Right to Design

Definition

The right to design is the normative claim, grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), that access to well-designed places and experiences is a basic human right: "everyone matters and each person should be able to access well-designed places and experiences. Interiors shape lives in the most fundamental and personal way… Everything is designed and has value. As designers, we have the responsibility to promote access to design as a basic human right" (Teston 2018). The grounding texts are UDHR Article 25(1) — "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care" — and Article 27(1) — the right "freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts, and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits." Designed on the heels of World War II to make atrocities "unassailable" against state oppression, the Declaration repositions the designed environment — from the recycling center to the gallon of milk — as a matter of rights rather than taste or consumption.

Key Thinkers

• Liz Teston — the concept's author in this wiki: the UDHR as the political grounding of the everyday interior; "the responsibility to promote access to design as a basic human right."
• The United Nations (1948) — the Universal Declaration's authors: the "thirty articles" proclaiming "unassailable rights or liberties that cannot be determined or oppressed by a governmental state."
• Erin Carraher — the technological mechanism: open-source digital tools as the means by which access to design reaches "an audience beyond the technocratic elite" (WikiHouse).

Related Concepts

• politicizing-the-interior — the program the right serves: the interior as "both spatial and political."
• everyday-life — the field of the right: everyday objects, "underserved populations, and modestly detailed buildings" as design's rights-bearing territory; "everything is designed and has value."
• right-to-the-city — the urban-scale precedent (Lefebvre): the right to design is the interior volume's counterpart to the right to the city — the everyday, inhabited scale of the same claim.
• commons — what the private interior is not: because most interiors are "not a part of the commons," designers feel "absolved from allegiance to meeting the collective demands of the public" — the right to design reattaches the private interior to the public claim.
• housing — the UDHR's Article 25(1) register: the right's most literal spatial object.
• consumerism — the rival account of everyday designed identity (commodity consumption "emit[s] a signal representing our chosen identity"): the right to design stands in tension with a world where designed things are consumption choices.
• disciplinary-frontiers — where the right comes from: it crosses the disciplinary frontier from political theory and human-rights law into interior architecture.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/teston-2018-politicizing-the-interior — the founding source: UDHR Articles 25(1) and 27(1) quoted in full; "each person should be able to access well-designed places and experiences"; the design status of "a recycling center or a gallon of milk"; the designer's "responsibility to promote access to design as a basic human right."
• Technologies: The spatial agency of digital praxis (Carraher 2018) — the technological mechanism of the right: "The rapid expansion of access to digital tools in low-income areas and developing countries, as well as the open-source nature of the communities working with these tools, allows for the dissemination of knowledge beyond the traditional formal structures of academia and Western practice"; the open-source access "that has the potential to democratize the process (once the infrastructure for such tools is more readily accessible)"; customizable interiors economically viable "to serve an audience beyond the technocratic elite"; WikiHouse giving "clients who would not otherwise be able to afford a designer's services" the ability "to adapt and fabricate their own home" — access to design delivered as access to the means of design. See spatial-agency, self-build, mass-customization.
• 'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors' (Ferry 2003/2006) — the claim's 1876 antecedent in taste's own vocabulary: between the Garretts' two textual halves the ladies of the house advance from being "told that it is now their turn to have their tastes consulted" to "demand[ing] the right of having their particular tastes consulted" (quoted p. 113, Ferry's italics on "demand the right") — design-consultation claimed in the language of rights, a century and a half before Teston's UDHR grounding and without its doctrinal apparatus. The antecedent also marks the claim's limit: the right is to be consulted by the professional, not to design — the rights-language arrives with professionalization, attached to the client's leverage over the expert rather than to lay access to design itself. See taste, house-decorator, domestic-feminism.
• source-notes/borden-2006-thick-edge
• source-notes/schneiderman-2018-inside-the-prefab-house

Open Questions

• Is "design as a basic human right" a right to be designed for (passive entitlement) or a right to design (participatory agency)? Teston's "stimulate new forms of community, political agency, and social consciousness" suggests the latter; the UDHR's framing suggests the former.
• How does the right to design stand against the consumption economy it is embedded in — if "everything is designed and has value," does market distribution of designed things already defeat the right, as housing as commodity defeats the right to housing?
• What obligations does the right impose on the wiki's iconic-architecture cluster — is access to well-designed places a constraint on spectacular, capital-drawing design?
• Carraher's mechanism ("once the infrastructure for such tools is more readily accessible") concedes the right's precondition: is a right dependent on infrastructure access still a right, or a market-development aspiration with rights-language dress?