This document discusses how designers can transform precarious working conditions through biopolitical production and the commons. It notes that precarious conditions include low pay, lack of benefits, isolation, and an inability to plan ahead. The author argues that designers produce subjectivities and the common, which is neither private nor public but governed by people. However, open design practices do not often challenge how economic value is distributed. The document concludes that linking design production to concerns of justice can help create new economic subjects and cultures that reduce precarity.

1. PRECARIOUS DESIGNERS AND THE TRANSFORMATIVE
POTENTIAL OF BIOPOLITICAL PRODUCTION AND
THE COMMONS
Cumulus Conference, Politecnico di Milano, 04.06.2015
Bianca Elzenbaumer / Brave New Alps/ @bravenewalps
Junior Research Fellow, Leeds College of Art, UK
Access text: http://tinyurl.com/qgzfakl

2. In this text, I draw on noncapitalist and anticapitalist
notions and practices – mainly by Michael Hardt &
Antonio Negri, Judith Revel and J.K. Gibson-Graham –
to trace ways in which designers can transform
conditions of precariousness and precarisation.

3. Precarious (working) conditions to be transformed
bulimic work patterns, low pay, work in isolation,
no paid vacations, no or only minimal social protection,
no sick-leave, work taking over life, work-related health
issues, no unemployment compensation, innability to
plan ahead...

4. Precarious (working) conditions to be transformed
bulimic work patterns, low pay, work in isolation,
no paid vacations, no or only minimal social protection,
no sick-leave, work taking over life, work-related health
issues, no unemployment compensation, innability to
plan ahead...
Induced both through precarising procedures such as
the dismantling of the welfare state and self-precarising
work practices in the creative industries.

5. Design, biopolitics and the common
Biopolitics as the «power of life to resist and determine
an alternative production of subjectivity» (Hardt & Negri,
2009, p. 57).
The work of designers contributes to constitute
contemporary subjectivities.
This creation of subjectivities is a battle ground for
transformation, if we take labour as non-linear driving
force of history

6. Design, biopolitics and the common
Designers today produce “the common”, i.e. that which
is not inscribed in capitalist framework as it is neither
private nor public but governed by the people who
produce it.
Through “the common” people express a desire to not
be governed, managed and precarised in the ways it
currently happens.

7. Dilemma of the common
Designers produce the common in the form of
languages, images, codes and relations, but often don’t
considerably challenge how this common functions
within the real economy.
The sharing practices of “open design” – for example
– mostly don’t challenge how material value is being
distributed.

8. The power of politicized subjectivities
Start to intervene in how economic relations are played
out. The common invites us to challenge competition,
private property and profit as the norm.
Linking the production of designers to concerns of
socio-economic and naturo-cultural justice allows to
create novel economic subjects that have the desire and
capacity to create de-precarising economic cultures.