Design and the Art of Care

Michael Schillmeier asks fundamental questions about the composition of the common world and the role of design in cultivating caring relations to maintain it. He demonstrates the value of engaging in critical reflection on contemporary vocabularies of care by attending to the work of Argentinian artist and activist Raul Lemesoff, whose Weapons of Mass Instruction, a vehicle that is shaped to look like a tank but works as a book bus spreading free knowledge, constitutes a deliberate, non‐violent intervention into urban space. Drawing on diverse philosophies, Schillmeier proposes that design needs to participate in similar creative disruptions to spread forms of togetherness that are respectful of difference and diversity. In order to do so, however, design has to rid itself of its human exceptionalism and attend to entanglements between humans and the nonhuman world, a task that care thinking is particularly well suited due to its relational orientation.