Master Editorial policy - Design and Politics of the Multiple

Teacher/Coordination: Renaud Huberlant, Johnny Leya, Caroline Godart

Seminar participants: Pierre-Philippe Duchâtelet, Maryam Kolly

Related courses: Seminar on Politics and Graphic Experimentation, Artifact Studies.

DPM

The Master's degree Design and Politics of the Multiple opens up a field of study on research in and through design practice (Huyghe, 2017). This master's programme engages students in the development of a personal project based on a working hypothesis supported by a critical point of view. It involves considering the designer's responsibility in the construction of discourses, images and knowledge and, in this way, measuring his/her active role in carving out the cultural, social and political structures of our world.

If the notion of design is central to the master's degree, it is less a method oriented towards the search for solutions than an exploration of the potentials of dissensus, understood as a place for the creation of a different sensitive world (Rancière, 2018). Design as the politics of the multiple. Linking the multiple and politics is, on the one hand, to question the political force of multiple, fragmented subjectivities, not fixed in immutable identities, and on the other hand, to question the capacity for action of the multiple - those 'inanimate' serial objects of design.

Among the design disciplines, we wish to address more specifically editorial practices. Publishing is to be considered here in a broader sense. It implies a set of operations of rearrangement, translation, editing, formatting and reproduction. It extends, as a practice of editing, from print to digital, from the still image to the moving image, from layout to space.

The master's degree combines the contributions of design and art with those of philosophy of science, cultural studies, feminism and postcolonialism. Students are led to explore the relationships of domination in the processes of transmission of historical narratives and the construction of collective memories. During the 2018/2020 cycle, students will share the fruits of their research with a range of guests and teachers. "At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of efficiency and productivity, not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority." Langdon Winner, Do Artefacts Have Politics?