The politics of design

There's not enough writing about the intersection of design and politics, so I had high hopes for this “(Not So) Global Manual”. The Politics of Design is full of single-page anecdotes, and feels more like a collection of lightly-researched blog posts than a serious printed reference. Most of the book is dedicated to pointing out cultural and political missteps that have been made by designers in the past, but there are no guiding principles to link these stories together into something actionable that designers today can use to improve their own work. The book ends abruptly after one anecdote, without a conclusion.

There are several typos, printed references to pages on Wikipedia, and pages where text color contrast almost certainly does not meet minimum accessibility requirements—a spectacular oversight for a book that dedicates an entire section to color and contrast. Overall, formatting feels sloppy: text is misaligned, margins are painfully tiny, fonts and colors seem chosen at random... I can't tell if this is brutalism or just poor design.

All that said, I did learn a few new things, and the entire book can be read in one sitting. I'd like to see a second version of The Politics of Design that approaches these topics more seriously, backed by more research, and with more consideration toward the design of the book itself.