Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Introduction: Design and citizenship

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13621020903466233

1469-3593

Cynthia Weber,

Children's Rights and Participation

Abstract This article introduces design, citizenship and their relationships by contrasting two very different design projects on citizenship. The first is the collaborative project 'Touching the State', which was carried out by the publicly funded UK Design Council in collaboration with the independent think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research in 2004. The second is artist and designer Robert Ransick's project Casa Segura/Safe House. Bearing these two design projects in mind, the article suggests that if we want to better understand citizenship, we need to better understand how citizenship, citizens and those who are not (fully) counted as citizens are designed, re-designed, or designated as beyond the scope of design by states, professional designers, activists, citizens and citizen groups, and non-citizen and non-citizenship groups, in all the richly varied ways design and citizenship interact. The urgency in taking design seriously within the realm of citizenship studies is that design offers a new prism through which to address the political. The article then lays out how the contributions to this special issue examine citizenship in relation to the political through this new prism of design. Keywords: designcitizenshipTouching the StateCasa SeguraThe Political Acknowledgements This project grew out of a coupling of my interest in citizenship with an interest in design that my colleague Mark Lacy introduced into our discussions of security studies and science studies at Lancaster University. The result was a jointly run program Mark and I ran with our colleague Adrian MacKenzie through the Institute of Advanced Studies at Lancaster University during the 2007–2008 academic year called 'New sciences of protection: Designing safe living'. As part of that programme, I ran a stream called 'Designing safe citizens', where this project on design and citizenship began. For more information about the general program and the issues it raised, see the program website at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/isa/annualprogramme/protection/ and see the program blog at http://safeliving.wordpress.com/. Some of these papers were presented as part of that project. Additional papers were presented on a panel I organized on Design and Citizenship at the International Studies Association Annual Conference in San Francisco in 2008. In terms of this issue, I want to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their helpful comments, the numerous additional reviewers who reviewed articles for this special issue, Engin Isin and Peter Nyers for their on-going support of this project, and especially Daiva Stasiulis, who made invaluable contributions not only to this essay but to the overall issue in her capacity as the special issue oversight editor. Finally, I want to thank each of the contributors to this issue for generously taking up the challenge to think creatively about design, citizenship and their relationships. Notes 1. For a fuller sample of design recommendations, see Cottam et al. Citation2004, pp. 69–70. 2. The less benevolent ways that states 'touch' citizens are briefly mentioned in the report (see Cottam Citation2004, p. 8). But none of these less benevolent forms of touching inform either the choice of key moments to be analysed nor any of the design prototypes or design recommendations. 3. Cottam and Rogers insist that Touching the State is citizen centered because they take citizens as their starting point by interviewing citizens to find solutions to the problem of increasing citizen participation (Cottam Citation2004, p. 10). But because the problem they are trying to solve is given to them by their client, the British state, this makes their project state centered. 4. At the time of this writing, the structure has not yet been placed in the desert due to a lack of funding. 5. In this case, think, for example, of the 2005 'We are America' protests led by undocumented migrants working in the US. These marches, rallies, and one-day job boycotts were used to evidence the economic contribution undocumented migrants make to the US economy, as a way to lobby for a change in their status from illegal to legal workers, a move that would make them eligible to apply for US citizenship. 6. http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/en/Case-Studies/ [Accessed 10 October 2008]. 7. Acting compassionately is not always the first impulse of US citizens who encounter undocumented migrants. The prime example of a security approach rather than a compassionate approach to the undocumented is the Modern-day Minutemen, US citizen civilians who patrol primarily the US-Mexico border to inhibit undocumented migrants from entering the US. When the Minutemen come across undocumented migrants, they turn them over to US Border Patrol. See Doty (Citation2009).