This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good Review
This Is for Everyone, edited by Paola Antonelli, is a survey of design that serves the public: projects that expand access, resilience, and dignity. It treats design as infrastructure for everyday life—open, scalable, and humane—rather than as styling.
Overview
The book curates objects, interfaces, systems, and social practices: health and crisis tools, civic platforms, education kits, accessibility hacks, and networked artifacts. Each entry pairs a concise brief with context: the problem, the intervention, and the evidence of use.
Summary
Works range from low-tech fixes to networked services. Themes recur: openness (licenses, APIs), modularity, repairability, and community governance. The lens is outcomes: does this reduce friction, lower cost, or widen participation. Failures are instructive: beautiful prototypes that never reached users.
Authors
Paola Antonelli, MoMA curator, frames design as a civic discipline. Contributors bring museum rigor with practitioner pragmatism.
Key Themes
Access as a design goal; simplicity at scale; openness and interoperability; repair and reuse; participation and co-creation; measuring impact, not hype.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths: crisp case selection, actionable patterns, and a clear ethical frame. Weaknesses: limited long-term data and uneven technical depth. Treat it as a compass for public-interest design.
Target Audience
Designers, civic technologists, product teams, educators, and policy makers building tools for broad publics.
Favorite Ideas
Open standards as social equity; repairability as resilience; lightweight, modular kits that communities can adapt without permission.
Takeaways
Design for outcomes and access. Favor open interfaces, repairable parts, clear language, and community governance. If more people can use it, fix it, and adapt it, it serves the common good.
