Lesley-Ann Noel

Ontario College of Art and Design | OCAD University · Faculty of Design

Design for social good is an area of design in which designers focus on social problems. One way of teaching this type of content is through classes with an international component that mimics an international development project, where students work as a consulting team for an organization in a developing country. However, this type of class somet...

This paper explores the use of speculation and design thinking as a tool for empowerment in three case studies. In the first study, children in Trinidad used speculation to develop solutions for problems that they had identified within their community. In the second study, responding to the destruction unleashed by Hurricane Maria in 2017, Puerto R...

This book is an outcome of the collective efforts of the Design Research Society (DRS) Special Interest Groups (SIGs) in Global Health, Pluriversal Design SIG, Sustainability SIG, SIGWELL and Education. We thank the DRS as well as all the members of our SIGs and all the contributing authors to this volume.

This case study describes many changes to the curriculum of a design thinking for social innovation class at a private university in New Orleans that were prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pre-COVID version of the course offered a practical, experience-based introduction to design-thinking (DT) tools and methods. Students learned to apply thes...

The presentation is a documentation of a workshop that explores holistic pluriversal approaches to design, research, and engagement. It interrogates, challenges, and provides alternate ways of thinking to the Eurocentric design canon and the unequal knowledge production systems that have created models of power that give rise to asymmetric design o...

Trauma-informed design and technology have been an important topic of discussion in the last 5 years in user experience. However, little exists to offer practical direction for practitioners applying trauma-informed approaches to websites, apps, and other digital tools. This paper shares an example of applying trauma-informed (TI) principles to a s...

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With increased awareness and mindful decisions, digital designers can repair the harm caused by digital design and improve the online experience of individuals who have been previously marginalized. This repair of poor design decisions, well-intentioned or out of ignorance, is necessary in a world where technology, exclusion, and trauma are pervasi...

This is a presentation of the Ten Big Ideas for Pluriversal Design which resulted from discussions of the Pluriversal Design Working Group of the Future of Design Education project. This presentation was made to the Education Special Interest group of the Design Research Society in December 2023

An adventurous collection that examines how the design field has consistently failed to attract and support Black professionals—and how to create an anti-racist, pro-Black design industry instead. An Anthology of Blackness examines the intersection of Black identity and practice, probing why the design field has failed to attract Black professional...

This essay is written from the keynote speech delivered at the P&D conference in 2022. In this speech, Lesley-Ann Noel emphasizes how designers can use their practice to promote social change by sharing emancipatory research principles and examples from her own reseach and practice.

The Future of Design Education working group on Pluriversal Design — with members from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, South and Southeastern Asia, North America, Oceania, and Europe — developed recommendations for higher education design curricula. The group addresses the dominance of a Eurocentric design canon and worldwide colonization by...

The Pluriversal Design Education working group met from April – September of 2021. This publication contains the results of their discussions. This document shares the detailed content that led to the ten Big Ideas shared through the FDE initiative. The document opens with an essay that supports the readers’ understanding of the core concepts that...

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 i...

In this project, an equity-centered design thinking process facilitated the engagement of people from communities underrepresented in the prioritization of health research on COVID-19 and increased the capacity for designers, researchers, and community members to work together across traditional boundaries. A partnership was formed between five pat...

Background: Health inequalities are rooted in historically unjust differences in economic opportunity, environment, access to healthcare services, and other social determinants. As a result, the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected underserved populations, notably people of color, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals, and th...

BACKGROUND Health inequalities are rooted in historically unjust differences in economic opportunities, environment, access to health care services, and other social determinants. Owing to these health inequalities, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected underserved populations, notably people of color, incarcerated and formerly inca...

El papel del diseño en la estructuración de la opre­sión ha sido en gran medida desconocido por la investigación y la historia del diseño. Sin embargo, podemos ver un movimiento reciente, impulsado por los movimientos sociales, que reconoce la complicidad del diseño con diversas formas de opresión. Reconocer el diseño opresivo abre la posibilidad d...

The design community has made several calls to re-imagine a design education for the future. Here I share a series of visual representations of guiding principles for design curricula that respond to these calls. These sketches were created over several years, exploring visually different objectives for design curricula. In doing the drawings, I wr...

And if you are in social design, we think you should be in an existential crisis right about now! If you’re not in an existential crisis as a designer in Social Change in 2021, you’re not doing it right! Depending on when you first became a designer, the profession you are currently in may look radically different from the profession that you enter...

Five design educators apply a reflective framework to discuss the who, what, when, where, and why of the Design Studio, how it has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the future of design education at North American universities. The educators are dispersed geographically across Canada and the United States and teach in public higher educat...

Call for papers (CfP): This Special issue welcomes research that contributes to sharpening the understanding of oppression in design and increasing the solidarity between the different struggles for liberation that cut across design. Contributions can include the- oretical or methodological essays, ethnographic accounts, case studies, or visual pap...

Problem Framing helps designers define issues they want to focus on and make issues more focused and addressable. In Industrial design, and several other design disciplines, designers use 'pain points' or points of friction in the user experience to support problem framing, and to elucidate areas where they can intervene and improve the experience...

Pivot is a series of virtual conferences organized by the Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group (PluriSIG) of the Design Research Society (DRS). The PluriSIG and the Public Visualization Lab of OCAD University invited designers, scholars, artists, and changemakers for two days of intercultural conversations about decoloniality and societal tran...

Creating patient-centred and equitable health research through design-based research methods.

Proceedings of 'Pivot 2020: Designing a world of many centers' Virtual conference. New Orleans, June 4, 2020 (held online). Organized by the Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking at Tulane University and the DRS Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group.

