Abstract
Countering Rhetoric is an ongoing design research project that explores how speculative and critical design methods might be utilised within political discourse to communicate the unfamiliar by co-opting the familiar rhetoric from the past or present. Currently, the project consists of two design proposals that employ a ‘Counter-rhetorical Design’ design approach. Exhibited at No Bounds Festival in Sheffield. The two chosen rhetorical devices are ‘Trickle down’ and ‘level-up’, the first comes from economic political discourse from the 1980s and the second is a term used by Boris Johnson’s UK government from the 2019 election. In the exhibition, the audience is invited to visit a forgotten research department in Whitehall, where they engage with a prototype “trickle-down” project from the 1980s. This project implements a neo-liberal notion of redistribution by proposing a new function for money that makes income tax redundant by directly redistributing wealth between people’s bank or savings accounts. This system and its associated devices built on the principles of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism, advocated by Friedrich Hayek and popularized by the rhetoric of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Conversely, the “Level Up” project makes palpable a geographically variable VAT (Value added tax) rate for a new central bank digital currency (CBDC pound), based on the “Levelling Up” rhetoric used by Boris Johnson’s government to gain power in the 2019 general election.
Presenters
Austin HouldsworthLecturer, Art and Design Department, Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
2026 Special Focus—Design Across Time
KEYWORDS
Speculative,Critical,Economic,Design
