Design and Culture Allies and Decoloniality: A Review of the Intersectional Perspectives on Design, Politics, and Power Symposium (original) (raw)
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Insurgent Design Coalitions: The history of the Design & Oppression network
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Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice
Design is key to our collective liberation, but most design processes today reproduce inequalities structured by what Black feminist scholars call the matrix of domination. Intersecting inequalities are manifest at all levels of the design process. This paper builds upon the Design Justice Principles, developed by an emerging network of designers and community organizers, to propose a working definition of design justice: Design justice is a field of theory and practice that is concerned with how the design of objects and systems influences the distribution of risks, harms, and benefits among various groups of people. Design justice focuses on the ways that design reproduces, is reproduced by, and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism). Design justice is also a growing social movement that aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design's benefits and burdens; fair and meaningful participation in design decisions; and recognition of community based design traditions, knowledge, and practices.
Intersectional Design: Design As a Tool For Social Equity
INCLUDE 2022. Unheard Voices 11 th Inclusive Design Conference Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, 2022
Today, we recognise in law and corporate practice that we must address discrimination by race, gender, sex, and other identity indicators. The 'design industry' directly shapes people's lived experiences. However, surveys show that the field lacks diversity. A comparison of existing methodologies also suggests a lacking awareness and capability of critically engaging with social responsibility. As a result, design can contribute to paradigms of oppression and discrimination. This study proposes participatory design methods enabling explicit consideration of end-users structural identities and pressures. Some of its key components include the radical inclusion of marginalised stakeholders or canvases for mapping oppressions based on the intersectional theory and analysis of power dynamics surrounding the design context. The framework was co-designed in workshops with diverse stakeholders. We tested the process in an accelerated co-design case study, through semistructured interviews and think-aloud testing with practising design experts. The early framework effectively and productively included marginalised stakeholders in 'reimagining' a sexist tradition and achieved positive appraisal, good fidelity and practicable outcomes. It also raised exciting questions about its applicability by other designers; transferability across different contexts; and commercial integration.
What Is at Stake with Decolonizing Design? A Roundtable
Design and Culture Journal, 2018
This roundtable was conducted by the eight founding members of Decolonising Design Group in October 2017, using an online messaging platform. Each member approached design and decoloniality from different yet interrelating viewpoints, by threading their individual arguments with the preceding ones. The piece thus offers and travels through a variety of subject matter including politics of design, artificiality, modernity, Eurocentrism, capitalism, Indigenous Knowledge, pluriversality, continental philosophy, pedagogy, materiality, mobility, language, gender oppression, sexuality, and intersectionality.
Introduction to Diseña 22: Design, Oppression, and Liberation (2nd issue)
Revista Diseña
This special edition introduces eight papers at the intersection of design, oppression, and liberation. These papers refer to social structure as a common leverage point to criticize and transform different oppression relations, namely racism, gender, marginalization, epistemic injustice, and colonization. The contributions follow recent moves in social movements and social sciences that recognize that tackling different oppression relations enables seeing oppressive structures more clearly. Nurturing solidarity bonds across different oppression struggles becomes an urgent task in this new field of research we call Oppression Studies of Design. Building upon anti-colonial views on oppression, this field connects design research with the history of changing social structures through liberation struggles.
Rethinking Design: A Dialogue on Anti-Racism and Art Activism from a Decolonial Perspective
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ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2023
With increased focus on historically excluded populations, there have been recent calls for HCI research methods to more adequately acknowledge and address the historical context of racism, sexism, gendered racism, epistemic violence, classism, etc. In this paper, we utilize Black feminist epistemologies to serve as critical frameworks for understanding the historical context that reveals the interconnected systems of power that mutually inluence one another to create unequal outcomes or social inequalities for diferent populations. Leveraging Black feminist thought and intersectionality as critical social theories of design praxis, we introduce intersectional analysis of powerÐa method that enables HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to identify and situate saturated sites of violence in a historical context and to transform the ways in which they engage with populations that have been historically oppressed. Engaging in self-relection as researchers, we apply an intersectional analysis of power to co-design technologies with community street outreach workers who address violence in their predominantly Black communities. We: 1) identify the saturated site of violence; 2) identify the intersecting systems of power and who holds power (past and present); 3) describe the łconceptual gluež that binds these intersecting systems together and the assumption(s) that those who hold power are employing to guide their interactions; 4) examine the ways in which Black people are subjugated, surveilled and/or expected to assimilate to łnormativež ways of being and behaving; and 5) identify acts of resistance. This paper contributes an alternative to traditional HCI and design methods that falsely perpetuate a lens of neutrality and colorblindness that centers whiteness, innovation, and capitalism and ignores the history of State sanctioned violence and structural oppression. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models.
