Designers work hard. Late hours in the studio, intricately layered drawings, and painstakingly crafted models have all contributed to the strong work ethic of our respective disciplines. Professional practice carries these ethics forward after education, with offices full well beyond the typical 9 to 5 hours of other industries. However, such admirable characteristics have also been used to justify problematic conceptions such as the creative genius, free and exploited labor, environmentally wasteful projects, and other socially harmful practices. Recent discourse has begun to challenge these ideas, however. With new social solidarity campaigns, building industry collectives, and growing unionization efforts, for example, a new movement of designers has provided an alternative paradigm for the relationship between labor and design. As we continually confront a broader series of crises in the twenty-first century, from global pandemics to crippling economic inequality to worsening climate change, our old ways of thinking are inadequate if designers are to contribute effectively to possible solutions. This seminar invites students to examine their own disciplines through the lens of social, economic, and labor theory, developing a personal critique which reframes strongly held practices that they might consider problematic, as well as workshop potential solutions. Through intensive weekly readings and discussions centered on historic thinkers like Plato, Karl Marx, Max Weber, William Morris, Henri Lefebvre, Hannah Arendt, and Harry Braverman, and more contemporary critics such as Shoshanna Zuboff, Michael Yates, Erik Olin Wright, and Nancy Fraser, we will develop a new perspective which foregrounds labor and social theory in our conception of design. Concurrently, we will read excerpts from the instructor’s forthcoming book The Labor of Architecture: Design, Creativity, and the Building of a New Class Consciousness as a worker-centered critique of the architecture industry. The final deliverable for this course will be a critical paper which utilizes a new theoretical framework to both critique current conditions as well as posit alternative modes of practice within a particular design discipline, creating a potential contribution to this new model of design practice.