Designers are often depicted as social change agents that serve the good in the world. Similarly, co-design tends to be described as a democratic mode of creativity that is somehow beyond reproach. But is change a virtue in itself, and do participatory practices always produce socially beneficial outcomes?
Such questions are becoming more pressing as co-design has emerged as a dominant practice in planning and urban design, while also informing corporate management and public administration. In this book, Otto von Busch and Karl Palm-suggest that designers tend to overemphasize the place of ideals in design, leaving them ill-equipped to deal with a social world of power-wielding and zero-sum games. Seeking to reorient the concerns of the Scandinavian tradition of participatory design, they suggest that co-design processes are rife with betrayals, decay, and corruption, and that designerly empathy has morphed into a new form of cunning statecraft.
In putting forward Re
