ABSTRACT
Inequality is fundamental to capitalism. Designers have contributed to this by increasing value of goods and services, empowering the world’s richest 1% who have control over privately owned assets. This enables a small group of people to access the best education, jobs, and positions of authority, creating inequality of opportunity, exclusive privileges, and lack of heterogeneous voices in public and private decision-making processes. This supports centralised control of resources, economic instability, and environmental concerns and focuses population and job opportunities in urban areas. To address these issues, design researchers should develop alternatives to challenge the dominant paradigm by building resilient communities, where decentralisation of power, self-organisation, and cooperative values are facilitated through trust and co-design. That is, designing approaches rooted in more sustainable socioeconomic and political paradigms. One alternative way to overcome current issues that has attracted design researchers’, activists’, and practitioners’ interest is the design for commonism.
