Thematic areas

Issue 42 of the journal welcomes contributions that explore some key questions, including:

• Endorse the role of design as a responsible and critical practice, and therefore question how visual communication design can respond to a reality that subverts its founding values.
• Design forms of responding towards dominant communication, questioning the communication, projectual, and speculative strategies that can stand against the rhetoric of populism, anti-science, and post-truth.
• Hybridize visual languages as an act of speaking out and of civic action and ask what languages, devices, and formats are emerging in visual design as a form of political action.
• Design communication tools that facilitate the visibility of marginalized subjects, categories and communities and their access to design tools. Therefore, the question is: To what extent can communication design build spaces of resistance and solidarity, as well as spaces of visibility, coalition, and representation for marginalized subjects?
• Demonstrate that every design act involves choices ethically and politically positioned worldviews: Is there such a thing as “value-free” design, or is every project inevitably political?
• Enhance the intrinsically social, cultural, and political nature of communication design and question whether design can be limited to being merely functional and instrumental, or whether its connection to society makes it inevitably political and ethical.
• Investigate contemporary work systems and design platforms, asking what organizational, institutional, and technological conditions enable or limit communication projects as forms of social and political intervention.