Decolonising Design Labour: Rewriting Labour, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in Modern Design History

Modern design history often organizes its narratives around products, brands, and designers while giving less attention to the labour and situated knowledge through which designs are made, maintained, repaired, and used. This article develops “design labour regime” as an analytical concept and examines its narrative, epistemic, productive, and subject-forming mechanisms through comparative cases: the Bauhaus weaving workshop, the Eames fiberglass chair, Apple/Foxconn production, Maasai cultural-property debates, and mobile-phone repair in Ghana. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s accounts of the distribution of the sensible, political subjectification, and intellectual equality, it asks when workers are merely made visible and when they can alter who is authorized to define design. It distinguishes capitalist labour control from colonial knowledge extraction while examining where these mechanisms intersect. The article argues for shifting design history’s unit of analysis from isolated objects to labour relations, knowledge authorization, and situated agency.