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This year’s presidential election made visible a dynamic that is often overlooked in political analysis: how campaigns operate as a form of civic infrastructure, and to what extent design plays a role in their efficacy. Far from being peripheral or decorative, the visual strategies deployed by candidates’ structure how people encounter political life; they shape perceptions long before policy is discussed or manifestos are read. Political design occupies a unique position within democracies, somewhere at the intersection of communication, civic identity, and public trust.
In Ireland, this relationship between design and democratic expression has been strained by a decades-long pattern of executive neglect. Successive governments have systematically deprioritised design and aesthetic quality in public communication and built infrastructure. Senior ministers increasingly frame design as an optional consideration, an unnecessary add-on rather than a fundamental part of how the State articulates care, competence, and regard for its people. As Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers stated during a debate concerning escalating costs at the National Children’s Hospital (NCH), ‘there needs to be much better discipline in cost effectiveness… That means making choices around cost and efficiency over design standards and aesthetics in some instances’ [1].
This position, widely cited and contested, exemplifies a broader ideological shift which sees design treated as a dispensable luxury rather than an essential civic tool [2].This framing misunderstands the function of design within public life. Design, in this case, is not ornamental; it is a mode of communication through which the State makes itself legible. When design is neglected, the consequences extend far beyond the aesthetic and shape the conditions under which political meaning, public trust, and civic visibility are formed.
In the aftermath of Catherine Connolly's election as President, commentators highlighted the design and visual expression of each candidate as decisive factors [3]. Connolly’s campaign offered me a rare opportunity to explore what an authentically Irish political visual identity might look like when grounded in cultural memory rather than branding for the sake of visuals alone. While designing, I drew directly from Ireland’s vernacular signwriting tradition: the hand-painted shopfronts, gilded fascias, and serifed letterforms that once defined the visual texture of towns and villages. These were not simply aesthetic references. They embodied authorship, locality, and a sense of civic care.
By incorporating hand-drawn lettering, a deep green and cream palette, and a postage-stamp motif, the campaign sought to restore the tactile warmth and humanity often lost in contemporary political design. The stamp, a quiet symbol of communication and exchange, is a reminder that politics is, at its core, a conversation carried between people. This concept frames Irish craft traditions not as relics, but as living cultural practices capable of shaping contemporary civic discourse.
In doing so, Connolly’s campaign made design itself an act of cultural continuity, a way of honouring the past while proposing a more grounded and participatory future. By the time Connolly declared on election night, “This win is not for me, but for us,” the sentiment had already been woven through posters, leaflets, and social media, a visual testament to a campaign that made the collective visible long before the votes were counted [4].
Across the Atlantic, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York City attracted attention first for his democratic socialist views. It was the striking coherence of his campaign design, however, that propelled him into broader public discourse. Not since Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster, for Barack Obama, had a political image circulated so widely. It gained the kind of immediate recognition associated with Jim Fitzpatrick’s image of Che Guevara.
The Mamdani campaign was intentionally rooted in the material and cultural vernacular of the city itself. The cobalt blue and yellow palette was drawn directly from everyday sights in New York: bodega awnings, taxi cabs, MetroCards, hot dog vendors, and the signage of small independent businesses [5]. In this way, the campaign aligned itself with working-class infrastructure that defines the city’s public life, situating Mamdani not as an outsider but as a candidate embedded in the city’s social, cultural and economic rhythms [6]. Central to this strategy was the premise that design could serve as a communicative bridge to the constituency Mamdani sought to represent. In doing so, the campaign framed visual culture as a mode of continuity and care, a reminder that political communication can affirm belonging as powerfully as it persuades.
Irish election materials, as well as the State's political design more generally, don't attempt to convey substantive meaning through visuals. Their long-standing reliance on formulaic portraiture, generic slogans, and minimal graphic refinement mirrors a broader campaign strategy in which candidates are packaged as approachable local figures using highly-conventionalised visual cues. This approach reduces design to a mechanism for name recall rather than a vehicle for articulating political values or fostering civic engagement. The environmental waste associated with poster production only heightens the sense of outdatedness and underscores how Irish campaign materials often lag behind the more considered, narrative-driven strategies emerging elsewhere. As such, this tradition of visual identity crystallises the limitations of Irish political branding: a dependence on repetition, familiarity, and low-risk aesthetics at the expense of meaningful visual communication.
