Many designers today (including ourselves) are experimenting with how their practice can engage in meaningful ways with the complexity of pressing social and environmental issues. Being very much concerned with the politics and power relations that run through such issues, in this paper we will explore what points of orientation the framework of the 'commons' and that of 'community economies'seen from an autonomist and feminist Marxist perspective-can offer when working on socially and politically engaged projects. We mobilise these two frameworks as possible entry points through which eco-socially just modes of reproducing livelihoods can be fostered. Moreover, we will consider how they can encourage designers to more directly activate their skills to support human activities that move our societies towards eco-social justice.

We understand eco-social design as a diverse set of design practices and projects that want to contribute to a much needed transformation of the relations among humans and between humans and nature, in order to move towards more sustainable, non-alienated, resilient, just and equitable futures -both locally and trans-locally. However, in today's economic and political landscape designers often struggle to keep their eco-social design practices viable.

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