DESIGN AND EMPOWERMENT WITHIN INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES: ENGAGING WITH MATERIALITY (original) (raw)
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Design & Culture, 2019
Designing among Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is turbulent because we are all working within differing legacies of colonialism and entrenched systems of ‘othering’. When design enters this space through widely popular methods like the Double Diamond or HCD toolkits, it can often carry legacies of its industrialized, Eurocentric origins that emphasises problem-solving, replicable methods and outcomes, pursue simplicity and efficiency, and detaches knowledge, people and relationality from the sites of its embodiment. This risks perpetuating acts of colonialism, inadvertently displacing Indigenous practices, knowledges and worldviews. Instead, we propose respectful, reciprocal and relational approaches as ontologies of co-designing social innovation. This ontology requires a sensitivity towards being located within multi-layered sites of power, knowledge, practices, cultural values and precarious asymmetries as the condition of collaboration. We provide personal, reflexive stories as a Māori, Pākehā and Japanese designer in negotiating the legacies of colonialism, to lay bare our whole selves to show accountability and articulate pluralities of practices. In respecting design that is already rooted in local practices, we learn from these foundations and construct our practices in relation to them. This means for us, respect, reciprocity and relationships are important as an engaged consciousness to pursue Indigenous self-determination as co-design.
Walking backwards into the future: Indigenous wisdom within design education
2018
This research parallels Tongan academic Hūfanga ‘Okusitino Māhina’s assertions in the 1994 Contemporary Pacific article Our Sea of Islands, that ‘People are thought to walk forward into the past and walk backward into the future, both taking place in the present, where the past and the future are constantly mediated in the ever-transforming present’ alongside those of Professor Terry Irwin and fellow Transition Designers in which they discuss the use of Indigenous Wisdom to enable designing for the Long Now as defined by Brand in his 1999 book The Clock for the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. In the 2015 Transition Design Monograph Irwin asserts that, ‘Transition Design draws on knowledge and wisdom from the past to conceive solutions in the present with future generations in mind’. This paperdraws on the pre-industrial wisdom of indigenous knowledge, specifically that of the Pacific regions, Moana, who have lived and designed sustainablyin-place for generations to illustrate the value it holds for the formulation ofsustainable and sustaining futures.
The Tapiskwan Project: A Design Approach to Foster Empowerment among Atikamekw Artisans
2017
This paper presents Tapiskwan, a project focused on developing design workshops for indigenous artisans that aim to encourage their empowerment by bridging tradition and innovation. Developed in partnership with members of the Atikamekw First Nation (Québec, Canada), this approach to design workshops is the result of a long-term commitment to community-based social innovation. Our design team has been collaborating with artisans, artists and community leaders since 2011 to address the challenge of producing crafts as a source of socioeconomic development. Our main activity has been the organization of intergenerational workshops to create contemporary products based on Atikamekw traditional iconography. Over the last four years, we developed an approach that motivates the participants and enhances their creativity, self-confidence and autonomy, and, at the same time, increases the participants' appreciation of their cultural heritage. This paper describes Tapiskwan's guiding principles, which could inspire similar initiatives within other indigenous communities. We suggest that such projects should be conceived as processes of collective discovery, in which designers and artisans learn together the challenges, opportunities and resources available, therefore aligning the intentions of several different stakeholders to the creation of a common vision.
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Formakademisk, 2020
This article argues that, in collaboration with Indigenous [and non-Western local] communities, social designers should approach "culture" not only as a form of heritage that should be preserved and transmitted, but also as a project that weaves together heritage, current material circumstances, and desirable ideas for the future. We therefore examine the notion that every culture is intrinsically oriented towards the future, representing a trajectory that links the past to a projected ideal of well-being. Thus, cultural diversity leads to numerous trajectories and distinct futures, contrary to the colonial ideology according to which only one trajectory is possible: that which adheres to the project of eurocentric modernity. Based on a participatory research action project called Tapiskwan, which focused on the aspirations of the Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok, we propose that the ultimate goal of social designers should be to nurture local communities' capacity to (re)create their own autonomous trajectories, in pursuit of the good life as their culture defines it.
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Designing across cultures requires considerable attention to interrelational design methods that facilitate mutual exploration, learning and trust. Many Western design practices have been borne of a different model, utilizing approaches for the design team to rapidly gain insight into "users" in order to deliver concepts and prototypes, with little attention paid to different cultural understandings about being, knowledge, participation and life beyond the design project. This paper describes a project that intends to create and grow a sustainable set of technology assisted communication practices for the Warnindilyakwa people of Groote Eylandt in the form of digital noticeboards. Rather than academic practices of workshops, interviews, probes or theoretical discourses that emphasize an outside-in perspective, we emphasize building upon the local designs and practices. Our team combines bilingual members from the local Land Council in collaboration with academics from a remote urban university two thousand kilometers away. We contribute an approach of growing existing local practices and materials digitally in order to explore viable, innovative and sustainable technical solutions from this perspective.
