These Postcapitalist Design (PCD) Guidelines are intended to practically guide the work of transforming projects, practices, and disciplines—including and beginning with design currently done for capitalist enterprise. As a group, the guidelines are designed to function uniquely at each of these layers, representing different contexts, scales, and speeds of transformation. Each set of guidelines comprises a series of questions for designers to consider as they navigate the unique contexts of their work. In these guidelines, the strategies take a form directly applicable to designerly approaches for synthesizing disparate needs into design solutions. Each guideline is posed as a “How might we…” question.
Project Guidelines: PCD Strategies × Project
Practice Guidelines: PCD Strategies × Practice
Discipline Guidelines: PCD Strategies × Discipline
All Postcapitalist Design Guidelines
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
PCD 30
How might we distribute and institutionalize social, economic, and political relations through patterns of operation?
Socializing the Enterprise
Social Power x Practice
PCD 31
How might we build a socially empowered organizational network of constituents, collaborators, and contributors?
Socializing the Enterprise
Social Power x Practice
PCD 32
How might we socialize the workplace, including everyone directly involved in the design practice?
Socializing the Enterprise
Social Power x Practice
PCD 33
How might we socialize the community, including all employees, partners, vendors, clients, and neighbors?
Socializing the Enterprise
Social Power x Practice
PCD 34
How might we operate cooperatively, sharing ownership and governance with those whose efforts, knowledge, and labor support the enterprise?
Socializing the Enterprise
Social Power x Practice
PCD 35
How might we determine and achieve what is necessary for the practice’s and community’s personal and social survival?
Commoning the Surplus
Community Economies x Practice
PCD 36
How might we determine whether and how social surplus will be produced and consumed with and for the practice and its community?
Commoning the Surplus
Community Economies x Practice
PCD 37
How might we appropriate and distribute social surplus collectively, with and for the practice and its community?
Commoning the Surplus
Community Economies x Practice
PCD 38
How might we build and sustain a (or some) commons—commons of materials, equipment, knowledge, information, space to be used for diverse activities, file sharing, peer-to-peer instruction or guidance, and so on?
Commoning the Surplus
Community Economies x Practice
PCD 39
How might we reduce material and energy needs in operating a practice?
Organizational Degrowth
Degrowth x Practice
PCD 40
How might we reduce or eliminate the use of fossil fuels in operating a practice?
Organizational Degrowth
Degrowth x Practice
PCD 41
How might we strategize the ongoing reduction of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources in all that the practice produces and consumes, including energy needs of digital services and production of designed outcomes?
Organizational Degrowth
Degrowth x Practice
PCD 42
How might we localize production of material goods to minimize shipping and fuel use?
Organizational Degrowth
Degrowth x Practice
PCD 43
How might we ensure participants the “right to unplug,” support non-work-related interests, fulfill educational interests and personal flourishing of participants, collaborators, and constituents?
Organizational Degrowth
Degrowth x Practice
PCD 44
How might we design so that our collaborators and constituents can flourish and live comfortably while consuming less material, energy, and cognitive or attention resources?
Organizational Degrowth
Degrowth x Practice
PCD 45
How might we normalize PCD practice by sharing processes, methods, outcomes, and challenges?
Organizational Degrowth
Degrowth x Practice
PCD 46
How might we demonstrate successful models of design and community flourishing through our practice, sharing our best practices and nurturing new participants?
Organizational Degrowth
Degrowth x Practice
PCD 47
How might we generate design-driven desire for PCD ways of living, making, knowing, and working?
Postcapitalist Designers
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Practice
PCD 48
How might we share, disseminate, and promote PCD models of practice for adoption by others?
Postcapitalist Designers
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Practice
PCD 49
How might we participate in, contribute to, and maintain shared disciplinary resources, such as health care, political representation, legal and professional advising?
Socializing Disciplinary Resources
Social Power x Discipline
PCD 50
How might we commonize practical, material, and knowledge-based assets within the discipline and among its many constituents?
Socializing Disciplinary Resources
Social Power x Discipline
PCD 51
How might we contribute PCD methods, processes, and resources toward in-house, corporate design practices to support internal erosion of capitalist design enterprise?
Socializing Disciplinary Resources
Social Power x Discipline
PCD 52
How might we continually provide and seek mentorship to build long-term and evolving forms of disciplinary patterns of postcapitalist action and knowledge?
Socializing Disciplinary Resources
Social Power x Discipline
PCD 53
How might we contribute to publications, media, and events that share case studies, research, and best practices and that generate new sites for PCD discourse and association?
Socializing Disciplinary Resources
Social Power x Discipline
PCD 54
How might we work to cooperate, confederate, or network PCD practices toward scaled-up social power within the discipline?
Confederated Co-operative Design
Community Economies x Discipline
PCD 55
How might we work to collaboratively achieve greater political power for PCD practitioners?
Confederated Co-operative Design
Community Economies x Discipline
PCD 56
How might we contribute to building and maintaining the infrastructure and platforms of a distributed PCD discipline?
Confederated Co-operative Design
Community Economies x Discipline
PCD 57
How might we commit a dedicated percentage of working time to the intellectual and productive labor required for building PCD infrastructures, networks, commons, and other shared resources?
Disciplinary Degrowth
Degrowth x Discipline
PCD 58
How might we commit efforts to build cross-boundary initiatives between independent (PCD) design practices and corporate, in-house (capitalist) practices?
Disciplinary Degrowth
Degrowth x Discipline
PCD 59
How might we support postcapitalist designers through ongoing education and participation in extra- or interdisciplinary programs to extend the reach of PCD and create positive spillovers in communities of practice?
Postcapitalist Citizens
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Discipline
PCD 60
How might we support postcapitalist citizens in their efforts to postcapitalize their lives by promoting a PCD that is truly participatory and cooperative?
Postcapitalist Citizens
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Discipline
PCD 61
How might we work in ways that transform constituents of design from passive consumers to active agents who participate in and facilitate the design of their own lives?
Postcapitalist Citizens
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Discipline
PCD 62
How might we normalize PCD as a disciplinary form and the generally perceived notion of what design is and should be?
Postcapitalist Citizens
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Discipline
PCD 63
How might we make PCD the desirable model for design, internal both to the discipline and to the general public?
Postcapitalist Citizens
Postcapitalist Subjectivities x Discipline
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