Ideas Arrangements Effects

Ideas are embedded in social arrangements, which in turn produce effects. With this simple premise, this radically accessible systems design book makes a compelling case for arrangements as a rich and overlooked terrain for social justice and world building. Unpacking how ideas like racism and sexism remain sturdy by embedding themselves in everything from physical and social infrastructure to everyday speech and thought habits, this book gives readers the tools to sense, intervene in and imagine new arrangements. Using diverse examples from their work and others, DS4SI offers readers a roadmap for using social interventions to invite the larger public into imagining and creating a more just and vibrant world. 'Throughout their work, DS4SI strives to enact the principle that design is not just about problem-solving within existing paradigms and social orders, it is about world building, about imagining and constructing new territories of life and difference... This is design's imagination at its best, the grounds for a genuinely transformative design praxis. It is a route to disclosing new worlds and bringing them into existence.' -- Arturo Escobar, author of Designing the Pluriverse. 'As we face this dire moment of climate change, tyranny, mass extinction and international war on the global scale, and poverty, housing shortages, and stagnant wages at home, we need tools that we can use to address these problems, and it can't be just the same old tools we've been using all along. This is where this excellent guide to ideas-arrangements-effects comes in.' -- Mindy Thompson Fullilove, author of Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It.