Radical Intimacies: Designing Non-Extractive Relationalities

An extradisciplinary investigation into the radical potentials of design by the global Memefest network.
 
This book is an investigation of the key aspects of capitalist domination and resistance to it through design; its five sections explore dialogue, power, land, interventions, and radical praxis. Vodeb’s curated chapters engage radical intimacies with design and connects it with media, communication, and art. Radical intimacies imply a closeness to the world created through our relations, which work towards the decolonization of knowledge and the public sphere. The closeness is political as it involves qualities that constitute and enable an alternative and opposition to extractive relationalities imposed by capitalism.

Radical Intimacies connects frameworks on (de)colonization with the work of Memefest, a global network of people interested in social change through radical design. Bringing together original written and visual contributions from around the world, the collection connects universities, practitioners, and social movements. This book explores design as a central domain of thought and action concerned with the meaning and production of sociocultural life. Contributors are interested in design that operates outside the dominant social orders, narrow disciplines and extractive paradigms and imagines and builds new worlds and social relations.

This inter/extradisciplinary collection of original works will interest academics, students, artists, designers, activists, and adventurous professionals who are interested in the crossovers between design, arts, and social change.

Oliver Vodeb is an academic in the School of Design at RMIT University in Melbourne. He is the founder and principal curator of Memefest and Lipstick + Bread.