Mobility and immobility are designed and organised through the designed object, the passport. Mobility is unfairly and unevenly dispersed globally due to both intentional decisions and chance.
The passport is not a neutral object, it can discriminate through class, gender, ethnicity.
"Passports thus can be thought of as instances in which the relations, contradictions, convergences, and intersections of design and politics collide ... passports reveal various aspects of design as an activity that participates in the manipulation of the world, regardless of its initial and actual intentions."
Politics of design/Design of Politics
What other objects explore this intervention? See 'The Politics of Design' - Ruben Pater
The design of a passport can enforce an identity of that nation, this comes from the perspective of the designer.
The design of politics can be both obvious and evil, such as spikes to ward off rough sleepers, or more subtle such as the chosen use of symbols for bathrooms.
Design is not merely representation, designed objects design environments which have their own meanings based upon the design of said object. "As much as these environments are socially constructed, they are materially sustained and reproduced; as much as they are real and pragmatic, they are fictional and illusionary."
Passports do not represent borders, their materiality and the performative acts involved in using them create the border. These elements have far more value than any wall, fence or boundary.
Human activity of any kind can be "communicated through material practices".
Passports differ from other 'techniques of control' (e.g. barbed wire) because of their ability to mediate and facilitate - they are active and mobile themselves.
They are a 'gateway' object between bodies and the world, if they aren't on your person when needed they cannot serve their purpose.
Passports can open, close, and temporarily shorten or extend borders. A person with a passport of a certain nationality has different perceived borders to a person of a different nationality, these borders are driven by capital, prejudices, colonialism, '(un)desired' migratory flows, etc.
Such as Judith Butler described gender as 'performative', the state realises its sovereignty in a performative manner - through the acts of civil servants, citizens, non-citizens all following policies, completing paperwork, etc.
Tony Fry (2015) would describe this as a "designed system of compliance".
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