Special Post: Designers Must Act – An Open Letter to the Design Community

Nearly a decade ago, Victor Margolin and Ezio Manzini’s open letter “Stand Up For Democracy” urged the design community to recognize its responsibility in shaping democracy worldwide. That letter articulated a growing understanding of design not only as a professional practice, but as a civic force that helps structure the infrastructures of collective life.

Today, we write not to repeat that call, but to advance it. Yet much of what has been articulated has not entered practice. This letter is another incitement toward doing so.

In recent months, Iran has entered a period marked by widespread repression, mass detentions, and severe violence, alongside repeated disruptions to communication infrastructures. At stake are the fundamental conditions that allow people to speak, assemble, and participate safely in public life.

Across many international professional and academic contexts, including within our own discipline, responses have often remained cautious or silent. Yet silence is not neutral. Neutrality is also a position, a stance of silent consent.

The subject of design is the human being. Not merely as users or consumers, but as people within society. Where human dignity is at risk, design must act. If we lose this principle, design is reduced to a tool.

Design cannot be separated from politics. Yet its concern must remain with people, not with their reduction to game pieces in ideological conflicts, and not with deciding which people matter in which part of the world.

If design claims a role in democratic life, then the ongoing uprising and repression in Iran are where that claim must be proven.

Our field possesses concrete capacities that are directly relevant in times of civic strain: the ability to visualize complex systems, to communicate across differences, to structure participation, to build and sustain channels of inquiry, and to translate concern into coordinated action.

We therefore call on the global design community to move beyond tokenistic acknowledgment toward meaningful engagement through more substantial forms of solidarity including:

 

- designing for connectivity in response to restrictions on communication and civic participation inside Iran;

- actively identifying, inviting, and safeguarding the participation of those directly affected;

- providing sustained academic, institutional, and action-oriented support for Iranian designers, design students, and researchers, including mentorship, collaborative platforms, and projects that respond to present conditions;

- leveraging informational, transformation, and system design to make invisible conditions visible, to render longstanding demands for structural change legible beyond Iran, and to enable durable exchange and collaboration;

- contributing to the enrichment of discourse on design for democracy, not merely in terms of designing new ballot boxes, but in redesigning democratic infrastructures.

 

Alongside these actions, we invite an open and sustained dialogue within the global design community on the role articulated in this letter, not as an abstract debate, but as a collective effort to deepen and refine the language, practices, and responsibilities of design in times of crisis. Action and reflection must reinforce one another.

To break silence is not to speak for others; it is to ensure that those whose voices are constrained are not cut off from the global networks that shape knowledge and practice.

We therefore urge our colleagues worldwide to stand clearly and collectively in defense of the conditions under which dignity and shared life remain possible.

 

 

Check the website: https://designersmustact.com

Image: An imaginary portrait of Zoroaster (on the left). Painting by Raphael, The School of Athens, circa 1509 CE.