Designing against Infrastructures of Harm: Introduction

This special issue has a kind of origin story, even if we don’t really believe in those, per se. In 2014, as a faculty member at Parsons School of Design/The New School, I (Shana) proposed a course for the University’s shared undergraduate curriculum with an extraordinarily long title: Worldmaking: Design and Designing in Social and Political Contexts. These classes bring together students from across most of The New School’s undergraduate programs, including the art, design, and business majors at Parsons; the liberal arts majors at Eugene Lang; and the jazz and drama majors at the College of Performing Arts. The idea for the class had grown from my experiences as a community organizer, my still-new practice teaching a service design studio at Parsons, and an article I’d written – for this journal (2012) – that was my first attempt to understand questions that had emerged at this intersection and wouldn’t let me go: What happens in the process of designing things (systems, services, spaces, objects, images) that encourages professional designers – and design students – to Shana Agid, Parsons School of Design (The New School). agids@newschool.edu Paula Austin, Boston University. pcaustin@bu.edu