The Philosophy of Design. Glenn Parsons. Polity. 2015.

In recent years, the term ‘design’ has attracted increasing attention among academics and practitioners alike. While new sub-disciplines such as ‘design anthropology’ and ‘innovation design’ have emerged on the scholarly horizon, paradigms like ‘design thinking’ continue to conquer the business world. However, despite this growing presence of ‘design’ as both a mode of practice and scholarly focus, there has been little philosophical investigation and commentary on the phenomenon.

The single-authored book, The Philosophy of Design, by Glenn Parsons, Associate Professor in Philosophy at Ryerson University, Toronto, sets out to change that. It provides a well-structured discussion of the term ‘design’ from a philosophical standpoint, rooted in Parsons’s extensive work on beauty, aesthetics and nature. It aims to demonstrate the significance of design as a relevant area of philosophical inquiry and therefore to map out the philosophical issues and questions that arise from contemporary design practice.

The book consists of seven chapters, starting with a brief introduction and ending with an epilogue (including a quite helpful page on suggested further reading). The narrative of the book first establishes a philosophical definition of ‘design’ in Chapter One, ‘What is Design?’, before then outlining how ‘The Design Process’ (Chapter Two) is one focused on problem solving. Here, Parsons elaborates on both the specificity of design problems as well as the role of the designer in solving them.

The second part of the book establishes ‘Modernism’ (Chapter Three) as a case study for further exploring the philosophical issues of ‘Expression’ (Chapter Four), ‘The Concept of Function’ (Chapter Five), ‘Function, Form and Aesthetics’ (Chapter Six) and ‘Ethics’ (Chapter Seven). Overall, Parsons discusses Modernism as design theory and practice, which is explicitly concerned with how we constitute the modern world and therefore reveals design as a fundamentally social process.

The book starts off strongly with the first chapter developing a definition of ‘design’ as ‘social practice’ with historical roots in the industrial revolution. Here, quite rightly, Parsons does not deny the extensive existing body of work in design theory, but clearly distinguishes a philosophical understanding of design from it: he states that while design theory focuses on theorising practical considerations in design, a ‘philosophy of design’ contextualises design practice with ‘other important dimensions of human life’ (2). Parsons’s definition promotes an understanding of design as social practice that focuses on problem solving in and through making plans. This is an achievement beyond the discipline of philosophy as it opens up a window for an empirical investigation of how these social practices might be enacted in the contemporary design profession. For social science scholars interested in studying design, this provides an alternative route for theorising design practices from the empirical material, bottom-up as it were, and without a detour into the larger theoretical arguments that are not focused on design but on larger societal issues.Image Credit: (gigijin)


While Chapter Four and Chapter Five discuss ‘expression’ and ‘function’ as core concerns of Modernism that reflect the epistemological problems of design, Chapter Six provides an important and necessary discussion of ‘aesthetics’. Here, in analysing Modernist thought, Parsons makes the point that aesthetics in design are not only concerned with some form of objective beauty. In line with existing philosophical discussions of aesthetics (historical and contemporary), he promotes a relational understanding of aesthetics as both a mode of being in the world and the appreciation of ‘beauty’ – which can also derive from something being ‘functional’. This leads him to discuss aesthetics in the context of taste and as fundamental – and philosophical – aspects of design concerns.

Most importantly, Parsons ends his book with a chapter on ‘Ethics’, which rightly emphasises the importance of designers’ ethical considerations as consequential for our (material and immaterial) environment. Here, he starts off by outlining how Modernist thought promotes an understanding of ‘good’ design as ultimately ‘ethical’ design. Leading on from that, Parsons discusses how ethical considerations are integral to designing, which, by default, includes huge levels of complexity and compromise. In other words, he states that designers are constantly making decisions about what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ design, articulating different kinds of value (such as privacy, environmental sustainability or freedom of choice) and often prioritising them. He continues that this, then, is at odds with the Modernist claim of functional design as necessarily ethical design, simply because prioritising certain values (e.g. functionality) may negate others (e.g. freedom or privacy). Looking at contemporary design practice, Parsons discusses the difficulties of designers necessarily being moral agents and introduces new design approaches, such as participatory design (in which stakeholders participate in the design from the outset and thus become ‘designers’ themselves), as processes that can mediate ethical concerns.