RESISTANCE OR REACTION: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DESIGN
Architecture and Behavior Magazine
History is not neutral. It is the site of a power struggle between competing social and cultural groups who wish to see their own version of historical events become the accepted everyday version, the better to validate their own position in the hierarchy of social relationships we call society. This essay is largely about the recent history of design theory, and places the events that have happened since the 1960's into a social, political, economic and ideological context. This for several reasons. First, it is a history that has never been told from quite this point of view - a point of view which critically apprehends the education of professional designers and the role they inadvertently play in practice to support asymmetrical relationships of power and resource distribution. But there is another reason for writing this history. I hope to clarify some of the misunderstandings and misconceptions which have recently developed within design theory itself. Postmodernism is either embraced or vilified by members of the design community, but few seem to be fully aware of its deeper ideological significance and emancipatory potential. The meaning and social role of design have been contested since distinctions were first made between architecture and building, between art and craft, between design and manufacture. These distinctions express a struggle which continues down to the present to shape the thing we call "design" and express deeper social distinctions which operate on the basis of class, gender and ethnicity. The design disciplines have historically enjoyed the privilege of a social distinction which allowed them special status within the wider field of social relations mediated by the division of labour. They particularly enjoy the mythology that they contribute to the overall public good by virtue of their "purity" with respect to politics and ideology. This mythology is reinforced by recent theories of postmodernism which are prevalent in design practice, which express an essentially conservative ideology which seeks to sustain existing social hierarchies. In architecture for instance, postmodern design theorists have developed structures of understanding which reinstate design practice as a depoliticized sub-category of fine art production, which takes as its sine qua non the building-as-beautiful-object, founded upon what are reputed to be universally accepted aesthetic norms. In so doing they have at the same time divorced form from its social, cultural and political roots, and have presented it as a value free commodity, the embodiment of the postmodern conception of the "free-floating-signifier" to be bartered and traded in an ever-escalating attempt to transform the use value of buildings into the exchange value of speculative, designed environment. In this process, notions of how the shaping of the built environment might reflect and reproduce asymmetrical arrangements of power which benefit these theorists themselves have been entirely elided from the theoretical discourse. These theories are paradoxically represented as value-free, while at the same time their ideological roots have been masked in logical mystifications which inhibit critical interrogation. They have played a crucial part in bringing about the abandonment of scientific rationality as a mediating factor of architectural design, and their ideology now stands as the dominant belief system to a whole new generation of design students. Yet postmodern theory has been applied in the design disciplines in a partial and selective manner calculated to prescribe the ways in which the professional designer might operate as a public intellectual. Its proponents in the design professions seek to preserve a sacrosanct domain of professional expertise, based upon normative theories of aesthetics, through which the designer might exercise control over what stands for quality in the built environment. At the same time that this has been happening in architecture proper, a similar process has been occurring in the domain of Environmental Design. Environmental Design (as embodied in organizations such as the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), together with its Australasian and European affiliates (PAPER and IAPS) was originally conceived around the need to ground design in a rational methodology, and to eliminate the apparent arbitrariness of formalism. While not denying the legitimacy of formalism per se, Environmental Design has been viewed as a rationalist supplement to traditional conceptions of design, seeking the integration of Environment/Behavior information systems into the everyday knowledge base of the design professions. This model has worked with reasonable efficiency until recently, when, with the advent of Postmodernism and Deconstructivism in design, a new form of radical expressionism appeared, undermining the veracity of all forms of rationalism save those dedicated to the ethic of efficiency, performativity and maximum short term economic return. In response to this tendency, many environmental designers have themselves repudiated the principles of Postmodernism seeing it as the affirmation of irrationality in the designed world (Harris and Lipman, 1989, 68). In what follows, I will show how and why postmodernism has been conservatively taken up by designers, and will suggest an alternative model of the designer as public intellectual. This model will move beyond the selectivity and partiality of existing postmodern theories of design, and will take seriously many of the precepts of postmodern philosophy to re-insert the social and political into the theoretical discourse of design practice, design education and environmental design research. 2. WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM? Most recent critical authors (Debord, 1968; Bell, 1973; Mandel, 1975; Lyotard, 1984; Harvey, 1989) agree that the last twenty years have ushered in a set of unique social, cultural, industrial and political circumstances commonly called "postmodern". This is variously understood to imply a radical departure from what is termed Modernism, which is itself taken to be an aspect of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment Project - the application of instrumental rationality to the social world, ushered in by the industrial revolution, and transforming permanently the pre-industrial feudal society which had dominated life for the preceding two thousand years. According to Enlightenment philosophers, rationalism was to liberate humankind from the servitude of inherited privilege, and to ensure that resources were socially distributed according to individual ability (Ward, 1991). Postmodern critics maintain that any social emancipation has been at the cost of a decrease in the quality of life brought about by precisely that modernist rationality which promised freedom. The "progress" normally associated with Modernism and science is partial. Hayter (1982, 16-17) notes that a very large proportion of the world's population is significantly worse off now than before the Enlightenment with 16% of the population receiving 63% of the world's income, and the rest doomed to dependency. At the same time, within the industrial nations, the number of middle income earners is contracting, with a minority moving up the economic ladder and the vast majority moving down. (Parenti, 1988, 10-11; Harrington, 1984, 149) Furthermore, the situation is getting progressively worse, and this is true both nationally, as well as internationally. Modernism, with its scientific rationality has, according to writers like Lyotard, acted as a kind of cultural imperialism for which "progress" operates as a code word for oppression. One of the significant aspects of Postmodernism, then, is relationship to this process. Modernism in design has a rather different meaning, usually being applied to a style of building which occurred during that period following the Russian revolution of 1917 and including as its primary influence the work in the 1920's and 1930's emanating from the Bauhaus (Blake, 1974). Postmodernism, in this more restricted sense is seen as a repudiation of many of the principles of this style, and the ideology which produced it (centralized socialist programs, factory housing production, an abandonment of ornament, etc). Wolfe, along with others notes that the high ideals of architectural Modernism, based originally upon the principle of universal worker housing have been an abysmal failure. (Wolfe 1981; Jencks, 1984, 1987; Venturi, 1977), and other postmodern design theorists have suggested that Modernism, with its emphasis upon principles of universal emancipation, is dead. Jencks, particularly, has rather dramatically pin-pointed the death of Modernism , "at 3.32 p.m. on the 15th July 1972" when the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri (a prize-winning design based upon Corbusian principles) was demolished as unliv¬able. In fact, the failure of Pruitt-Igoe has been recently shown to result not from design deficiencies arising from modernist principles, so much as from a dearth of capital financing, and a severe cutback of the maintenance programs of the St. Louis Housing Authority (Bristol, 1991, 163). For Jencks and Venturi, Postmodernism is a new formal style of architecture in which playfulness, and ornament have been reinstated. The style is characterized by a separation of form from content and by giving preference to the former over the latter. It is characteristic of such critics that they perceive the built environment as stripped of its social, political and economic reality, and see its social failure as a failure of form
Proceedings of DRS
To explore dismantling oppressive power relations in design, we bring to fore design encounters through the lens of relationality and improvisational competence. This paper is based on the premise that, if we are to move toward decolonizing design, design(ers) needs to rethink the organization of the design encounter and how we as designers practice participation in such encounters. We emphasize the improvisational nature of turn-taking in dialogue amidst asymmetric and dynamic power relations, with design's commitment to generating resources for future practices, and decolonization's commitment to re-configure power structures. After problematizing the design encounter from a power relation perspective, we explore practice models for developing improvisational competence. We do this by looking at the two improvisational dialogic practices of Capoeira and Improv Theater. We focus on what it can mean to develop skills in "improvisational competence" of relationality in design. We first touch on our previous Participatory Design work in the language learning "in the wild" agenda and then draw on each of our personal improvisational practices: Capoeira martial art, and improvisational theater. We then outline possibilities for relational improvisational design dialogue and conclude by outlining how it can be practiced in Design education and practice.