Jul 28, 2026 · 1 hr 11 min · 13 segments
Design has always been political. The question is who gets to say so, and at what cost. In this episode of Design is Everywhere, Guest Editor of Unfold 002: The Dissent Issue Rania Adwan sits down…
Sabiha BasraiGuest
Rania AdwanHost
I wonder if you can share with us what you see and understand in terms of the role of designer in challenging systems throughout history.
Has it? Has it been intentional? I wonder if you could give us just a little background from your perspective.
One of my kind of side projects that I love is spending time at Letterform Archive in San Francisco, which is a museum, a small, a very special museum that collects objects and ephemera focusing on the written word.
And one of the collection is made up of a lot of graphic design from resistance movements spanning many, many decades.
Getting to spend time there, doing research there, being a member of the docent program there has given me the opportunity to handle objects that it's really just amazing that they've survived this long because they were created in moments of crisis.
They were created by artists who risked their lives to make those pieces and distribute them.
And the fact that they were saved and preserved and can be teaching tools for us now is just a real gift.
And as an educator has also given me the opportunity to collect case studies so that we can be constantly in conversation with movements past and present when we think about our roles and responsibilities as designers today.
We may not call ourselves artists or graphic designers, but communication in its kind of simplest form has always been critical to understanding our conditions and creating opportunities for us to organize and build power.
So as an example, there were labor organizations that were collecting content and producing magazines, anti-fascist magazines in 1930s Germany that were speaking truth to power about what the Nazi Party was, how the Nazi Party was bad for labor, bad for workers, and exposing their violent rhetoric.
We in the US and in this period of authoritarian consolidation can take lessons from like, what was anti-fascist organizing in Germany in that time? And then how can we consider the ways we share information and the way we keep each other safe as we build resistance? How can we consider like those lessons? And there's so many of those lessons from social justice resistance movements around the world.
And we have the receipts because of the designers and because of the media makers and the storytellers and the artists.
And now in our kind of technological terrain, digital content has always been intrinsic to social justice movement and struggle.
I wonder if you can share with us what you see and understand in terms of the role of designer in challenging systems throughout history.
Has it? Has it been intentional? I wonder if you could give us just a little background from your perspective.
One of my kind of side projects that I love is spending time at Letterform Archive in San Francisco, which is a museum, a small, a very special museum that collects objects and ephemera focusing on the written word.
And one of the collection is made up of a lot of graphic design from resistance movements spanning many, many decades.
Getting to spend time there, doing research there, being a member of the docent program there has given me the opportunity to handle objects that it's really just amazing that they've survived this long because they were created in moments of crisis.
They were created by artists who risked their lives to make those pieces and distribute them.
And the fact that they were saved and preserved and can be teaching tools for us now is just a real gift.
And as an educator has also given me the opportunity to collect case studies so that we can be constantly in conversation with movements past and present when we think about our roles and responsibilities as designers today.
We may not call ourselves artists or graphic designers, but communication in its kind of simplest form has always been critical to understanding our conditions and creating opportunities for us to organize and build power.
So as an example, there were labor organizations that were collecting content and producing magazines, anti-fascist magazines in 1930s Germany that were speaking truth to power about what the Nazi Party was, how the Nazi Party was bad for labor, bad for workers, and exposing their violent rhetoric.
We in the US and in this period of authoritarian consolidation can take lessons from like, what was anti-fascist organizing in Germany in that time? And then how can we consider the ways we share information and the way we keep each other safe as we build resistance? How can we consider like those lessons? And there's so many of those lessons from social justice resistance movements around the world.
And we have the receipts because of the designers and because of the media makers and the storytellers and the artists.
And now in our kind of technological terrain, digital content has always been intrinsic to social justice movement and struggle.
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3 of 6
Leia Poster Erased Assata Shakur
An iconic poster hides an erased credit
Turning Hate Into Anti-War Posters
Nineteen, Muslim, designing amid post-9/11 hate fires
No Neutral Design
She dismantles the myth of neutrality design
+3 more clips · 6 min 8 sec of audio in all
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