Commoning By Design: making room for life in the designed world

How can design (re)enter the picture as a practice of care in worlds both built and damaged by design? Our response is to direct its materialising agency toward ‘commoning’. Commoning is a collective process of convening, repairing, regenerating and defending commons that can only be enacted with a community of commoners. This paper explores an interdisciplinary action research project that uses a workshop-based methodology to redirect organic waste from landfill to regenerative farms by designing with a group of actors including institutions, universities, social enterprises, and farmers. We introduce the ‘Commons Identi-kit’ to aid “thinking like a commoner” and cultivating a commoner subjectivity through a participatory design workshop, in which the diverse knowledges, capacities and collective agency of participants was enacted. In doing this work we learn to expand our capacities by prefiguring “new” commons and exploring the redistribution of responsibilities in relation to commons that already exist.