A strong democracy depends on sustained, accessible dialogue between the State and its people. Visual identity is structurally embedded within this exchange. Visual languages that are familiar or culturally resonant reduce cognitive load and strengthen affective engagement, whereas generic or stylistically flattened forms tend to weaken meaning-making [7]. In this sense, campaign aesthetics function as a form of civic infrastructure, shaping perceptions of authority, intention, and legitimacy before a single word is spoken.
When design is framed as a luxury rather than an essential component of civic life, it erodes the shared visual language through which democratic communication occurs. Such an approach initiates a feedback loop. Minimal investment in design yields fewer meaningful symbolic or material expressions of public life. As these expressions diminish, the State becomes increasingly illegible to its people. Over time, the corporeal presence of the State, its visibility in the everyday, degrades. What was once a free-flowing dialogue becomes generic, flattened, and emotionally inert. Political branding therefore mirrors the State’s broader orientation toward public infrastructure. When design is treated as secondary, a dispensable aesthetic layer rather than a civic medium, its communicative and democratic potential collapses. When taken seriously, however, design becomes a point at which cultural belonging, political intent, and civic participation converge.
Ireland’s future civic health depends not on dispensing with design but on recognising it as a central component of public life. It is the medium through which the State becomes visible, legible, and trustworthy.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Future Reference is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2025.
In 2024, Coastal Register received the SOM Foundation European Research Prize [1], an architectural research-for-practice project at the coast of Mulranny in County Mayo - a national Decarbonising Zone (DZ) with an objective of reducing carbon emissions by 51% by 2030 [2]. Across three phases - framework, fieldwork, groundwork - the project engages with the community, stakeholders, cross-disciplinary researchers and practitioners, and politicians. An emphasis emerged on data collection as a method of bridging consultation and capital funding, underpinning protective / restorative landscape-based design interventions, and linking research and practice with policymaking.
Within this context, it is a timely moment to focus on policymaking - not because the coast has suddenly become unstable, but because its instability is becoming impossible to ignore. Writing in April, after a winter of storms, the aftermath is now visible: collapsing paths, retreating edges, failing infrastructure. At the same time, this is the point in the year when reports are published, priorities set, and funding decisions made. It is a moment suspended between damage and response - when policymaking becomes most consequential. In this context, Mulranny DZ is acting as a test-site for examining whether existing research, practice and policy frameworks are equipped to address complex coastal challenges.
In its basic sense, the coastline is the boundary between terrestrial and marine environments - where land meets sea. However, the coast is not a permanent line drawn on a map, but a dynamic system in which land and sea are constantly eroding and accreting in response to natural and human time-scales [3]. Historically, the response to coastal erosion is to build structures for resistance, ensuring this boundary remains fixed. This is done under the assumption that the coastline has always been in its current position and must never be allowed to change. However, coastal processes operate on a parts-to-a-whole relationship. For example, building a sea wall in front of an eroding cliff may stop that area from eroding, but it also stops sediment from that eroding cliff from entering the coastal sediment budget. If this sediment is supplying beaches down drift, these beaches would erode. Hence, solving one erosion problem has created another, embedding a cycle in which each intervention necessitates another [4]. Over time, this defensive logic has been institutionalised through engineering standards, planning systems, and funding mechanisms which prioritise site-based resistance over system-scale processes [5].
This assumption is now being questioned, with research proving the effectiveness of ‘soft’ nature-based solutions over traditional ‘hard’ infrastructure. NATURESCAPES demonstrates how saltmarshes attenuate wave energy and function as adaptive coastal protection infrastructures [6], while SLOWATERS builds agricultural land through water retention measures [7]. Studies in the Maharees [8] and Grattan Beach [9] examine dune systems as socio-ecological landscapes shaped by governance. BLUE C positions wetlands as carbon-sequestering systems [10], while SWAMP investigates measures to improve water quality in peatlands [11]. Taken together, their work makes clear that the issue is not a lack of knowledge, but the absence of policy frameworks capable of acting on that knowledge at the large-scale at which coastal systems operate.
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At Mulranny, data collection has become a design practice rather than a preliminary step, operating as a mechanism for both design and policy action. Rather than introducing infrastructure to control natural processes, at this stage the project proposes light-touch infrastructure for recording cultural, ecological, and legislative conditions through drawing, mapping, and photography - such as plinths that direct repeat photography towards calibrated viewpoints. This is producing an evidence base that can support both design decisions and the buy-in, risk, need, and impact required for capital funding. By involving the community as citizen scientists, the project also raises awareness of coastal change. In doing so, it aims to reduce reliance on reactive interventions and support the saltmarsh as primary infrastructure - a first, rather than last, line of defence.
