Designing for Dissent

Explore how design as a practice is a revolutionary force.

Featuring Guest Editor Rania Adwan, The Dissent Issue explores how creative resistance, spatial justice, and intentional refusal intersect with design to challenge failing institutional systems. Featured topics include art and performance as a medium for protest, confronting systemic racism in architecture, and community-led advocacy in disability and care.

“Every day, as designers, we shape how people move through the world. Design has always been a revolutionary act — one that can challenge power, preserve memory, build community, and imagine alternatives. Dissent rarely appears out of nowhere. It is inherited, adapted, and passed forward. This issue is an atlas of that force, charting where it’s been, where it’s emerging, and where it might take us next.“

— Rania Adwan, From the Editor.

The Dissent Issue features:

• An excerpt from Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area by Rae Alexandra of KQED;

• A conversation with Guest Editor Rania Adwan and Sabiha Basrai—designer, organizer, and co-owner of Design Action
  Collective—about twenty years at the intersection of graphic
  design and social justice;

• The visual strategies and graphic histories of social movements by Melissa Casburn;

• The role of art and design as levers of political resistance by Nick Cheney of Blackfish Gallery;

• Care as dissent, wherein individuals become “positive deviants” within existing systems by Rachael Dietkus;

• The value of disagreement for driving fresh perspectives, stronger bonds, and sharper decision-making by Zoe Donaldson of The Ready;

• A digital platform documenting and amplifying the work of DC-based Black artists and designers by Eden Elam;

• Resistance to the physical world through the digital space by Corrina Espinosa & Molly Valentine Dierks;

• A visual examination of design strategies to support protest movements by Tyler Galloway;

• Unpacking race, inequity, and public interventions in the built environment by Jacquelyn Iyamah;

• Navigating collective grief, resistance, and the power of dissent through vulnerability by Anna Johannes, PLY;

• The Palette of Dissent: An Introduction to Emergent Dynamics by Tyfahra Milele, PhD;

• Dissent against the fast fashion industry’s normalized systems of environmental destruction and labor extraction by Jocelyn Rice;

• Play as a tool for civic dissent, social equity, and community empowerment by Ryan Swanson and Maeghann Coleman of The Urban Conga;

• Resilience as an active discipline in the face of ongoing systemic challenges by Tracy Swyst.

Purchase The Dissent Issue and/or subscribe to Unfold to receive stories about creative thought leaders who are using design to change the world.