When I was a student, I used to work part time as a paralegal for Diane Bélanger, a long forgotten but fierce immigration lawyer in Montréal. It was a formative experience because it helped me deal with my own immigration journeys: first to study in Italy and then to move to the UK and settle in London permanently. Today’s announcements of changes to immigration rules are really changes in service design. I’d like to propose we talk about immigration as a form of antagonistic design (i’m borrowing from the field of graphic design here) so that we start to politicise our design practices a little more. After all as Ai Wei Wei says: everything is art, everything is politics.
As things become more difficult for people looking to study here, settle here for work, settle here for life, I think of the hurdles and barriers that the design of that immigration process will create and the mechanisms people will invent to overcome them. And you know who else creates barriers for a living? Games designers. Where else do we talk about rules so much rather than process? Games.
I’d invite us to be more public and descriptive about these antagonistic design activities so that we prepare designers for this very unique form of public service when they come to it.