Designing Commonspaces: Riffing with Michael Hardt on the Multitude and Collective Intelligence

Michael Hardt has made an indispensable contribution to current understanding of the impact of globalisation on social, economic and political practice, especially in his two books, Empire and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. In order to engage Hardt with many of the projects and ideas raised in this issue, guest-editors Christopher Hight and Chris Perry invited him to participate in a blog. The blog format enabled the resulting exchange between Christopher Hight and Hardt to be an open platform relating concepts like empire and multitude to contemporary design practice, and even raised challenges implicit in Hardtʹs own work. It also provided a productive alternative to the expropriation of a theoristʹs writings to legitimatise a particular design approach or methodology.