An experiment with alternative forms of design, Public Design Support is also an intervention in urban life. It helps local residents and others to shape their lifeworld and explore possibilities for action, instead of the usual experience of powerlessness and marginalization in the face of urban development. Public Design Support offers free practical help in dealing with everyday problems while also helping to develop alternative conceptions of the city. It explores the potential of design, including its social role and political significance. Design can be more than a way for competing cities to be distinctive, more than the display of individual status, more than a tool for segregation in urban development. Public Design Support is an engaged and political form of design, since it makes other people, problems, and spaces into actors and objects in the design process. It usually works with people impacted by design, or excluded by it, rather than participants who profit from the process.

This publication—which includes key project materials, scholarly essays, and significant historical texts—chronicles the aspirations, methods, and projects of the first four years of Public Design Support."