Diseña

From the University to the Pluriversity?

Sebastián Maya Tapiero, Diana Albarrán González, Angus Donald Campbell — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Decolonization initiatives in design have sparked growing interest among academics worldwide. While these initiatives foster collaborative design with diverse communities in Latin America, their theories and practices often diverge significantly. How to critically integrate these decolonial models into learning processes and knowledge creation with other communities within the university? To address these questions, we undertake a reflexive critical literature review from an artisanal perspective, moving away from objective systems and standardized measurements of knowledge, integrating our experiences, and highlighting our concerns as educators and students from the Global South. This review highlights two key themes in decolonial studies literature: understanding power relations and the roles in knowledge production, and identifying prevailing ideas and practices in knowledge creation with other entities. Using this information, we establish a three-way conversation to examine the limits of neoliberal modern-colonial education within reflexive critical practice, drawing on our own experiences and positionalities.

Weaving Reflexivity in Decolonization Paths and Knowledge in Design

Marysol Ortega Pallanez — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores the transformative potential of multiple, more complex decolonial paths in design practice. Through a recap of persistent tendencies in design discourse, such as universalization, rooted within coloniality and a European/Western dominant design paradigm, I advocate for a nuanced understanding of commonality and difference in our designing. Bringing the focus to praxis, I draw from examples in my design practice and pedagogy, highlighting the significance of personal reflexivity in challenging conventional design ideals and a mostly singular design history, while underscoring the importance of incorporating personal history, the history of the place, and its conditions to weave decolonial paths toward conviviality and the sustainment of life.

Design Stories in the Global South: Fabulation as a Means to Decolonize Design History

Clara Meliande — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article aims to discuss, through the critical fabulation of Saidiya Hartman, the use of fabulation in the field of design history as a decolonizing methodological tool, as it challenges and problematizes notions of truth and neutrality in research and the boundaries of scientific writing. Assuming that all writing, even that which claims to be committed to reality, has elements of fiction, I argue that researchers in design can engage in writing that, with historical rigor, utilizes imagination not as a means of falsification but as a materialization of what is suggested in documents but escapes the possibility of verification. I conclude that fabulation can be employed as a means to imagine alternative occurrences, as a way to speculate on what cannot be answered through archival materials, and as a tactic for democratizing academic discourse.

On the Limits of Design

Matthew Kiem — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Several recent publications in design theory have drawn into question the hope and idealism that often underlie dominant ways of thinking and talking about design. These arguments can be drawn into connection with earlier discussions about how the structural constraints of professional practice limit the ability of designers to enact change. ‘Design civil society’ and ‘infrastructural politics’ are suggested as ideas for helping designers to think through action beyond the limits of professional identity.

The The Visitor’s Hut: An Integrative Methodology

Britta Boyer — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

International collaborative projects can export inequalities and power dynamics across borders. The Visitor’s Hut offers transformative possibilities in knowledge recovery that advance other ways of knowing through its active, other-seeking dialogic approach. Visiting prioritizes more equitable and community-grounded ways to mitigate power imbalances in international design research, where the methodology can become the site for repair by negotiating and translating, through design. In this paper, I showcase the methodology, first theorized in my PhD thesis and further put into practice through research on weaving ecologies in Myanmar, illustrating how knowledge is dynamic, created alongside others in a shared third space between cultures, languages, and people. This ongoing decolonization discussion invites us, as academic researchers, scholars, and practitioners, to actively reflect upon ‘me’, ‘us’, and ‘them’ within different temporal dimensions, remote relations, and the increasing use of technology.

Challenging the North-South Divide in Decolonizing Design

Ehsan Baha, Abhigyan Singh — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article critiques the prevailing North-South divide within the discourse on decolonizing design, recognizing its historical significance while exposing its limitations in advancing decolonial agendas. The uncritical adoption of this dichotomy often leads to oversimplification, exclusion, and isolation, limiting the practical impact of decolonizing efforts. Drawing on insights from a global design anthropological study on energy exchange, we advocate for a post-development perspective that transcends the North-South divide. Our study presents three key insights: colonization is rooted in ideology and requires global reform for decolonization; mutual learning between the Global North and South is essential; and infrastructure plays a crucial role in envisioning and implementing decolonial alternatives. This work aims to stimulate further discourse toward a dialogic, contextual, infrastructural, and comparative post-development paradigm in decolonizing design.

Editorial: Decolonization & Knowledge in Design

Ahmed Ansari — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Decolonization has become a major theme in design practice and research, and the spate of scholarship produced under different terms―‘decolonizing design(s)’, ‘decolonial design’, ‘respectful design’, ‘pluriversal design’, to name a few―signal a significant turn in the field, that deals with addressing historical and entrenched various forms and relations of Anglo-European domination. This issue brings articles that take a critical look at the state of decolonial discourse and praxis in the field, highlighting its many challenges and tensions, as well as opening up new queries and questions for readers to consider: around research and pedagogical practice; around relations between the local and global; and around the status of professional design as part of the apparatus of present institutional power.

Design or Decline? A Decolonial Cease and Desist

Bárbara Estreal, Marcelo Ramirez — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This paper critically examines the contemporary relationship between design and decolonization, with a focus on reevaluating our expectations of design as a profession and exploring potential pathways forward. The discussion centers on the stagnant state of design discourse, and the intricate power dynamics within design practices. It underscores the significance of recognizing that designers do not uniformly occupy identical positions, highlighting the asymmetrical power dynamics inherent in design nearshoring and the prioritization of Northern interests. Furthermore, it questions the reliance on exclusive designerly methods for systemic change, the pursuit of the common good, and the realization of the pluriverse. We claim that design, in its current form, often reinforces capitalist and colonial structures rather than dismantling them. The paper criticizes design’s complicity in perpetuating colonial differences while claiming to address them, recognizing the fundamental role of design for the realization of the modern project and as a key enabler of capitalist modes of production and consumption. Through an interdisciplinary lens, this paper scrutinizes the dissonance between design’s self-professed ethical values and the pursuit of capitalistic gains.

In Another Life Another Being: On Design and the Wages of Decoloniality

Jomy Joseph — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the struggles for design disciplines to confront their colonial legacies and practices, the question remains: who can truly afford a decolonizing practice worthy of the name? This paper will investigate why Industrial Design, as a discipline, has been glaringly absent from the decolonial conversation, and the critical institutional gaps between decolonial thought and action. I will investigate the pragmatic relations between labor, value, care work, and social reproduction within the political economy of design that dissuade and constrain the discipline from articulating its responsibility to transform its social and material realities. In setting this provocation, I argue that if decolonizing design is to be anything more than an epistemological curiosity, moving beyond the niche corners of design academia, it will need a diverse ecology of accomplices—to imagine other lives for itself and become other beings.

Legible for Whom? Decentering the Dichotomy of Center and Periphery

Esther Y. Kang — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What does it mean to have and sustain a decolonial design practice in the aftermath of political rupture? With an emphasis on elevating the heterogeneity of scale, dynamics, and lived realities, this work focuses on the ways designers and technologists determine the orientation of their worldmaking practices. This work prompts designers and technologists to consider the diverse range of politics of a locale in their efforts toward decoloniality.