The key strength of Parsons’s book is that it ‘does what it says on the tin’: it provides a strong philosophical analysis and approach to ‘design’. In that, it both emphasises design as social practice and investigates how key philosophical concerns, such as expression, function, aesthetics and ethics, are featured in these practices. This not only encourages further social research into these practices, but also provides a much needed framework for how we can explore creative practice and its link to society. In other words, Parsons successfully opens up a new and potentially interdisciplinary area of study by giving a comprehensive theoretical framework of design.

However, despite his own call to look at design as social practice, Parsons focuses on analysing works and arguments by other scholars. His discussion of Modernism as a philosophical approach to solving design problems breathes life into this notion, and is both necessary and important. However, it would have been equally, if not more, interesting to go beyond Modernism as a well-discussed, prime example of a well-articulated design theory and practice to spend some time thinking through the (philosophical) issues arising in twenty-first-century design, such as those relating to ‘capitalism’ or ‘class’. Across disciplines, these themes are becoming increasingly important for design scholars and practitioners alike and it would have been intriguing to include this in a philosophical discussion of design.

Glenn Parsons’s The Philosophy of Design will certainly be welcomed across the social science and design communities, both by scholars and by practitioners. It covers a lot of crucial theoretical ground and manifests the importance of ‘design’ as a worthy area of study and of equal importance as ‘culture’ or ‘arts’. Parsons scores with his engaging writing that maps out and links up existing philosophical scholarship on design in a highly accessible way. For anyone interested in an intellectual engagement with design, this is an essential read.

Urban China by. Xuefei Ren, Polity.

While bottles of champagne were opened, ribbons were cut, and millionaires and billionaires were made, many ordinary residents lost their homes and relocated to the urban periphery, joining the army of the poor.

Ren (2013: p. 164)

China’s economic miracle, closely related to its urban transition, is both fascinating and mind-boggling. On the one hand, China’s GDP grew at an average of 9.99 percent per year from 1978 to 2010, and its per capita GDP in 2010 is 79 times higher than in 1978 (p. 1). On the other hand, China’s Gini coefficient is 0.474 in 2012, higher than the warning level of 0.4 set by the United Nations. China’s super-large cities (with populations of more than 2 million) increased in number from 10 in 1995 to 42 in 1992 (p. 11). China’s migrant population, defined as people living in a different place from that of their hukou record (i.e. household registration) for six months or more increased by 83 percentage points from 2000 to 2010 (p. 10).

In Urban China, Xuefei Ren provides an accessible and engaging overview of China’s urban story for expert and non-expert readers. Her concisely-written book addresses four key themes: firstly, how China’s urbanisation came about; secondly, the mechanisms that perpetuate China’s urbanisation processes; thirdly, the consequences of the urbanisation process; and finally, some pointers to emergent problems as well as early signs of spaces for social change.

However, Ren’s intention stretches ambitiously beyond the sole focus on China. As she explains in the Preface (p.xiii-xx), China’s urban story offers opportunities to reflect about broader urbanisation and political economy issues. These include China’s economic miracle, the interconnectivity of the global economy, and implications for urban theory developed from predominantly Western contexts. Her book is also intended to caution against “fast policy transfers” (p. xx) typically adopted by other cities aspiring to model themselves after the success stories of some Chinese cities. This cautionary insight is informed by Ren’s parallel work on comparative urban governance and citizenship rights in China and India.

The book is clearly structured into six chapters, with a separate preface and conclusion. Chapter 1 provides the contextual introduction: firstly, China’s historical development; and secondly, the relationship between the urbanisation process and the global economy. Chapters 2 to 6 zoom into individual themes of what can be termed ‘urban consequences’. The themes cover urban governance and shifting power structures (exemplified in land rights, the housing market, infrastructure development, and the governance of regions and communities); new forms in the urban landscape; the housing and labour rights of rural-urban migrants; social, spatial and urbanisation-induced inequalities; and new developments in the cultural economy. These themes emphasise Ren’s reading of Brenner’s (2013) “Theses on Urbanization” – Ren sees the urban as a process with positive and negative “moments” and “effects” (p.191).

