedents, problems and challenges for the discipline. For the past fifteen years, there has been a consistent deterioration of democracy in tandem with the establishment of the marketisation and monetisation of design education. Design, with its expertise in window-display, has excelled in these wars, profiting with greater globalisation. Navigating difficult external political contexts in the middle of internal power struggles, design universities seem to be incapable of challenging political, social, cultural and environmental phenomena with the urgency that all of these demand. Swallowed by an ever-rolling snowball of neoliberal educational models, small gestures—either by defiant academics, occasional lectures and short workshops—have difficulty producing the kind of radical change that design education and climate crisis needs for our survival.

Radical is contextual. Always. But it seems that it’s in small educational projects, community initiatives and often-isolated academic resistance that resides an important force to question and offer alternatives to an hegemonic and myopic system of profit, rankings, credits and validation.
The following essays contribute to the debate about these dominant structures, while being sceptical of the trendiness of the word ‘radical’—traditionally a scaremongering term but also a cool and consumable device, as well as a beacon of hope. There is no doubt that design education needs profound, radical change. There is no doubt that this change will never be radical—or indeed substantial—if it adopts the universal, oppressive models that shaped design’s “principles” during the 20th century. There is no doubt that in radicality lay not only the future(s) of the discipline, but our own.