A Studious Use. Designing from the Undercommons
Giovanni Marmont
What if study was not about learning, improvement, accreditation? What if use was not about intentionality, function, ownership?
A Studious Use invites readers to reconsider the habitual logics and material priorities at play in practices of both study and use. It examines their potential and actual interplay, unravelling the ways in which these are at once shaped by and reproductive of broader social, political, and cultural currents. Here Giovanni Marmont explores how a seemingly inoffensive commitment to the terms of individuation, as a manner of understanding and organising the world first and foremost as an aggregate of separate entities, carries with it profoundly harmful implications. With an eye toward the unseen possibilities of social life, he proposes an alternative mode of engagement with and through artefacts – studious use – predicated instead on our general, shared, practical indebtedness. Through a blend of theoretical critique, philosophical inquiry, and experimental design practices, A Studious Use offers a rethinking of sociality not as a coming together of independent, if interacting subjects and objects but, rather, as a primary, undirected, ongoing collective experiment.
“How do practices dispossess us? How does use reorient the very question of function and form? Where else can it take us beyond our-selves? In this compelling engagement with use-beyond-use-value, Marmont takes us on a journey to a non-binary account of use that refuses the limited account of any marketable claim. Instead, it moves use toward the surprise of constellations as experimental as they are quotidian.” – Erin Manning, author of For a Pragmatics of the Useless
“Beautifully written, intellectually generous and politically sharp, this is a stellar work of design studies. Marmont politicizes the often-depoliticized notion of ‘use’ within design discourse and practice. If taken seriously, this rare gem in the current landscape of design theory can potentially expand the horizons of what thinking and acting mean by and within designing.” – Mahmoud Keshavarz, author of The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent
Bio: Giovanni Marmont is a university worker currently based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Ordering Information
Available direct from Minor Compositions for the special price of £12 + shipping.
Advance pre-orders for the book will be taken during November 2025 (to be shipped in December).
A digital version can freely be downloaded here: A Studious Use.
368 pages, 6 x 9
UK: £23 / US: $30
ISBN 978-1-57027-396-4
Release to the book trade 1 March 2026
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