The Occupy movement has been one of the most noticeable global citizen-led movements in the last decade. While the media attention and citizen participation have seemingly thinned now, three years since its inception, there is continued interest within academia and governments to study these movements to better understand the motivations, reach and consequences. Occupy by design investigates the failures in the current institutionalised methods that have driven citizens towards contentious politics, and asks the question, what role can design play to rethink democracy and citizenship for the common good? The aim is to map the philosophies, structures and platforms for direct democracy those have emerged through such movements, and to identify opportunities for curating new cultures in citizenship and governance; and, in the process, seek to redefine the role of design in addressing complex social and political phenomenon.

Based on key insights from the research, I propose an alternative to the current “really existing capitalist democracy” or RECD (Chomsky, 2013), called the “now emergent wholesome democracy” or NEWD. It is based on six key principles, SCARRS – Small is beautiful, Coexistence, Acceleration, Resilience, Reciprocity, and Speculation. In order to establish this new system, a new form of design is proposed – contentious design, which is defined as the creative use of disruptive techniques for the purpose of deconstructing and (re)designing ‘things’ for the common good. The potential application and value of these concepts are further defined in the context of a renewed energy and mobility proposal for Scotland in 2020.