Simone Ashby, who joined our team of NMD teachers this summer, has co-authored an essay in a very interesting book that was published last month. It will especially appeal to our (former) students who’ve enjoyed the design fiction assignment in the UX Design course (and to anyone who appreciates speculative design in general)!
The book is titled Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon. It is a volume of essays inspired by the revival of interest in Hannah Arendt and edited by Eduardo Staszowski (Parsons School of Design) and Virginia Tassinari (Politecnico di Milano). In her essay, which she wrote together with Julian Hanna, James Auger, and Sónia Matos, Simone wrote on the theme “Common World” — breaking it down for closer analysis into sub-themes such as “Common Time”, “Common Good”, and “Common Market”.
The book is part of a provocative new series, Designing in Dark Times / Radical Thinkers in Design, which is intended to “push at the boundaries of contemporary design thinking, responding to the world’s current and pressing social, economic, and environmental challenges and crises”. Forthcoming titles include Politics of the Everyday by Ezio Manzini and Designs to Reshape Humanity by Ann Light, as well as new editions of Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy by Tony Fry and Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.