If research and practice are aligning, why does implementation remain so slow? With Paul Lawless, I posed parliamentary questions and found that Ireland’s policy context is fragmented.
A key challenge was simply identifying who is responsible for managing the coast. The answer is not one particular Government department – rather, at least nine departments have jurisdiction over the coast, alongside layers of commonage and private ownership [12]. It is also problematic that approximately twenty public bodies with a remit in this area have their own governance structures and policy objectives and never the twain shall meet.
This fragmentation extends to the data that underpins investment. Baseline infrastructural and ecological recording is incomplete. There is no national inventory of coastal infrastructure [13], meaning we lack an understanding of what exists, requires maintenance, and who is responsible. A national survey of saltmarshes was carried out in 1998 [14], and the Saltmarsh Monitoring Project was then setup between 2006–2008 [15], with limited partial revisits in 2016–2017 [16] and no subsequent monitoring programme since - leaving gaps of over a decade between site observations.
Even ownership of the coast is not straightforward. While the Foreshore Act 1933 / Maritime Area Planning Act 2021 presumes the foreshore to be state-owned, this presumption is not absolute, and the spatial extent of state- and privately-owned foreshore has not been comprehensively delineated [17]. This is further complicated by coastal change and historic reclamation, where legal boundaries do not consistently align with physical landscapes [18]. In practice, licences may be issued for areas the State is assumed to own, despite the absence of a clearly defined spatial or legal framework [19]. This creates uncertainty in decision-making and presents practical barriers for communities and local authorities.
These issues are compounded by the absence of an overarching policy framework. Despite thirty years of discussion documents and legislative proposals, Ireland remains the only island nation without a national coastal management strategy [20 a, b], with only a report outlining how one might be prepared [21 a, b]. The National Landscape Strategy has lapsed without replacement [22]. The committee drafting Ireland’s Nature Restoration Plan raised concerns over the absence of funding for nature within the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund under the National Development Plan [23]. This exposes a clear contradiction between Ireland’s funding framework and its legal environmental obligations. Binding European Union requirements oblige Ireland to restore at least 20% of its land and sea areas by 2030, yet the State’s principal investment framework extending to 2035 does not provide adequate support for achieving these targets. Instead, most of the fund has been allocated to MetroLink. Ireland is also already falling significantly short of its emissions reduction targets, highlighting a widening gap between policy commitments and implementation [24]. Indeed, Ireland’s record for implementing EU Directives that provide protection for coastal environments has mostly been reactive in response to infraction proceedings [25].
In Ireland’s policymaking context, the absence of a coherent framework is not simply an administrative problem; it shapes what can be known, measured, and ultimately acted upon at the coast. Where policy remains fragmented and data incomplete, decision-making will be necessarily partial and contradictory (26 a, b). At Mulranny, data collection has become a means of addressing this condition: a way of aligning lived experience, environmental processes, and design-thinking, while making these legible to policy. But evidence on its own does not lead to implementation. What is required is a department for the coast and a national coastal management strategy with funding attached, cross-departmental governance that aligns responsibility, and nature-based solutions treated as primary infrastructure rather than optional strategy. Without this, fragmentation persists, decisions remain inconsistent, and the cycle of damage and response continues.
The coast is not a fixed line; it is a dynamic, shifting environment shaped by erosion, accretion, tidal rhythms, and human intervention. However, while the coast moves, our policies remain static.
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Our present unequal urban structure is not accidental, but by design [2, 7, 13]. It emerges from systemic failure to acknowledge the needs of women and other genders that do not conform to the heteronormative, able-bodied white male default. This is evident in the restricted mobility of women in the city, the scheduling of the workday that often interferes with caring responsibilities and the threat of Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) [1] that exerts control over women’s bodies and how they inhabit space. Darkness alters perception, diminishes passive surveillance, and reshapes social dynamics, often concentrating alcohol-fuelled economies and male-dominated activities in specific zones. After dark, streets feel dangerous, spaces of refuge are inaccessible, and mobility options are more complex. The mental map of the city shifts according to the geographies of fear and perceived unsafety. [2, 3]
Women’s mobility becomes constrained not only by physical design but also by cultural expectations, risk calculations, and the burden of self-protection, the all-too-familiar and emotionally exhausting ‘safety work’, such as altering routes to get home safe, keys in the pocket, private taxis at night to avoid public transport, and journey-tracking text messages. Feminist scholars have described this as a temporal injustice: access to the city is structured not only by where one can go, but when and under what conditions [4, 5]. The “right to the night” thus extends Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city into the temporal domain, asserting that equitable urban citizenship must include a safe and meaningful presence after dark [6]. Lefebvre imagined the city as a process, not finite, which aligns with Doreen Massey’s consideration of urban space as dynamic “never finished, never closed…as a simultaneity of stories-so-far’.
