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This special edition introduces eight papers at the intersection of design, oppression, and liberation. These papers refer to social structure as a common leverage point to criticize and transform different oppression relations, namely racism, gender, marginalization, epistemic injustice, and colonization. The contributions follow recent moves in social movements and social sciences that recognize that tackling different oppression relations enables seeing oppressive structures more clearly. Nurturing solidarity bonds across different oppression struggles becomes an urgent task in this new field of research we call Oppression Studies of Design. Building upon anti-colonial views on oppression, this field connects design research with the history of changing social structures through liberation struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arcos: Design, Cultura e Visualidade is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses various reports within the issue on topics including decolonization and delinking from Western modernity, ableism and urban design planning, and student protests against banking education.

Digital trends are signs of imminent social changes that appear linked to the use of digital technologies. It is believed that digital media, due to its decentralized structure, induces more radical differences than centralized analog media. The aim of this research is to assess the potential for social differentiation implied in the dissemination of trends by digital media. To achieve this end, the research analyzed a corpus of 1,700 digital trends mapped on graph visualizations. Interpreting the results through Henri Lefebvre's materialist-dialectical differentialism, this research came to the conclusion that digital trends produce minimal differences, that is, they tend to maintain the status quo instead of questioning it, contradicting their association with phenomena such as revolution, disruption and innovation. In addition to investigating this specific issue, this research points towards possible collaborations between Information Design and Digital Humanities fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design literature describes an expansion of design activity towards systemic relations, the so-called fourth order of design. In this order, design is supposed to deal with sociotechnical controversies -- public deliberations over technical and social relations that include multiple actors with conflicting interests. This research looks at the sociotechnical controversy around COVID-19 design responses to map the extent of said expansion through a hybrid method. The controversial design space mapping method included web pages on design projects aimed at the pandemic as a source of problems, solutions, actors, and interests. The results reveal that actors overlooked systemic relations, possibly due to neoliberal ideologies. Based on this informed speculation, the research provides recommendations to prospect a systemic design space for pandemic responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Space is often designed based on the representations of user activities (i.e.lists, organograms or flowcharts) that streamline user activities in stepwise, oversimplified, representations that may leave insufficient room for future activity development. However, design can anticipate activity development if users are able to represent their own activities while participating in the design process. A case study of a medical imaging centre reveals that once users have such opportunity, their spatial practices are not only taken into account but also expanded. The designers, the users and the researchers created a range of instruments to expand across three units of analysis: operations, actions and activities. As a result, the representations of space proffered by the designers were expanded to a space of representation for the users, where new ways of working were realized. Based on this study, an integrated model for the production of space and the development of activity is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]