What I find useful is that some chapters are written with a combination of ‘big stories’ and ‘small stories’. The ‘big stories’ provide the broader social, economic and political forces and trends at work, while the ‘small stories’ provide personal and individual accounts to contextualise what the broader phenomena meant to individual social agents. For example, in Chapter 2, Ren provides her family’s housing evolution “from a self-constructed house in a work-unit compound, to five apartments in three cities in north, central, and south China” (p.66) to illustrate the impact of China’s housing-market boom for some Chinese families. In Chapter 5, Ren uses the rise of a real-estate developer to demonstrate “how the once egalitarian society has become increasingly divided between the haves and have-nots” (p.146). Finally, in Chapter 6, Ren describes a Beijing woman’s lifestyle changes to offer a glimpse into the emergence of China’s urban middle class and their increasingly globalised consumption lifestyle.

The short conclusions at the end of each chapter are also useful features. These provide excellent summaries of ideas discussed in the chapter. The contents of the chapters are also complemented by informative maps, tables and graphs. However, the book lacks photographs, which could be useful in illustrating the different urban landscapes. For example, Chapter 3 mentions new developments such as the 798 Factory in Beijing, the redevelopment of historical buildings in Qianmen Avenue in Beijing, Guangzhou University Town, and Tianjin Eco-City. These could be visually contrasted with old and neglected urban spaces such as inner-city neighbourhoods and degraded workers’ villagers mentioned in Chapter 5.

Despite Ren’s suggestion to “[use] urbanization in Asia to prove, reject, or revise Western urban theory” (p. xvii), this has unfortunately not been delivered in this book. While she rightly points out that “the frontier of urbanization has unmistakably shifted to Asia” and that we need “new theoretical tools and vocabularies” (ibid.) to understand this process, her book has not made any steps in advancing her call to urban China studies. An additional chapter, or at least further elaboration in the Conclusion, could have elevated this book from merely a concise account of China’s urban story to a significant contribution opening up important debates about the continued dominance of urban theories developed from Western perspectives.

Overall, this book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in obtaining a succinct and updated overview of China’s urban transition. Ren’s coverage of urban consequences would appeal to readers interested in a range of related themes, including urban governance, urban politics, architecture and urban forms, rural-urban migration, citizenship rights (in relation to housing, land and labour rights), urban inequalities, urban economy (particularly arts, culture and heritage), and urban theory.

Platform Capitalism. Nick Srnicek. Polity. 2016.

Capitalism, when a crisis hits, tends to be restructured. New technologies, new organisational forms, new modes of exploitation, new types of jobs and new markets all emerge to create a new way of accumulating capital. Since the 2008 crisis, the dominant narrative in advanced capitalist countries has been one of change. In particular, there has been a renewed focus on the rise of technology: automation, the sharing economy, endless stories about the ‘Uber for X’ and, most recently, proclamations about the internet of things. These changes have received labels such as ‘paradigm shift’ from McKinsey and ‘fourth industrial revolution’ from the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum and, in more ridiculous formulations, have been compared in importance to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. We have witnessed a massive proliferation of new terms: the gig economy, the sharing economy, the on-demand economy, the fourth industrial revolution, the surveillance economy, the app economy, the attention economy and so on. But what unites these divergent phenomena?

In essence, all are symptomatic of how twenty-first-century advanced capitalism is coming to be centred upon extracting and using a particular kind of raw material: data. And the business model which is adequate to this shift is the platform – digital infrastructures that intermediate between different groups. This is the key to its advantage over traditional business models when it comes to data, since a platform positions itself (1) between users, and (2) as the ground upon which their activities occur, thereby giving it privileged access to record them. Google, as the platform for searching, draws on vast amounts of search activity (which express the fluctuating desires of individuals). Uber, as the platform for taxis, draws on traffic data and the activities of drivers and riders. Facebook, as the platform for social networking, brings in a variety of intimate social interactions that can then be recorded. And as more and more industries move their interactions online (e.g. Uber shifting the taxi industry into a digital form or John Deere creating agricultural platforms), more and more businesses will be subject to platform development. Platforms are, as a result, far more than internet companies or tech companies since they can operate anywhere that digital interaction takes place.
Image Credit: (Pixabay CCO)

