Redirective design politics: Attachments as sites of rupture

This study engages with the paradox that, by being inherently political, design simultaneously compartmentalises agency and secures participation through attachments to values that shape our identities. In social design, attachments are perceived as ontological associations that are leveraged for technical capacities and devices in social issues, but the affective values they circulate and the politics these may perpetuate remain unexplored. More existentialist views have charged design with displacing attachments by perpetuating renewal but stop short of understanding what attachments hold and secure. Drawing on three citizen-led political movements and organisations in Romania and Hungary, and employing theoretical resources from political and affect theories, science and technology and social movement studies, this thesis examines how design contributes to collective agency. By considering the role of attachments as a threshold for redirective practices, it explores the experience of participation by the collectives and the action potential they construct, in deliberate and spontaneous ways, to change the terms and conditions of participation within the political system. Insofar as attachments mobilise capacities, the citizen designer or design activist is also subject to the conditions revealed in this study. By deconstructing attachments through the intensities and effects, elements and moments that form the manifest content of design action, the study develops a framework through orientation within the affective register, guiding the reader through the sets of relations and the repertoires that iterate commitments between the individual and collective. The thesis contributes to critiques of design’s hegemonic epistemes that are embedded in liberal knowledge systems and that perpetuate the field’s critique in-and-of-itself, suggesting that the innate desires of design politics are subject to the contradictory promises held within attachments that settle a sense of democratic belonging, in this context through the nation state.