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DESIGN UNDER ATTACK
POLITICS, VALUES AND RESPONSIBILITY PRINCIPLES 

Visual communication design has historically operated as a vector of social transformation, carrier of democratic values, device for constructing meaning. Today we witness a systemic inversion: authoritarian drifts, orchestrated disinformation, regression of civil and environmental rights subvert the ethical premises on which design practice is founded. This issue interrogates design’s capacity to respond when its founding values come under attack. It does not limit itself to analyzing communicative artifacts, but probes the material, institutional and organizational conditions that enable or inhibit design action as a form of resistance.

Mapping strategies to counter dominant communication, practices of linguistic hybridization as civic act, tools to amplify marginalized subjectivities, the volume reaffirms that every design choice is inevitably political. The reflection articulates through contributions that abandon universalist pretenses to confront the concrete repercussions of design practices. Designers, theorists and activists document how communication design can operate simultaneously as form of militancy, device for critical decoding and laboratory of alternative imaginaries, interrogating which systems today determine access to design tools and who gets systematically excluded from the possibility of taking visual voice.