Design Intelligence #27: Designing resistance
As governments move to the right and the corrosive consequences of technofeudalism increase, protest and collective action are rising in parallel.
The idea: The art of protest
As of 2025, more countries are living under authoritarian governments than democratic governments. Autocracies have risen to 91 countries while democracies have fallen to 88. In percentage terms, the shift is more stark: less than 12% of people worldwide live in a liberal democracy - the lowest proportion in fifty years - while 72% live under autocratic rule. And even in democratic countries, protest is being cracked down on.
At the same time, people are becoming more aware of the growing control that big technology companies (and their billionaire owners) have over media, communication, digital infrastructure, and increasingly, politics. A wave of creative protest and collective action is rising in response.
As data surveillance, facial recognition and AI become more pervasive across everyday life, tools and techniques that block recognition and dismantle the technologies are swelling in number and in use - from make-up that blocks facial recognition to clothes that scramble the view of the machine. In San Francisco, as driverless cars have become a symbol of Big Tech’s careless dominance, protesters have been vandalising the cars and putting traffic cones onto their hoods to immobilise them.
Following in the tradition of change-making performance art by groups such as the Yes Men, artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s projects explore sabotage as a tool for climate action. Their work includes encouraging people to phone fossil fuel executives and purposefully waste their time; bots that trawl the web to click on ads in climate news articles to incentivise the media to publish more of them; and carbon ‘offsets’ that transfer money to climate activists who’ve engaged in direct action.
In fashion, which has a long and storied history of pushing for social justice by way of creative protest, advocates for trans rights have embraced designer Conner Ives’ Protect the Dolls t-shirt. After being worn by high-profile cultural figures including actor Pedro Pascal, the tees have repeatedly sold out, raising over $700,000 for Trans Lifeline.
Writing recently in Dezeen, Susan Yelovich, professor emeritus at Parsons The New School in New York, called for a new wave of more collective design activism. “Whatever emerges needs to be compelling enough to galvanize the public imagination – be it in protest (e.g. the raised fist) and/or in hope (e.g. the rainbow flag). It needs to bring together the resistance bubbling up from town meetings, from the streets, from campuses and from the less-visible grumblings at the proverbial kitchen table.”
Protest is not only opposition; it can be proposition. It offers a way to suggest and design new possibilities, and is often the catalyst for the beginnings of new systems. Protest plays a key role in shifting the Overton Window, a political theory of public acceptability that also determines our ‘consensus futures’, by introducing and normalising ideas. There are many ways to influence where ideas sit within the Overton Window and whether they are perceived as ‘radical’ or ‘acceptable’ by the general public. One of these is activism. Another, less widely-acknowledged, catalyst for social change is art.
Olafur Eliasson has spent much of his career exploring how to affect perception: how to shift light, colour, and points of view. With Ice Watch (2014 onwards), he installed melting ice in high-traffic public spaces to put passersby in dialogue with the physical reality of climate breakdown. As he has said: “art is not the object, but what the object does to the world.”
🎤 My work
Listen to me on the Leeds Sanctuary podcast discussing Designing Hope, collective action, climate resilience and my favourite theory of change, the Overton Window
I ran a futures thinking workshop for a cancer care charity, looking at futures for fundraising. The participants synthesised an impressive array of interesting areas of change, including analog interactions and legacy giving
I was honoured to give a guest lecture to MDes Design Futures students at the Royal College of Art, discussing futures ethics and how to both widen and extend our thinking
I’m now starting to book talks and workshops for January onwards. If you’d like me to speak with your group, let me know!
🗒️ Research notes
The current mood in climate action is shifting to sit somewhere between pragmatism and hope. Fuelled by Bill Gates’ controversial memo on where to focus investment, climate leaders are reflecting on substantial progress since the Paris Agreement ten years ago: projected temperature rises have been lowered by 40%, from 4C to 2.8C, in that time. Fossil fuel use is plateauing and the goal to triple renewable capacity by 2030 is on track. They’re also celebrating the solar boom, which has taken off at 4x the rate that was projected. But at the same time, nowhere near enough progress is being made, and we are still heading in the wrong direction. Action remains urgent, and needs to accelerate
High levels of innovation in renewable energy continue, not only in deployment but in design. Chinese company Ming Yang has developed a two-headed wind turbine that could lower the cost of generating wind power by up to four-fifths compared to offshore wind in Europe
Change happens slowly then quickly. 780 new EV charging stations were added in the US in the past three months - the fastest rise on record - contributing to a 19% increase in the country’s charging infrastructure this year
Climate change mitigation has to come with adaptation to the changes we will live through. Singapore exhibition Hot Bodies shows ten creative responses to life in extreme heat, including a UPF cape and a self-conditioning cocoon
Apple doesn’t own the future in the way it once did, but its big bets still say a lot about the tech industry’s images of the future. The company’s product launches up to 2027 will reportedly include an indoor security camera, a home control hub and a tabletop robot
🌃 Interesting products
Tunisian automotive start-up Bako Motors’ dinky new two-seat car, the Bee, has a solar panel roof that can power it for about 50% of the time, and a battery for the rest of its energy needs
This feels like a speculative design project become real. Environmental charity Hubbub has created the Ballot Bin, which encourages people to vote on topical issues when they throw away their rubbish. Shown to reduce litter by 60-70% within a 20-metre radius, the solar-powered bins demonstrate that behaviour change can be much more effective when “you invite people to take part in something playful and topical”, per Hubbub CEO Alex Robinson
In other creative product marketing news: Ikea created tiny versions of its beds to hold smartphones overnight, awarding store vouchers to people who were able to leave their phones undisturbed in the beds for seven nights in a row
🐌 Listening
This is the most fascinating podcast I have ever listened to. Episode 238 of Knowing Animals: Snail Stories with Thom Van Dooren