Who Can Afford to Be Critical?

Afonso Matos, ed. | Amsterdam, the Netherlands | Set Margins' Publications, 2024 | Softbound | 6 x 8.25 in. | 92 pp | Duotone illustrations Design schools increasingly urge students to address social, political and environmental issues in their work. But who can afford to work in this way after graduation? In a dynamic style that draws from multiple contributors, Who Can Afford to Be Critical? discusses the limits that affordability, class and labor impose upon the educational promise of holding a "critical" practice. Why do we tend to ignore the material and socioeconomic constraints that bind us as designers, claiming instead that we can be powerful agents of change? Instead of focusing on the dream of ethical work under capitalism, could we instead focus first on designers’ own working conditions, as one immediate site for collective action? Over the course of four chapters, this publication delves into the modes of precarity in critical graphic work and possible paths toward emancipation from that position. Edited with introduction by Afonso Matos. Text by Silvio Lorusso, J. Dakota Brown, Marianela D'Aprile, Evening Class, Somnath Batt, Danielle Aubert, Jack Henrie Fisher, Alan Smart, Greg Mihalko. S04612