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# Design as a Strategy of Disobedience and Dissent
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/cruel-design-disobedient-design-interference-archive/
- Published: 2018-04-03T11:01:15.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:10:36.000Z
- Description: Design, according to a public talk in Brooklyn, has the potential to reflect and even remedy pressing social problems.
- Author: Daniel A. Gross
- Tags: Art, Events, Interference Archive, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-18 14:37 (2018)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/04/mw_riotid_00011.jpg)

A printout from the downloadable RiotID pocket book, which helps users track the use of riot gear across the world. (courtesy Interference Archive, MinuteWorks, and RiotID)

A few years ago, [a display of “disobedient objects”](https://hyperallergic.com/175102/the-designs-of-dissent/) went up at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. It included political video games, defaced currency, banners, and an [inflatable “general assembly”](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200334196/inflatable-general-assembly?ref=hyperallergic.com) for activist gatherings like Occupy Wall Street. Design, the show suggested, has the potential to reflect and even remedy pressing social problems. Of course, other objects — from [chemical mace](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/forgotten-history-mace-designed-29-year-old-and-reinvented-police-weapon-180953239/?ref=hyperallergic.com) to surveillance technology to rubber bullets — are designed to control. These objects bounce off each other, sometimes literally, in what could be called a design arms race between the resistance and the resisted.

This week, a free public talk at the Interference Archive in Brooklyn, “[Cruel Design/Disobedient Design — The Art and Politics of Designing for Social Justice](http://interferencearchive.org/cruel-design-disobedient-design-the-art-and-politics-of-designing-for-social-justice/?ref=hyperallergic.com),” will discuss design from both sides. A co-curator of the V&A’s *Disobedient Objects* exhibition, [Gavin Grindon](https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/grind91800/gavin-grindon?ref=hyperallergic.com), will take part. So will the progressive design studio [Minute Works](http://www.minuteworks.co.uk/?ref=hyperallergic.com) and [Anna Feigenbaum](http://annafeigenbaum.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com), a Principal Academic in Digital Storytelling at Bournemouth University who coordinates the [RiotID project](http://riotid.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com). According to Interference Archive’s event description, design can do more than influence specific objects: “Engaging in civic and participatory design can foster infrastructures of resistance, shape social movement cultures, and innovate tactics that spread around the world.”

![Installation view, 'Disobedient Objects' at the Victoria and Albert Museum, with a view of the inflatable cobblestones (all images courtesy the Victoria and Albert Museum)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/01/2014hd3918.jpg)

Installation view, Disobedient Objects at the Victoria & Albert Museum (courtesy the Victoria & Albert Museum)

**When:** Thursday, April 5, 7-9pm  
**Where:** Interference Archive (314 7th Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn, New York)

*More info at* [*Interference Archive*](http://interferencearchive.org/cruel-design-disobedient-design-the-art-and-politics-of-designing-for-social-justice/?ref=hyperallergic.com)*.*