Initiated by the ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment (Volkshuisvesting, Ruimtelijke Ordening en Milieu) of the Netherlands and housed within the faculty of architecture at the Delft University of Technology, the chair of Design as Politics will be exploring, researching and defining the boundaries, commonalities and tensions between the fields of politics and design.
The chair understands politics in the widest sense possible: it defines it as that level in society on which conflicting interests of groups of people become visible and are being solved, oftentimes through debate and negotiation, but possibly by exerting power or using physical violence. The political consequently implies succeeding in formulating a description of society in which certain interests are consciously given higher values than others, and the skilled use of a toolset to physically enforce this descriptive approach.
The chair of Design & Politics does not consider design and politics to be two seperated worlds, but rather considers politics to be an important dimension of design and, simultaneously, design an equally important tool for political action. An alternative name for the chair could thus be ‘Design as Politics’. This means that the toolset of the designer will be renewed by looking at the realm of politics, while the spatial perspective of developments in society will be considered to enrich the existing set of political instruments. The chair is explicitly looking for alternatives for classical top-down planning methods and control mechanisms, through which governments have manifested themselves in the 20th century.
