The discussion about the situation of the Roma in Europe and their exceptional legal standing when it comes to the right to movement is a telling example of both the legalization of politics and politicization of law within the EU. This text seeks to contribute to the project to re-frame our understanding of international law[1]by looking at how a drive to order coupled with a particular idea of the location of sovereign power that is dependent on particular historicist assumptions and a constantly re-produced separation between different levels of analysis (especially national and international) pervasive within the discipline of international law often enough make such a re-conceptualization impossible despite the best of intentions. It is by tracing this type of human rights discourse internal to international law that we can start to produce constructive criticism of the structures and processes of international law.

[1]In 2002, for example, Richard Falk, Lester Edwin J. Ruiz and R. B. J. Walker (on behalf of the journal Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems) gathered some of the field’s most prominent scholars in order to engage the question of what it might mean to re-frame international law for the 21st century. Accepting its role as a millennial product and at the same time finding the temporal and spatial structures upon which the question as such was framed, the collection explicitly began by asking what was at stake in ‘framing’ anything in terms of ‘re-framing’. In so doing, the authors located a current disciplinary sensitivity in “a loss of confidence in the adequacy of the world” which is reflected both in doubts about the possibility of interpreting the world and also in the actual normative structures of the world. According to the authors, the effect of lost confidence could be seen in how the academic interpreters of international law “tack uneasily between a conventional wisdom about a world of sovereign jurisdictions coexisting in an increasingly responsible and cooperative system and a sense of profound disorientation.” Falk, Ruiz, Walker, p. 4. – 5.

I’ll introduce my paper by an exercise that I force my students to do when they work on a project, I ask them to answer five questions that together describes the point of their project and that amount to what is generally described as critical thinking. After providing you with an idea of where I might be heading I will allow myself to ramble a little more.

What is the problem – there too many sofa tables produced by design students.

Why is it a problem – it underwrites an idea that design is primarily concerned with the production of consumer products for the upper middle class. It also illustrates a distance from the social context within which the students operate and underwrites a number of social, cultural and political structures.

To whom is it a problem – to designers, design students (it severally limits their capacity to do innovative work and limits the number of prospective users) and to society in terms of lost capacity. However, it is primarily a problem to us who are teaching the students.  Thus it is a question about how we teach “design”!

What have people said about it before – generally problems articulated in the field of design is per se different from problems in other disciplines. The importance of “design thinking” etc.

What is my addition to this debate – we have to understand and embrace the fact that design as a discipline is multidisciplinary in and of itself and that is a fact that has to be reflected both in the experience of our faculty and how any department of design builds collaborations with the university.