Designing in Dark Times

Eduardo Staszowski is Associate Professor of Design Strategies at Parsons School of Design, USA, and Director/co-founder of the Parsons DESIS Lab, USA. Working to enhance participation in policy development and civic design, he studies design as a method and language, and its role as an intermediary, creating, and orienting processes of social innovation and sustainability. Virginia Tassinari is Assistant Professor at LUCA School of Arts, Belgium, where she also founded the LUCA DESIS Lab; Visiting Professor at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and a design researcher for Pantopicon, an Antwerp-based foresight and design studio. Her research areas are design and philosophy, with a specific focus on design for social innovation, participatory design and design activism.

Series Foreword: The Urgency of the Possible

Preface: On Hannah Arendt Kenneth Frampton

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Eduardo Staszowski and Virginia Tassinari
I: Hannah Arendt & Designing in Dark Times
II: The Lexicon

A
Action, Activism, Alienation, Animal Laborans, Animal rationale, Anthropocentrism

B
Beginnings, Bourgeois, Bureaucracy

C
Citizenship, Common good, Common interests, Common world, Comprehension, Courage, Creativity

D
Democracy

E
Equality, Evil

F
Fabrication, Freedom

H
History, Homo Faber, Human rights, Humanity

I
Imagination (by Hannah Arendt), Imperialism

Insert: Martha Rosler, Reading Hannah Arendt (Politically, for an American in the 21st Century)

In-between, Instrumentality

L
Labor, Law

M
Metabolism, Mortality

N
Natality

O
Objectivity

P
Pariah, Play, Plurality, Power, Private realm, Public

R
Reification

S
Solitude, Speech, Spontaneity, Stories, Superfluity

T
Technology, Thought, Thoughtlessness, Togetherness, Totalitarianism

V
Violence, Vita Activa, Vita Contemplativa

Afterword: Richard J. Bernstein, The Illuminations of Hannah Arendt

List of Contributors