Vestiges of the curricula at the Bauhaus and the Hochschule, Ulm, the former designed in the 1920s, and the latter created in the 1950s, can still be seen in design curricula around the world. These curricula focused on the craft of design and were very tied to large industrial economies. More traditional design curricula born out of the Bauhaus an...

In this chapter, children from a 4th grade class at a rural primary school in Trinidad and Tobago participated in a three-week vacation camp with a curriculum based on design thinking. Design problems drawn from the lives of the children were used to stimulate deep thinking and engagement. The focus of the design problems allowed students to practi...

This article highlights a study in which critical pedagogy was introduced through design thinking strategies to primary school students in rural Trinidad and Tobago. By encouraging interactive discussions between students and instructors, the overarching objective was achieved. In order to build students’ critical awareness, agency and empowerment,...

Children from a fourth-grade class at a primary school in Trinidad and Tobago participated in a three-week summer camp with a design thinking- based curriculum. The study aimed to examine how children developed and practiced empathy during the design class. Qualitative data were collected from the children and the instructors, providing thick descr...

The aim of this track was to question the divide between the nature of knowledge understood as experiential in indigenous contexts and science as an objective transferable knowledge. However, these can co-exist and inform design practices within transforming social contexts. The track aimed to challenge the hegemony of dominant knowledge systems, a...

This paper considers the future of design education from the perspective of the designer who was not born in, will not be educated in, nor will practice in North America or Europe. What is the relevance of design education based on the curriculum of Ulm or that of the Bauhaus to the designer born today (or in the future) in an emerging economy? The...

Emancipatory research is a research perspective of producing knowledge that can be of benefit to disadvantaged people. It is an umbrella term that can include many streams of critical theory based research such as feminist, disability, race and gender theory. One of the key assumptions in emancipatory research is that there are multiple realities,...

Can design education have a positive impact on primary school education beyond merely preparing designers? As designers, we know almost intuitively that design education is ‘good education’, and most designers would affirm that it would be beneficial to expose children to design education, because of the benefits of the signature pedagogies of desi...

This study is part of on-­‐going action research between an Art and Design programme at the University of the West Indies with local children aged 4 – 12. This paper reports on a service learning and participatory design project undertaken between the urban university students and children from Guayaguayare, a rural beach village in Trinidad and To...

n a place where design is synonymous with art, fashion, graphic design and Carnival, how do we get a nation to talk about design related to manufacturing, trade, innovation, and planning and sustainable development? These were some of the questions that we, the co-chairs, wanted the designers, educators, engineers, other professionals and the publi...

In a place where design is synonymous with art, fashion, graphic design and Carnival, how do we get a nation to talk about design related to manufacturing, trade, innovation, and planning and sustainable development? These were some of the questions that we, the co-chairs, wanted the designers, educators, engineers, other professionals and the publ...

This paper is the introductory essay for the Colloquium Proceedings of the Ministry of Design - From Cottage Industry to State Enterprise. It describes the developmental process of the project and summarises the papers which are available in Volumes 1 and 2 of the Colloquium Proceedings.

This paper seeks to demonstrate how designers and design strategies can play a role in a trans disciplinary approach by public agencies to address 'wicked problems' and promote sustainable development, by sharing the results of a design class devoted to 'wicked problems in St. Vincent'. In this study, undergraduate design students who were being in...

Since most design professions involve shaping goods and services within large industrial economies, this political-­‐economic context is one key to the realities of design education today and tomorrow " (Ken Friedman) Prof. Ken Friedman wrote the above statement in his paper " Models of Design: Envisioning a Future Design Education " and in this st...

There is significant research on introducing Design Management and Design Thinking competencies in general Management education which normally examines the use and implementation of design strategies in situations in developed or fast developing economies or environments. This paper focuses on the development of a new design curriculum with a focus...

The Department of Creative and Festival Arts in response to Caribbean InTransit’s call for papers invited eight (8) alumni to interpret the theme of the symposium, Body/Institution/Memory and one to curate an exhibition of this work. The eight artists raise questions about interpretations of the body, is there a convergence around the themes? The g...

Despite 25 years of existence, the Visual Arts Unit (VAU) of the Department of Creative & Festival Arts (DCFA) at the St. Augustine Campus of the University of the West Indies, and its programmes are not well known and it is not recognized by internal and external stakeholders as the leading academic institution to provide academic programmes and t...

Although Facebook is seen as a distraction by many educators, nevertheless it can play a valuable role in creating a transnational experience in art and design education, by providing a platform for students from different schools to discuss, critique and collaborate on work, as was seen in this example of a Facebook project of three art and design...

The proposed Technical Assistance (TA) Plan was developed to equip the OECS‐EDU with pertinent information on areas of critical need by the arts and crafts sector in the OECS, as well as to identify sources of assistance. The OECS‐EDU TA plan is based on an amended version of the IMF formal framework for selecting projects, which uses a series of "...

The diagnostic review and analysis of craft production in the Eastern Caribbean form an integral part of the development of a Technical Assistance plan and a Five Year Strategic Plan for the craft industry. The review identified these problems, solutions and opportunities in the sector and action plans developed for both the country reports will ho...

The Caribbean Gift and Craft Show (CGCS) is an annual trade fair for handicrafts, gifts and souvenirs made in the Caribbean and it is hosted by the Caribbean Export Development Agency (Caribbean Export or CEDA). 2008 marked the fifteenth anniversary of the show. The show has reached ‘maturity’ stage and is at a point where it must be developed to e...