A first important aspect is that these digital platforms produce and are reliant upon ‘network effects’: the more users that use a platform, the more valuable that platform becomes for everyone else. Facebook, for example, has become the default social networking platform simply by virtue of the sheer number of people on it. If you want to join a platform for socialising, you join the platform where most of your friends and family already are. Likewise, the more users that search on Google, the better their search algorithms become, and the more useful it becomes to users. But this generates a cycle whereby more users beget more users, which leads to platforms’ having a natural tendency towards monopolisation. It also lends platforms a dynamic of ever-increasing access to more activities, and therefore to more data. Moreover, the ability to rapidly scale many platform businesses, by relying on pre-existing infrastructure and cheap marginal costs, means there are few natural limits to growth. One reason for Uber’s rapid growth, for instance, is that it does not need to build new factories – it just needs to rent more servers. Combined with network effects, this means that platforms can grow very big, very quickly.

This is exacerbated by a second dynamic of digital platforms: their insatiable appetite for data means that the most powerful platforms are also continuously expanding through new acquisitions. If collecting and analysing this raw material is the primary revenue source for these companies and gives them competitive advantages, there is an imperative to collect more and more. As one report notes, echoing colonialist ventures:


From a data-production perspective, activities are like lands waiting to be discovered. Whoever gets there first and holds them gets their resources – in this case, their data riches.

For many of these platforms, the quality of the data is of less interest than their quantity and diversity. Every action performed by a user, no matter how minute, is useful for reconfiguring algorithms and optimising processes. Such is the importance of data that many companies could make all of their software open-source and still maintain their dominant position due to their data. Unsurprisingly, then, these companies have been prolific purchasers and developers of assets that enable them to expand their capacity for gaining information. Mergers relating to big data, for instance, have doubled between 2008 and 2013, while globally, tech-related mergers and acquisitions rose to a record high in 2016. The vast cash glut of these companies and their frequent use of tax havens contributed to making this possible. A large surplus of capital sitting idle has enabled these companies to build and expand an infrastructure of data extraction.

The end result of these basic dynamics is a tendency for companies to grow big, to grow fast and to monopolise their core businesses. These consequences pose significant political challenges, particularly as these companies come to control the basic infrastructure of digital society. As our future becomes even more digitally-dependent, we must challenge the economic dynamics that lead to a vast centralising of power within the hands of a few massive platforms.
Note: Text includes selections from Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016).

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek, Polity. 2016.

Find this book:

Capitalism, when a crisis hits, tends to be restructured. New technologies, new organisational forms, new modes of exploitation, new types of jobs and new markets all emerge to create a new way of accumulating capital. Since the 2008 crisis, the dominant narrative in advanced capitalist countries has been one of change. In particular, there has been a renewed focus on the rise of technology: automation, the sharing economy, endless stories about the ‘Uber for X’ and, most recently, proclamations about the internet of things. These changes have received labels such as ‘paradigm shift’ from McKinsey and ‘fourth industrial revolution’ from the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum and, in more ridiculous formulations, have been compared in importance to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. We have witnessed a massive proliferation of new terms: the gig economy, the sharing economy, the on-demand economy, the fourth industrial revolution, the surveillance economy, the app economy, the attention economy and so on. But what unites these divergent phenomena?

In essence, all are symptomatic of how twenty-first-century advanced capitalism is coming to be centred upon extracting and using a particular kind of raw material: data. And the business model which is adequate to this shift is the platform – digital infrastructures that intermediate between different groups. This is the key to its advantage over traditional business models when it comes to data, since a platform positions itself (1) between users, and (2) as the ground upon which their activities occur, thereby giving it privileged access to record them. Google, as the platform for searching, draws on vast amounts of search activity (which express the fluctuating desires of individuals). Uber, as the platform for taxis, draws on traffic data and the activities of drivers and riders. Facebook, as the platform for social networking, brings in a variety of intimate social interactions that can then be recorded. And as more and more industries move their interactions online (e.g. Uber shifting the taxi industry into a digital form or John Deere creating agricultural platforms), more and more businesses will be subject to platform development. Platforms are, as a result, far more than internet companies or tech companies since they can operate anywhere that digital interaction takes place.
Image Credit: (Pixabay CCO)

