Complementary Currency Design Through Debt
Community currencies are based upon cohesion between their members and often aim to circumvent issues related to a lack of monetary supply, particularly within more marginalized populations. Based on trust and an aim to secure the local economy, it can be said that these currencies re-frame money as...
Fit for Finance
Something seemed deadly about the »sardonic funeral towers of metropolitan finance«. In 1938, when Lewis Mumford was looking for the possibilities of creating form under the conditions of his time, what concerned him was the »fatal lack of connection between architecture and the dominant social s...
The Promise of the Creative Industries, Design Work and Livelihoods
In neoliberal times design has become an instrument of economic policy and commercial opportunity, more generally. This is in both its basic role in creating and controlling assets through intellectual property rights, and in its symbolic role as a leading innovator in the transformation of labour...
An Anticipated Pandemic & Post-Covid Design Economies
In an ideal world, designers would create ways of living to meet human needs and desires without undermining the climate system and contributing to the sixth extinction event. In the political system we inherited, designers work within an economic context that harnesses our skills to reproduce unsus...
“Top Up With Driver”: Entanglements of Design, Online Drivers, and Digital Money in Indonesia
“Belum bisa” the barista told me when I asked if I could pay for my coffee with a digital wallet. You can’t yet. It was one of my first weeks of fieldwork on digital payments in Yogyakarta, and I was confused because I had particularly selected this coffee shop after having seen it listed in the Ind...
Financial Reflections in The Uncanny Mirror
From a one dollar everyday item in a convenience store, to a holy object at an ancient shrine,the mirror is one of the most diverse cultural objects embedded within financial interpretations. To most, the mirror is used as a tool for personal care and is an essential part of our everyday lives....
The Split Subject of Speculative Discourse
Every discourse feeds an illusion—an image of a world without an unconscious— on the one hand and on the other produces a claim, for example the “I claim” or “I define” of philosophical discourse, statements that serve as the declaration of power of the master and his agents. What we’re concerned wi...
