Welcome!

Designing Economic Cultures is a research project that sets out to investigate the relationship between socio-economic precarity and the production of socially and politically engaged design projects.

The fundamental question the project poses is:
how can designers, who through their work want to question and challenge the prevalent economic system, gain a satisfying degree of social and economic security without having to submit themselves to the commercial pressures of the market?  Read more ›

Construction site for non-affirmative practice

Constructive Dismantling

My Castle Is Your Castle

Carrotworkers’ Collective, an introduction

Two members of the Carrotworkers’ Collective, a London-based group of ex-interns, students, researchers and cultural workers, who regularly meet to think together around the conditions of free labour in contemporary societies, introduced us to their work and followed up the discussion with a workshop on the next day.


THINGS THAT CAME UP DURING THE DISCUSSION

– the Bologna-process reforming university made free-internships a way to get formative credits and has thus institutionalised free-labour;
– the difference between being employed and being occupied;
– welfare state vs. workfare state;
– we are governed by the carrot of our (induced) ambitions;
– we always work in the hope of being ‘discovered’ and of finally ‘making it’;
– the affective consequences of such a life;
– feeling like being trapped in an ubiquitous job interview;

Readings:
The counter-internship guide
Two connected articles by Marta Malo de Molina on the history of militant research

We would like to thank the Carrots for spending their time with us.