Design and Inuit Cultural Artifacts: at the Intersection of Ways of Knowing
Cumulus Conference Proceedings, 2019
As design programs increasingly evolve from discrete-object to relational systems orientations, there is opportunity to reevaluate core principles that inform design epistemologies. Indigenous traditional knowledge systems may provide frameworks for governing actions and behaviors that could guide designers to engage in more viable, sustainable and meaningful practices. Exploring Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ) or Inuit Traditional Knowledge as a framework for guiding design activity is the basis of a course that introduces students to a range of Inuit artifacts and cultural practices by considering them as objects of design and evidence of externalized knowledge. The course also introduces students to design as a way of knowing, as a process for devising human-made responses to environmental conditions, and as a category of informative and expressive artifacts, of which Inuit cultural objects are often exemplars. A key project is to redesign or modify an everyday object of significance to the student to make it more useful within the context and conditions of the student’s daily life, while integrating IQ Principles. Students discovered a gap between what everyday objects are often purported to be versus the students’ awareness of the implications of their design decisions owing to the IQ Principles. All students wanted to deepen their understanding of traditional knowledge and incorporate it into their practice.
The practice of work integrated design learning with Indigenous communities
Australian Collaborative Education Network, 2020
Indigenous-led approaches to practice-led design studio learning provide authentic Work Integrated Learning (WIL) engagements that demonstrate good practice and enhanced learning outcomes for students. By exploring a body of work being undertaken in the School of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT University, this paper presents a germane and iterative model of WIL specifically connecting with Indigenous contexts through the nurturing of sovereign relationships. The work being explored includes consideration of the design studio as a particular pedagogy and the ways that this is mutually supported by informal visits to community by staff and students. This body of work will be examined through three overlapping and mutually informing frameworks; practice-led design, Indigenous-led principles, and WIL.
2015
This research focuses on designing with indigenous communities. The use of design raises concerns in this context. Because of the aim to ‘improve’ lives and the emphasis on innovation, design approaches have the probability to colonise. As designers, we have to find ways to deal with such concerns. Approaches that do this within the context of indigenous communities are Sheehan’s respectful design and Tunstall’s culture-based innovation. Both approaches acknowledge that the community should benefit from projects. In this, the role of the designer becomes to spark the resourcefulness of the community members to find such benefit. However, neither approach states in pragmatic terms how such a space can be reached. Therefore, this research aims to: explore the dynamics of a respectful design space in co-creative and co-reflective encounters with indigenous communities; and to provide recommendations to reach such a space. The explorations were performed by introducing co-creative desig...
This research parallels Tongan academic Hūfanga ‘Okusitino Māhina’s assertions in the 1994 Contemporary Pacific article Our Sea of Islands, that‘People are thought to walk forward into the past and walk backward intothe future, both taking place in the present, where the past and the futureare constantly mediated in the ever-transforming present’ alongside those of Professor Terry Irwin and fellow Transition Designers in which they discussthe use of Indigenous Wisdom to enable designing for the Long Now as defined by Brand in his 1999 book The Clock for the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. In the 2015 Transition Design Monograph Irwin asserts that, ‘Transition Design draws on knowledge and wisdom from the past to conceive solutions in the present with future generations in mind’. This paper draws on the pre-industrial wisdom of indigenous knowledge, specifically that of the Pacific regions, Moana, who have lived and designed sustainably in-place for generations to illustrate the value it holds for the formulation of sustainable and sustaining futures.
A Respectful Design Framework. Incorporating indigenous knowledge in the design process
The Design Journal
To stay within the planetary boundaries, we have to take responsibility, and this includes designers. This requires new perspectives on design. In this work, we focus on a co-design project with indigenous communities. Within such communities, indigenous knowledge is central. Indigenous knowledge acknowledges that the world is alive and that we, as humans, are merely a small part. Central in our approach is Sheehan's respectful design, which ensures a central place for indigenous knowledge in the design process. However, Sheehan's approach does not state in pragmatic terms how such a design approach can be achieved. Some of the co-design processes we engaged in led to respectful design spaces, others did not. This helped us to identify patterns of dynamics that are essential for respectful design. At the core of our findings lies the observation that in order to reach a respectful design space, in which indigenous knowledge is embedded, a shared dialogical space between community and designer is essential.