Ahmed Ansari

New York University | NYU · Department of Technology, Culture and Society

This talk briefly sketches out some thoughts towards the possibility of a design practice that has the capacity to comprehend the contradictions of an incredibly and irreducibly complex and interconnected world. I propose that through an understanding of culture as that which emerges through relations, which are themselves constituted through scala...

The 'decolonial turn' has shifted the landscape of critical design discourse and practice significantly over the last few years, introducing new conversations around representation and epistemic diversity, and the terms and grounds on which design research, practice, and theory are constituted. This keynote lecture surveys and assesses the impact o...

All designing, as well as everything designed, is ontological: things shape and form humans, just as humans shape and give form to them (Willis, 2006, Fry, 2013). However, there is no ontology of the human in the singular sense, but plural, multiple ontologies, and therefore, no human, but only humans. This paper proposes the introduction of a prov...

1. Cosmological Perspectivism While on one of my intermittent trips to Karachi, Pakistan, during the summer of 2018 while on a visiting scholarship at a local university, I had an interesting conversation on sustainability with a cab driver who had been conscripted to drop me at the other end of the city where I had to commute for work. Over the ho...

Design and Futures is a major collection of essays, manifestos, interviews and peer-reviewed articles, edited by Stuart Candy (Carnegie Mellon University) and Cher Potter (Victoria and Albert Museum), documenting 'design futures' discourse and practice around the world. First published as back-to-back volumes in the open access Journal of Futures S...

A closer attention to cultural and cosmological difference as the basis for thinking about how we redesign our own modern technological infrastructures may be the way to decolonize design research.

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 variet...

Having attended universities in the U.S. and China, this educator shares his insight of the design industry and education in China.