Designing Futures in Indonesia

Design is a wide reaching and unruly idea, often associated with seamless global mobility, ubiquitous consumerism, elite urban tastes, and fast paced economic growth. But design is also increasingly understood to be operating at edges, as a necessary response to the ethical and political challenges of advanced global capitalism. Design is both the problem and the solution, and effects everything. As Tony Fry writes ‘Design–the designer and designed objects, images, systems and things–shapes the form, operation, appearance and perceptions of the material world we occupy' (2009: 3). This curated issue takes as its departure point Fry’s notion that design broadly shapes the world we occupy. To ask what happens when the world we occupy is not conceived simply in terms of local issues and solutions, but rather as a set of shared concerns that are localised and play out through global flows. To do so this issue presents ten contributions from Indonesia.