Curator Aric Chen claims that manifestos are "part of how we got into the mess that we're in" in his contribution to the Dezeen 15 digital festival.
They are a distraction, he claims, "resulting most frequently in empty platitudes at best and totalitarian visions at worst."
The Dezeen 15 festival features 15 contributors presenting their manifesto ideas that could change the world over the next 15 years. See the full line-up of upcoming and past contributors here.

Let us begin this manifesto by calling for the death of manifestos.
Manifestos are, frankly, part of how we got into the mess that we're in. We have for too long been beguiled by their fervor, their eloquence, their deceptive clarity. These edicts of belief and proclamations of purpose have seduced us into thinking that, by virtue of their certainty and righteousness, we could build a shining new world or, in contemporary parlance, "find a path forward towards [fill in the blank]". But manifestos, however well-intentioned they may be, are by nature reductive and, as such, their expansive promises can only prove false. They are inherently one-dimensional and are often exclusionary and divisive, their conceit of a unifying logic resulting most frequently in empty platitudes at best and totalitarian visions at worst. They are a distraction: proof of the power of rhetoric ? for good, bad, and often, both at the same time ? but also its impotence.
A call to action is no longer action e...