A really interesting concept I hadn’t considered before was one of the first things Monteiro talks about in the book. The idea is that design is inherently a political act. Monteiro rationalises this through the discovery process of design where a designer chooses who to design for, who not to design for, and what to design. I suppose what Monteiro means by this is that design is political in the sense that designers are always making decisions, and every decision can be equated to a political stance on something.

Where this becomes more political in the social sense is who we design for. For example, when a designer chooses to design for a specific user group, they’ve also decided to exclude another group from consideration. The political problem then arises when social and economic factors sway the user group you’ve identified. It’s common that through views of the world, certain groups will get left out of consideration in design. I think when designing we need to consider a spectrum of users rather than one marginalised group.

Through this idea of designing for specific users, we are inherently political in the way that political parties are appealing to certain groups of people. What this means to us as designers is that we need to consider how our work marginalises and excludes people and work against that, rather than just how we include them.