Azimuts / 57

Issue 57 of Azimuts arrives in a context where many students and young designers are questioning or even deserting their profession. We know that our professional activity is assimilated to a "passionate profession", which would justify free work, while concealing a precarious situation. We are also aware that exercising this profession contributes to a more globalised social, environmental, and economic crisis. Despite the ideology of the "saviour" designer, the designer as an individual becomes a vector of exclusion, oppression, alienation, consumerism, pollution, greenwashing…

The term "deconstruction" (of thought, of institutions, of social relationships) is a philosophical concept that is often borrowed in social science, to try and decenter the standpoints often imposed as absolute truths by a dominant group. For example, the word can be found in decolonial thought or in feminist struggles. But before being a philosophical concept, it is above all a term linked to doing, to a gesture, an action.
In this issue, the contributors each offer us their own way of de-designing by going back and forth between practice and reflection.

 

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Azimuts is a design research journal founded in 1991 by the student-researchers of the post-graduate program of the École supérieure d'art et design de Saint-Étienne. A unique publication in the design editorial landscape, the journal is a place for reflection, exchange, and criticism on the issues of contemporary design and art, as well as a field for experimentation and graphic and typographic research.
Azimuts magazine gathers the points of view of personalities from the world of design, culture and research in general. The issues are organized around thematic dossiers on design and, more generally, on material culture or its criticism. The "Varia" section welcomes contributions that are not part of the dossier, and the "Anthology" section allows readers to discover or rediscover texts and documents that are difficult to access (out of print or never translated into French). The "Reviews" section is a space for free criticism of current research and publications on design in the field.