Because I was not able to participate in the group design exercise in class, I am instead submitting a reflection based on Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” that seems to be one of the crucial texts upon which we’re basing our analysis this week. I thought this reading was particularly interesting because it connected to the previous week’s discussion about the four levers of social change. The politics of an artifact can also be read as the code that is baked into the components of the world we’re surrounded by, and it’s interesting that code was one of the hardest levers to ideate on during our billionaire pitch challenge because it was hard to think of ways we could strategize change in the subtle and almost deterministic ways that Winner describes in the paper.

The political artifact that I’m choosing to analyze today is public benches. Hostile architecture is something that I read about a couple years ago, and public bench design became something that I started to notice everywhere I went (noting that my ability to not have noticed hostile architecture shows my privilege in not being part of the demographic targeted by this code). The most obvious example of this would be park benches that have sharp wedges or bars built into them to make lying down uncomfortable or even impossible, or the recent transition in places like the New York subway stations or even the light rail trains in my hometown to standing benches where users can only lean against the bench to rest their legs. This kind of design, like Robert Moses’ low-clearance bridges described in Winner’s piece, serve to subtly but very effectively remove a certain group of people from the public landscape. A lot of these hostile benches that I’ve seen come disguised or are even just created as artsy and modern decorative benches, like these:

While these kinds of innovative space designs are trendy, creative, and eye-catching, the priorities of who the space is designed for becomes clear through the utilities that the objects can serve. Something I’m thinking about now as I also have experience working at an architecture firm is the big trend towards glass and clean, simple lines. While I’m also a fan of the look, I wonder what that translates to in terms of comfort and surveillance, and what audience is able to enjoy these kinds of design trends. Anyways, next time you sit on a bench, maybe you too can now ponder who the bench designer is trying to discourage from sitting on it.