Caroline Criado Perez exposes the pervasive gender data gap, which perpetuates the gender inequalities and promotes a neoliberal agenda which seeks to protect male supremacy [7]. She argues the lack of sex-disaggregated data results in a world designed by and for men, effectively rendering women invisible and creating significant, often dangerous, inequalities. Architecture, urban design, and planning have historically privileged male norms of movement, visibility, and occupation, resulting in nighttime landscapes that intensify vulnerability for some and enable freedom for others. Can we play a role in addressing this inequity of freedom by reflecting on the status quo and challenging the lived reality that restricts women at night?
Through a radical feminist lens [8], which understands intersectionality [9] and seeks to dismantle patriarchy as the social system of women’s oppression, we can reframe our approach to designing public spaces to promote greater social justice. Emerging feminist research positions co-design as a gender-responsive architectural method that can translate lived experiences into spatial change.
Rather than treating participation as a procedural requirement, these examples advance co-design as a supportive knowledge-producing practice that can challenge the male-normative assumptions embedded in briefs, standards, and spatial typologies. Feminist urbanism has long argued that everyday experience - particularly the embodied, emotional, and temporal dimensions of navigating the city - constitutes a form of expertise [8]. Women’s diverse narratives of fear, avoidance, and adaptation are spatial data that reveal how environments function in practice. This data then emboldens architects and urban designers to act with purpose, respectful of the needs of those the public space will serve.
What methodologies might we employ to understand lived experience at night? One such critical framework is Doreen Massey’s theory of Power Geometry [10]. Massey argued that space is constituted through relations of power that enable some groups to move freely while constraining others. Applied to night-time urbanism, Power Geometry reveals how the ability to inhabit darkness is itself a privilege. Men, particularly those aligned with dominant social groups, often move through nighttime space with relative autonomy. In contrast, women, girls, and other marginalised groups experience heightened surveillance of their own behaviour and curtailed spatial freedom.
Co-design, a participatory design approach, when informed by feminist principles seeks to redress gender inequality and elevate lived experience as design expertise, redistributing epistemic and spatial power. When women and girls participate in defining problems and generating solutions, they expose the micro-geographies of safety and danger that conventional planning overlooks: poorlylit desire lines, bus stops without escape routes, dead frontages that eliminate refuge, or thresholds where harassment routinely occurs. Translating these insights into architectural parameters can reshape environments in ways that support presence rather than avoidance. Importantly, such changes are not limited to token gestures like brighter lighting, increased surveillance or police presence. Feminist design emphasises relational safety: the presence of other people, diversity of activities, and spaces that support care, waiting, and rest.
Massey’s framework also cautions that co-design does not automatically equal empowerment. Power relations persist within participatory processes themselves. Whose voices are heard, whose knowledge is deemed credible, and who ultimately controls implementation remain critical questions. For co-design to translate into spatial change, it must occur early enough to influence briefs, budgets, and land-use decisions, and must be supported by institutions capable of acting on its outcomes. Otherwise, participation risks becoming symbolic, leaving the underlying geometry of power intact. State systems must support the opportunity for meaningful engagement and the dynamism that is required for context-specific approaches to emerge, led by the community [11].
Architecture has the capacity to materialise social relations. Nighttime environments are not neutral backdrops but active agents shaping behaviour and perception. By treating women’s diverse lived experiences as architectural knowledge, designers can move beyond security-driven responses, applying defensible architecture strategies [12], such as Safety by Design, toward supportive environments that promote inclusivity. Democratic planning processes in the form of gender-responsive co-design do not simply act as a tool for consultation but a mechanism for producing new forms of space - spaces where the right to the night is not aspirational but meaningfully constructed. Co-design then becomes an architectural practice of spatial justice, promoting equitable access to the city after dark.
