Introduction: Design and citizenship

Abstract

This article introduces design, citizenship and their relationships by contrasting two very different design projects on citizenship. The first is the collaborative project ‘Touching the State’, which was carried out by the publicly funded UK Design Council in collaboration with the independent think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research in 2004. The second is artist and designer Robert Ransick's project Casa Segura/Safe House. Bearing these two design projects in mind, the article suggests that if we want to better understand citizenship, we need to better understand how citizenship, citizens and those who are not (fully) counted as citizens are designed, re-designed, or designated as beyond the scope of design by states, professional designers, activists, citizens and citizen groups, and non-citizen and non-citizenship groups, in all the richly varied ways design and citizenship interact. The urgency in taking design seriously within the realm of citizenship studies is that design offers a new prism through which to address the political. The article then lays out how the contributions to this special issue examine citizenship in relation to the political through this new prism of design.

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