Daunted by design: creating tools of slow violence

Abstract

Design today is tackling increasingly complex societal issues; however, it is also prone to instrumentalisation in this endeavour. This paper examines how design practice and solutions can become a tool for daunted managerialism, a form of slow violence that conceals, prolongs, and even reinforces the complex and interwoven sources of social and environmental harm. It argues that design problem-solution spaces are often constructed with naturalised norms and subjectivities, which can lead to design processes and outcomes that incite cruel optimism, prioritise certain harms over others, and become tools for governing precarity. This argument is illustrated with examples from different domains of design addressing complex societal issues, such as sustainable design, social design, humanitarian design, and participatory design. We propose that design outcomes should not be regarded as solutions, but as intermediaries of engagement that can facilitate sociological and political imaginations that empower society in general, and marginalised people and communities specifically, to resist and transform violent systems.