From rhetoric to realpolitik: the optimism of design commons discourse

Commons and commoning have become distinct analytical and strategic devices for designers working with (and sometimes as) activists in social change.¹ This is salient in various arenas where design practitioners operate, such as the urban commons or digital commons. Urban commons refers to the collective maintenance of urban spaces, sustaining their ecologies, and defending them from privatization;² the digital commons involves efforts that range from maintaining free and open access to knowledge, information, and cultural production, to self-organizing the socio-ecological collaborative design of open hardware and software.³ In these design settings, social groupings engage in commoning, ‘the social practices and traditions that enable people to discover, innovate and negotiate new ways of doing things for themselves’.⁴ Academic design research on/with groups in the wild often adopts commons framings to differentiate from market-oriented service design: that is, as a community-oriented process articulated as autonomous, relational, situated, and locally sensitive.⁵