Decentralizing Statecraft
In 2018 I applied for digital citizenship in Estonia. I did this primarily because of my ambitions to develop a social enterprise that would have global reach and enable me to be a tech-nomad seeking to distribute accessible technologies to the global majority. At that time, I was primarily interested in Platform Cooperatives and the shared-ownership and governance discourse that was growing as a result of modifying these tried and true organizational forms with emerging technologies. This intersected with research that was happening in Maker Spaces, Web3, and the Social & Solidarity Economy. Actors like Zebras Unite, Mondragon, Doc Servizi, and the University of Colorado, Boulder kept appearing in view. My imagination around how the art of governance (statecraft) could become a cultural constant for all designers, cultural producers, and tech practitioners was piqued. Taking the agency for governance away from outdated and largely unpopular institutions which tend to be more the source of the problem than a resolution to the wicked problems of our time and of the future.
I reached out to 15 different actors pursuing projects that embodied the new spirit of cooperativism that was in relationship to modern cultural and technological projects. These interviews allowed me to identify patterns of resistance to these progressive models of power distribution and resource allocation. Those narrative barriers, as I called them, started to surface the importance of world-making in shaping the perceived-capabilities of the cultural and creative economy actors who would be the most-likely to adopt a new vision of the world and labor towards its production. The question evolved to — what is the minimum viable experience that a worker needs to have in order to believe in democracy in the workplace? Economic Democracy? Trust in democratic principles, and the engagement with their fellow human and non-human counterparts?
The questions about which levers of influence could facilitate a cybernetic catalyst towards systems change became, as one might expect, nebulous and expansive. Theorists like Elinor Ostrom situated that exploration and started to pick away at the presumed narratives of Neoliberal Capitalism — man was not inherently selfish (when given a true choice, let’s say), that the human world was not separate from the natural world, and that the market was not the only true representation of human want. Heeding the work of authors like Viktor Papanek, E.F. Schumacher, and Paolo Freire in wanting to ensure that global inclusivity is in frame for the knowledge that my work will produce was a necessary complicating vector for the ability to draw from existing bodies of work which would remain applicable.
Techno-anarcho-syndicalism
To seed a techno-anarcho-syndicalist system of knowledge production is a “chicken and egg” problem. Do we design solution first or do we build community first? In the Working Classics Series, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice written by Rudolf Rocker and last updated in 2004, I found resonance for the types of systems change that spoke to the constantly emerging interest in Web3, DAOs, Blockchains, and AI. Ownership was a key to the problem that must be redesigned.
Through the production of a textbook chapter (forthcoming in 2025) published by Bloomsbury and co-authored by my colleague and mentor Lara Penin, we positioned Worker-Centered Service Design as a logical next step in advancing the growing field and discipline of Service Design. Grounding the expansiveness of my own transdisciplinary work, I was asking if this switch from user- or customer-centeredness went far enough in pushing the boundaries towards a preferred future of design in which social, environmental, and economic justice would be achievable. Interviewed by researcher Matthew Wizinsky, in 2023, the following content and quotations were the outcome of our exchange:
** Rashid Owoyele is a Berlin-based designer whose work and research blend service design and social innovation. In our interview, Owoyele shared their career journey, emphasizing how they transitioned from environmental science to design, driven by a desire to create transformative change. They expressed disillusionment with the limitations of design within capitalist structures, arguing that design embedded in capitalism will inevitably perpetuate exploitation. Instead, Owoyele advocated for alternative models like cooperatives, commons, and platform cooperativism, emphasizing a fundamental shift in “the rules of the game” to achieve true social justice and ecological change. Owoyele’s vision involves building networks and fostering collaboration among diverse groups engaged in postcapitalist experiments, highlighting the importance of shifting power dynamics and redefining value systems to create a more equitable and sustainable future.
“When it comes to social innovation, often the most useful thing is something that has been right in front of you the whole time but in a different context.”
“There is no other role that the human in human-centered design can play other than consumer.”
One of the biggest takeaways from my conversation with Owoyele was the limitation of new methods or tools within existing institutions. They said (paraphrasing):
“I’m making the assertion that design embedded within a capitalist institution’s or organization’s DNA is going to replicate extractive, exploitative, marginalization effects NO MATTER WHAT! This is how the environment is designed. These are the rules we set in place for humans to interact with whatever materials and situations they encounter. The rules of the game ARE the problem.”
This starkly indicates that attempts towards “new ways of designing” within existing institutions whose function is to operate in a capitalist paradigm (compete, exploit, grow) will be limited by this “DNA.” Owoyele took a strong position on this point. It was valuable to hear how this perspective came from diverse experiences working on social innovation projects in the United States and Europe. This clear articulation of “the rules of the game ARE the problem” helped me to see that “new ways of designing” (as described by Transition Design) will also necessitate “new institutions of designing.” **
The boundaries of design, institutionalism, and systems thinking blurred and converging to encompass the next space of my personal academic and practice-based endeavors; I set out to develop a company as a legal testing bed for the things that I was learning. Transekt UG was created in 2024 in Berlin, Germany. With this new entity I started to seek networks of actors with whom alignment about progressive approaches and frameworks for ethical production might be of synergistic dynamics. One initiative that emerged was Represented Institute — the global institute for equitable and just design. This informal entity would seek to build a platform cooperative for BIPOC and queer creatives and transformative practitioners across sectors and disciplines in pursuit of the design of products, services, organizations, and institutions of equity and justice.
Emergent Technologies and Producer-Ownership of Data and Labor
As I had just received a certificate in Platform Design Facilitation from Boundaryless, I aimed to lead that process with the early joiners of the community. I had overlooked one of the core learnings from earlier iterations of this idea. Specifically, in 2019, I had convened a group of 30 young creatives in Berlin under the initiative I called Society of Owners. That lesson was, more or less, that ownership (specifically shared-ownership) can not be given. Shared ownership has to be claimed, and for something to be claimed, it has to be first deeply understood, and then desired, even coveted. So after a failed attempt to initiate this process of co-design, I retreated for some months to ideate about another approach. In late 2024 I initiated the second iteration of the Represented Cafe experience in which I invited professionals from the network to share their work and tie it to the vision of a cooperative future for the community.
Again, only a fraction of the 115 member community engaged in the series in a meaningful way, consistently. When I introduced an option to donate a 1 to 10 Euro contribution in order to be able to maintain the costs of the technology to host and record the sessions, a precipitous drop off in engagement followed. So here, in early 2025 I am asking a whole new batch of questions. Sorting through those questions trying to surface the most empirically testable for continuing with my academic and practice-based work. Applied Design Culture and Theoretical Framing for the development of new Pedagogical approaches to driving the agency of the next generations of designers has become one of the desired outcomes of my work. To achieve this though, I require guidance and resources to be able to more deeply reach the networks of Design Justice, Design Research Society, Social Innovators, Social Entrepreneurs and Design Educators who could actively engage in furthering this work.
To establish a distributed and decentralized network of actors who are included economically in the reimagination of global-scale systems requires an appreciation for and endurance of complexity which has been traditionally educated away from disciplinary excellence. Each discipline using limited terminologies to enclose their knowledge and practical applications from others in pursuit of rewards in a system that at its core is already harmful. The rules of the game, the dynamics of interaction, the very nature of relationships all need to be redesigned. Help me to further develop this practice-based exploration and the definition of a design culture that is post-capitalist, anti-colonial, and transcendent of disciplinary boundaries so that we might plant a seed in the stars for a global system of production that prioritizes the common good and rewards those who depart from universality in the productive growth of pluriversal means of organizing anthropogenic and natural system interrelatedness.