A first important aspect is that these digital platforms produce and are reliant upon ‘network effects’: the more users that use a platform, the more valuable that platform becomes for everyone else. Facebook, for example, has become the default social networking platform simply by virtue of the sheer number of people on it. If you want to join a platform for socialising, you join the platform where most of your friends and family already are. Likewise, the more users that search on Google, the better their search algorithms become, and the more useful it becomes to users. But this generates a cycle whereby more users beget more users, which leads to platforms’ having a natural tendency towards monopolisation. It also lends platforms a dynamic of ever-increasing access to more activities, and therefore to more data. Moreover, the ability to rapidly scale many platform businesses, by relying on pre-existing infrastructure and cheap marginal costs, means there are few natural limits to growth. One reason for Uber’s rapid growth, for instance, is that it does not need to build new factories – it just needs to rent more servers. Combined with network effects, this means that platforms can grow very big, very quickly.

This is exacerbated by a second dynamic of digital platforms: their insatiable appetite for data means that the most powerful platforms are also continuously expanding through new acquisitions. If collecting and analysing this raw material is the primary revenue source for these companies and gives them competitive advantages, there is an imperative to collect more and more. As one report notes, echoing colonialist ventures:


From a data-production perspective, activities are like lands waiting to be discovered. Whoever gets there first and holds them gets their resources – in this case, their data riches.

For many of these platforms, the quality of the data is of less interest than their quantity and diversity. Every action performed by a user, no matter how minute, is useful for reconfiguring algorithms and optimising processes. Such is the importance of data that many companies could make all of their software open-source and still maintain their dominant position due to their data. Unsurprisingly, then, these companies have been prolific purchasers and developers of assets that enable them to expand their capacity for gaining information. Mergers relating to big data, for instance, have doubled between 2008 and 2013, while globally, tech-related mergers and acquisitions rose to a record high in 2016. The vast cash glut of these companies and their frequent use of tax havens contributed to making this possible. A large surplus of capital sitting idle has enabled these companies to build and expand an infrastructure of data extraction.

The end result of these basic dynamics is a tendency for companies to grow big, to grow fast and to monopolise their core businesses. These consequences pose significant political challenges, particularly as these companies come to control the basic infrastructure of digital society. As our future becomes even more digitally-dependent, we must challenge the economic dynamics that lead to a vast centralising of power within the hands of a few massive platforms.

Performing Politics: Media Interviews, Debates and Press Conferences. Geoffrey Craig. Polity. 2016.

Media – electronic and print as well as social – plays a major role in contemporary politics, not just in ‘orchestrating’ but also in shaping public and political discourse. It has radically altered the ways politicians interact and communicate with the public, and also how the public itself participates in such conversations. Geoffrey Craig’s Performing Politics: Media Interviews, Debates and Press Conferences critically examines processes of political communication and classifies the places and occasions where these interactions take place as a site of struggle between journalists and politicians. His is a fascinating study of how politicians and journalists, while speaking in the name of ‘the public’, are actually engaged in a power struggle, and how for politicians these interactions turn out to be a platform for performing their leadership styles and substantive visions on various social and political issues.

We are increasingly experiencing our politics and political discourses as being shaped by media. A disconnect has emerged between the masses and their representatives, and audiovisual, 24/7 media houses and channels have gained enormous power by acquiring the middle space between the two. To a great extent, the increasing ‘presidentialisation’ and ‘individualisation’ of politics is the net outcome of this culture. The public standing of politicians is greatly dependent on their coverage by the media: in other words, their presence in media spaces matters more than their actual connection with the people. It turns out that encounters between politicians and media elites and journalists are more to do with ‘style’ and ‘performance’ than the conventional role of media to interrogate politicians and hold them accountable. This book is a welcome addition to understanding this phenomenon in our public political life.

