The project guidelines are intended for designers and design teams to ask how any given design project—including for capitalist clients or within businesses—can be used as an opportunity to install and enact postcapitalist principles. They operate like a worksheet or checklist: each question offers a discrete opportunity for postcapitalizing some aspect of the project at hand, organized by the four principles of PCD. Designers and design teams are encouraged to use these questions throughout the design process—starting with early research to define the strategy and scope and concluding with finalizing specifications for production, maintenance, and the project’s end of life. It’s best to begin a project’s orientation through this framework. For example, a project brief could be expanded or reframed by asking these questions at the start. In addition, new opportunities for postcapitalizing the project may turn up anywhere in the process. This process initiates interstitial erosion of capitalism at its most frequent point of contact with designing: the project.
PCD Guidelines
PCD 01
How might we create new social relationships?
Facilitating Community Design
Social Power x Project
PCD 02
How might we increase and sustain social connectedness?
Facilitating Community Design
Social Power x Project
PCD 03
How might we support economic independence and well-being?
Facilitating Community Design
Social Power x Project
PCD 04
How might we support economically disadvantaged communities, using some costs for education of necessary skills (e.g., programming and development)?
Facilitating Community Design
Social Power x Project
PCD 05
How might we deliver value that can’t be commodified—is nonexclusive, nonrivalrous?
Facilitating Community Design
Social Power x Project
PCD 06
How might we fulfill at least one additional nonexclusive, nonrivalrous need or desire for each one discovered through research to fit the client’s economic concerns?
Facilitating Community Design
Social Power x Project
PCD 07
How might we engage constituents in learning valuable skills related to design processes?
Facilitating Community Design
Social Power x Project
PCD 08
How might we increase human capital by distributing knowledge of and experience with applications of new technologies for the project’s constituents?
Facilitating Community Design
Social Power x Project
PCD 09
How might we ensure that any knowledge, skills, or innovative techniques are shared and explained within the work itself?
Facilitating Community Design
Social Power x Project
PCD 10
How might we support participants/constituents in becoming self-sufficient by allowing them to increasingly design for themselves?
Facilitating Community Design
Social Power x Project
PCD 11
How might we determine what the constituent community—not just the client or “user”—actually needs, socially and materially?
Local Production & Local Control
Community Economies x Project
PCD 12
How might we determine what the constituent community deems the appropriate social surplus to gather and distribute and how it can do so?
Local Production & Local Control
Community Economies x Project
PCD 13
How might we build or sustain a commons?
Local Production & Local Control
Community Economies x Project
PCD 14
How might we engage the fabrication, production, distribution, or other third-party work to be developed within the community economy, using local assets and resources?
Local Production & Local Control
Community Economies x Project
PCD 15
How might we shift designed outcomes from rivalry and excludability to nonrivalry and nonexcludability, from ownership to sharing, from copyright to open source, from intellectual property to shared knowledge?
Local Production & Local Control
Community Economies x Project
PCD 16
How might we minimize or reduce material inputs?
Minimum Viable Utopias & Circular Design
Degrowth x Project
PCD 17
How might we work with community partners to innovate more efficient processes?
Minimum Viable Utopias & Circular Design
Degrowth x Project
PCD 18
How might we plan for efficient maintenance and repair, particularly with local resources, including knowledge and labor?
Minimum Viable Utopias & Circular Design
Degrowth x Project
PCD 19
How might we integrate design outcomes into to a circular and repair economy?
Minimum Viable Utopias & Circular Design
Degrowth x Project
PCD 20
How might we create things or experiences to remain durable, usable, and meaningful?
Minimum Viable Utopias & Circular Design
Degrowth x Project
PCD 21
How might we create things or experiences to be shared, passed down, or recirculated within a community?
Minimum Viable Utopias & Circular Design
Degrowth x Project
PCD 22
How might we address the needs and desires of citizens, constituents, neighbors, and/or specific individuals (not “users”)?
Postcapitalist Constituents
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Project
PCD 23
How might we decenter the individual and individualist competition?
Postcapitalist Constituents
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Project
PCD 24
How might we prioritize communal processes of making, defining, and distributing value?
Postcapitalist Constituents
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Project
PCD 25
How might we require or reward collaboration, draw connections to local contexts, resources, and needs?
Postcapitalist Constituents
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Project
PCD 26
How might we ensure that constituents are cognizant of resource allocations and the global and local implications of those allocations?
Postcapitalist Constituents
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Project
PCD 27
How might we encourage positive ecological actions, such as replenishing, restoring, and nurturing the ecological environment?
Postcapitalist Constituents
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Project
PCD 28
How might we incentivize collaboration, participation, negotiation, and compromise?
Postcapitalist Constituents
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Project
PCD 29
How might we make political participation in acts of everyday life attractive and desirable?
Postcapitalist Constituents
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Project
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