Making Trouble: Design and Material Activism

Making hacks into reality. It engages matter in ways that trespass the boundaries between the civic realm and the state-assigned laws. Even with primitive tools and skills, designing and making can break open and repurpose arrangements of power. The proof is that some crafts are so controversial-lock-picking, moonshining, shoplifting, smuggling, sabotage-that they need to be controlled or even outlawed. When designers and makers touch on these contested realms, they run into trouble. This highly original book explores how the material power of design and making can challenge arrangements of agency and domination. Unpacking a series of conflicting cases-from illegal making to the strategic and civic use of crafts to manifest radical alternatives to the current order-it shows how designers and makers can use even basic tools to work towards more.

Otto von Busch is Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design, USA. His publications include The Psychopolitics of Fashion (2020), The Dharma of Fashion (2020), Making Trouble: Design and Material Activism (2022), the co-edited volume Silhouettes of the Soul (with Jeanine Viau, 2022), the co-authored The Corruption of Co-Design: Political and Social Conflicts in Participatory Design Thinking (with Karl Palmås, 2023), and The Design Comedy: The Descent Through Inferno (2025).

Clive Dilnot is professor of Design Studies at Parsons The New School for Design, New York, USA. Recent publications include Ethics? Design? (2005) and the text for Chris Killip: Pirelli Work (2007).

Eduardo Staszowski is Professor of Design Strategies at Parsons School of Design and Director of the Parsons DESIS Lab, USA. He is the co-editor of the Designing in Dark Times, Radical Thinkers in Design, and Beyond the Modern series, and Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (Bloomsbury, 2020).