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Making Trouble

Design and Material Activism
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Making Trouble explores how makers and designers use material creativity to challenge established power structures and state laws. By examining contentious practices like lock-picking, moonshining, and sabotage, the book reveals how even basic tools and crafts can become acts of civic resistance and political agency. Through diverse cases, it illustrates how design transcends mere aesthetics to become a form of radical activism.
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Format: Paperback / softback
$4099
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book is ideal for readers interested in the intersections of design, politics, and social activism, including scholars, makers, and activists seeking to explore creative resistance through craft and design.

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Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Making Trouble 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.

Series: Designing in Dark Times

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  • Design and the Social Imagination
    How can social theory help us all design solutions to address the social, political, and ecological challenges that confront us, and build more sustainable communities? Design professions have typically been associated with intervention and action, while social science has long been associated with thought and reflection. Design and social thought are too frequently considered distinct in terms of how theories...
    Paperback
    $3899
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Making Trouble
    Making Trouble 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...
    Paperback
    $4099
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Making Trouble is praised for profoundly reshaping perspectives on activism, design, and politics. Stellan Vinthagen hails it as a transformative work that urges readers to rethink their life and design practices. Victoria Hattam calls it a beautifully written and original intervention that is destined to be a classic in interdisciplinary scholarship and political activism.

Book Hero reading reviews

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781350162549

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 10 March 2022

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts

Illustration: 42 bw illus

Audience: Tertiary education

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 15.0mm

Width: 124.0mm

Height: 196.0mm

Weight: 280g

Pages: 256

About the Author

Otto von Busch is Associate Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design, USA. He holds a PhD in design from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and was previously Professor of Textiles at Konstfack University, Sweden. He has published articles in The Design Journal, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, Fashion Practice, CoDesign Journal, The Journal of Modern Craft, Textile Cloth and Culture, Craft Research, Organizational Aesthetics, Creative Industries Journal and the Journal for Artistic Research, and has contributed chapters on design activism to The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design (2017), The Routledge Companion to Design Research (2015), The Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion (2014), as well as other design anthologies.

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