Borders of communication design

This article presents a critical reading of Plan 2050, a media design project from early 2014 that attempted a political intervention on the issue of the Australian government’s policy of mandatory detention for unauthorised migrants. The discussion begins by outlining a position on communication as designing or mutual orientation that is informed by theories of ontological designing. The concept of communication as designing is then brought into connection with arguments about the borders of artifacts and the genre of national identity so as to draw out problematic continuities between the violence of the Australian government’s communication designs and Plan 2050. The conclusion drawn here is that borders of Plan 2050 as a communications design operate within the genre of nationalist identification. This analysis is then set within a broader context of what decolonial theorists such as Walter Mignolo have called the ‘colonial matrix of power’. Here it is argued that the colonial matrix enforces a spatial order made up of nation-states that control the movement of people looking to respond to or resist the violence of coloniality. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, the paper argues that the concept of ‘refugee’ is a juridical category that has emerged as a strategy of containment designed to sustain a colonial spatial order against the movement of people it renders ‘dispensable’. The concluding claim is that a communication design politics that looks to address the so called ‘migration crisis’ ought to adopt a counter frame to that of the colonial spatial order and recode movement as a legitimate means of survival and adaptation.