Dark Designs: Critical Cases on Design in Dark Times

There is something rotten in design. Something dark, uncanny and corrupt, lurking under the user-friendly and sugar-coated surfaces of everyday consumerism. This book is a collection of cases that examine design from a perspective of political realism, emerging from the course “Design in Dark Times” at Parsons School of Design. The texts engage with design in its most quotidian forms, exposing its deceptive and crooked operations, and how design contributes to a distributed darkness enfolding our world. The essays explore and discuss a political realism of design, to uncover some of design’s deception and broken promises, how they all are part of our dark times. Most of the texts engage everyday life with consumer goods, apps and services in a city like New York. Here, the reality of the dark times is not ignored or escaped, but must continuously be acknowledged, examined and challenged in order for designers to open new frontiers that best support a perhaps somber natality, yet still imbued with refreshed affirmations of hope.