Ebook: Making Trouble: Design and Material Activism

Otto von Busch examines how power is and can be manifested through the material practice of craft and design. Whereas the state's power takes concrete form in infrastructure such as roads, bridges, pipes, walls, fences, cables, and cameras, craft objects and craft practice can be used to challenge the power of the capitalist state. Von Busch draws on the political philosophy of William Morris, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Zapatistas to trace crafting's radical potential to disrupt the apparatus of market and state. His case studies of radical crafting around the world include craft practices so controversial they are outlawed: moonshining, lock-picking, shoplifting, smuggling, sabotage, Molotov cocktails and other DIY weapons, medical clinics that operate outside state control, and the manufacture of unlicensed medicine in the context of unaffordable pharmaceuticals.
Von Busch then turns to more positive and hopeful examples of a radical craft practice, drawing on the ideas of what crafts teacher William Coperthwaite calls "socially valid design," where the cultivation of skills and capabilities intersects with the development of civic praxis and social justice. Referencing the infamous CIA Freedom Fighter's Manual alongside the classic Anarchist Cookbook, he explores how craft can disseminate civic skills and autonomy instead of violence. The book concludes on a hopeful note on how designers can help materialize political "thing-power" as part of a strategic progress towards more democratic incarnations of the civic realm, and ultimately use "socially valid" design and craft to work towards justice and peace.