In fact, in these interactions, Craig argues that we frequently witness a discursive struggle between politicians and the media for the maximisation of their own individual power while simultaneously invoking the ‘concerns’ of the public. With the rise of social media and new trends such as including a ‘studio audience’ to represent ‘ordinary people’, we do get a sense of ‘people’s participations’ in these encounters. However, we also know that these opportunities to participate, ask questions or intervene are still determined by the news anchor. Hence these events are seen by many as ‘controlled’ or ‘orchestrated’, and therefore put a challenge before politicians across the political spectrum: to engage smartly, intelligently and with some degree of openness and flexibility. How they perform and are seen through these interactions does matter. Performing Politics therefore seeks to seriously engage with the questions raised by the different genres of encounter between journalists and politicians.
Image Credit: The Great Debate, Wembley Arena, London, 21 June 2016, BBC Broadcast (Democracy International CC BY SA 2.0)


The book is divided into seven chapters, and the author begins by examining the emerging trends of what he calls ‘mediated political performances’. Using critical discourse analysis, he goes on to consider the suitability of concepts including Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of language to understand the subtleties of the language, bodily gestures and non-verbal communications used by the politicians in political and more relaxed celebrity-style interviews, leaders’ debates, press conferences and current affairs television formats. Considering politics mainly as a discursive phenomenon, Craig interestingly examines what he calls the ‘dialogic nature of language and agnostic nature of democratic politics’. Politicians now not only have to embody the principle of being open and flexible enough to connect with a range of issues across the political spectrum, but also of being competent at demonstrating their own standing and differentiating their own views from that of their opponents. Performing such tasks before a ‘live audience’ has become a real test for many politicians.

One tends to agrees with Craig’s assertion of political interviews as one of the occasions where tough interrogations of politicians by journalists are possible, and that the power to dominate the interactions between the two becomes most visible as both claim to represent the ‘indeterminate’ public. It is also interesting to observe that gradually it is the relaxed celebrity-style interview with more focus on the leader’s personal life that has attracted larger audiences; politicians moreover tend to exploit such interactions to present the human side of their character and generate more emotional support. Yet, no matter what the type of media interaction is, politicians must demonstrate their political authority as well as their individual character and personality. They must deploy political rhetoric in particular ways and identify themselves with the people to generate trust in their leadership. Chapter Four identifies the skillful deployment of such tactics by liberal democratic leader Nick Clegg in the first leader’s debate on ITV before the UK 2010 General Election as a very good example of understanding how these performances have shaped the public trust (even if Clegg would later lose the trust of the electorate due to perceived policy betrayals).

While the book aims to explain the discursive terrain and power struggle during the interactions between the ‘political field’ and ‘media field’, readers may nonetheless question how far these are separate. Aren’t the two interlinked? For example, Performing Politics is conspicuously silent about how the ‘media field’ itself is controlled by the big corporations. With so much explicit bias and prejudice displayed by the media houses, how far can they be examined as fair actors in these interactions? And does this question not fall within the domain of politics?

Another point that might be confusing to many is the title of the book – Performing Politics. At a time of great disenchantment with traditional structures of politics and power, many may expect the book to deal with newer political dimensions and actors in the form of the various protest movements that are emerging across the globe and altering the domain of ‘conventional politics’. Contrary to this, the book’s subtitle, Media Interviews, Debates and Press Conferences (not mentioned on the cover page) suggests that the text concerns the ways that politicians engage with the media and how they specifically perform in these encounters. Yet, how correct is it to limit the performance of politics to media interactions? Of course, these shape the public image of a politician, but are they judged by media performances alone?

This book is nonetheless relevant in opening up and highlighting the emerging trends in political communications between politicians and journalists as well as how these media platforms are becoming increasingly important for politicians to make announcements and directly appeal to the masses, often bypassing conventional spaces for public political debates and scrutiny such as parliament. Performing Politics is also mainly successful in its objective to promote greater literacy about contemporary political communication and the power struggles therein; as the author believes, it will therefore ‘lead to more cynicism but to greater public engagement’. One also needs to remember that ‘trust’ in the leadership is perhaps more important than ‘truth’. In fact, it is truth itself, as the author believes, that is now the ‘battleground upon which political communication occurs’.