Disarming Design

• Forthcoming: May 2025. You can pre-order this book in our webshop. As soon as the book is available, we will dispatch your order.
• Proposes design as a tool for emancipation and solidarity, engaging with political and social tensions.
• Pleas for sustainable collaborations and rooted connections.

Author: Annelys de Vet

Design: Annelys de Vet

Partner: Subjective Editions

May 2025 | Valiz in collaboration with Subjective Editions, supported by Creative Industries Fund NL | pb | c. 400 pp. | 22 x 16,5 cm (h x w) | English | ISBN 978-94-93246-44-7 | €27,50

Annelys de Vet (1974, NL, she/her) is a Belgium-based designer, researcher, and educator with a practice for long-term, participative design projects that actively engage in social and political struggles. She is a PhD researcher at ATRIA, Antwerp (BE).

How can design be a tool for emancipation and solidarity? How can design catalyze the activation and imagination of locally anchored knowledge? What can we learn from this?  How can others use this book to define questions, stepping stones and ‘scratching posts’ to set up their own way of starting a project and work on participatory design trajectories? Disarming Design takes three projects as its starting points that show the intricacies, questions and challenges that these political participatory processes incur: 1 • Subjective Editions (publishing platform); 2 • Disarming Design from Palestine (design label); 3 • Disarming Design (Temporary Master’s programme Sandberg Institute).

The book centres around these projects (co-)initiated by Annelys de Vet that engage with social and political struggles, attuned to relational ways of being-in-the-world. In its context it addresses broader and complex questions that were raised through these practices, in particular with working as a designer in the context of Palestine. It is a plea for sustainable collaborations and rooted connections—through design.