Towards Radical Design

Radical Spaces Lab is a participatory design project that delivers research and workshops focused around creating civic agency through investigative design and experimental methods. The project creates investigative design tools to interface with complex issues and systems in society and technology, creating critical insight and imagining possible alternatives. Our work focuses on four core aims:

Social action through civic imagination

The core focus of the project is to use design to empower people to have more agency and understanding in wider cultural systems. By enlisting communities as designers we can create new forms of participatory action through design.

Foster critical Inquiry

Critical Inquiry is a key investigative tool to understand and deconstruct our surrounding systems and experiences. By fostering an environment of investigation, teaching critical perspectives participants have the necessary tools for insight.

Create experimental approaches

Fundamentally we are interested in creating new experimental methods and pedagogical approaches to design, building a design literacy that is robust, experimental and engages with critical issues. By fostering an environment of experimentation we aim to create new processes of discovery and analysis.

Speculate alternatives

We want to use design as a tool to imagine alternatives and pluralities to the normative systems that govern the everyday. Through using design as a speculative tool communities can better shape and inform systems of democracy, difference and emancipation.