The design of our cities stems from long-standing patriarchal power systems that govern urban development, influence financial allocation, compound social inequality, and subjugate women. These inequalities are further amplified at nighttime. Within a patriarchal planning system, how can we design safe, inclusive and accessible urban spaces which remain agile to the demands of all genders?
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Although scattered voices have raised concerns over the years, debate within the field on the problems associated with architectural renderings have remained scarce. The heightened visibility and public concern surrounding renderings would seem to warrant greater scrutiny; yet, broadly speaking, this has not yet materialised [1].
Instances of public critique and backlash against renderings continue to surface in public discourse. Earlier this year, an Instagram reel depicting the contrast between early renderings and photos of realised public constructs in Copenhagen received over 2.7 million views and thousands of comments [2]. Also recently viral was AntiRender, a website allowing users to upload a rendering and, in return, receive a bleak, ‘realistic’ reinterpretation of it, stripped of ‘happy families’ and ‘impossibly green trees’ [3]. In the past decade or two, more consequential cases have emerged, including instances in which renderings became central to an organised community protest[4], a pre-emptive project closure and resignation [5], and even the unlawful replication of a project [6].
A reason for the passivity towards the responsibilities of renderings may lie in the tendency to frame present concerns through a ‘this-has-always-existed’ lens. A recent news article on manipulative images, amid widespread anxiety over the harmful spread of AI deepfakes, illustrates how concern is raised only to be quickly shut down [7]. Its central takeaway is that manipulated images are nothing new: the author alleges such images have long existed. Attempts to discuss renderings, whose current debates on imagery deception and societal harm are not too distant from those surrounding deepfakes, are similarly curtailed by this reflex.
This appeal to a limited interpretation of tradition is problematic. While it is sensible to situate contemporary concerns within their histories, it is specious to use historical resemblance to trivialise and undermine present problems. By assimilating current issues to past instances, the view risks turning a blind eye to key differences, such as scale and access, that may significantly alter their impact.
More importantly, this tendency assumes that direct continuity or lineage can be traced among imaging technologies; for example, that renderings today are essentially the same as those referred to in the past as renderings. Yet, as John May argues, imaging technologies have undergone foundational transformations such that they may share ‘virtually nothing in common’ with earlier iterations of the same technology beyond name and resemblance [8]. However, making sense of what has changed, and how, is complicated. Architecture, he suggests, has struggled with this confusion [9].
Susan Piedmont-Palladino similarly notes foundational shifts in the evolution of architectural renderings and how such shifts altered and obscured their understanding [10]. In earlier eras, she observes, architectural renderings were ‘more akin to paintings,’ but later they were more closely aligned with photography. These categories carry widely diverging public associations, with the former tending toward imaginative connotations and the latter toward associations with truth. Renderings’ sly movement between these fields has led to what Piedmont-Palladino describes as an ‘almost exquisite confusion between real and unreal.’
Renderings became entangled in interpretive ambiguity not only through visual changes, but also through their increasing alignment with data-driven simulation. This trajectory persists today, as rendering practices rely on increasingly sophisticated digital models, environmental data, and physics-based simulations. Previous literature indicates that improvements in accuracy were often presented as a means of mitigating renderings’ ethical implications [11]. However, the realisation of such aspirations has, in many ways, had the opposite effect. By incorporating greater fact-resemblance, renderings have reshaped how seriously their imagery are perceived. This has and continues to intensify public expectations of trust and validity, raising the stakes of their representations.
These technological and associative developments affect public judgment and understanding. There remains significant confusion regarding how architectural visualisations should be framed and how their truth-values versus their imaginative status ought to be assessed, despite their ubiquitous presence in decision-making processes. This evolving ambiguity should not be overlooked. However, ethical concerns and questions of trust surrounding renderings have become so entrenched that the topic is often treated as settled, and new calls for attention are readily dismissed. Much like the cautionary tale of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, concerns regarding renderings are discounted because they resemble earlier alarmism. Yet it is worth recalling that, in the tale, despite the town’s seemingly justified dismissal, in the end the wolf was dangerously real.
In professional discussions around architecture today, renderings are the elephant in the room. They are a principal means of communicating large-scale project proposals and frequently face widespread criticism on their accuracy and ethics. As a general subject, however, they remain marginally studied. Are attacks on their realism merely hysterics, or a cause for concern?
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