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Monster aesthetics as an expression of decolonizing the design body
Abstract
Institutionalized design education aims at training the human body to become a design body, a subject capable of designing according to aesthetic canons. In colonized territories, the modern canon predominates over indigenous, vernacular and other forms of expression. Manichaeism, utilitarianism, universalism, methodologism and various modern values are inculcated in the design body as if it did not have any. The colonization of design bodies makes young designers believe that once they learn what good design is, they need to save others from bad design. This research reports on a series of democratic design experiments held in a Brazilian university that questioned these values while decolonizing the design body. Comparing the works of design produced in the experiment with some works of art from the Neoconcrete movement, we recognize a characteristic form of expression we call monster aesthetics : a positive affirmation of otherness and collectivity that challenges colonialists’ standards of beauty and goodness.
... We seek to disrupt this by presenting alternative ways of teaching design that acknowledge there is not 'one' universal design history, but many histories of designing, where multiple competing and divergent concepts and realities can complement and challenge each other. Here, we join others who seek to emphasise local histories as they have always been and continue to unfold alongside dominant design histories (Cheang & Suterwalla 2020;Angelon & Van Amstel 2021;Noel 2022). ...
... Webster argues that design teachers primarily employ tacit teaching approaches drawn from their personal experience of good teaching when they were students and practices they see around them (2004). Angelon & Van Amstel (2021) argue that disregard for design students' cultural values creates designers accustomed to specific ways of seeing grounded in the Europe aesthetic canon. ...
... A group of design educators and scholars who question dominant design discourses is considering how decolonial and pluriversal approaches can foster necessary change (see Cheang & Suterwalla 2020;Angelon & Van Amstel 2021;Noel et al. 2023). Decolonising design scholars argue for the comprehensive reconfiguration of design education to embrace other ways of becoming and being a designer, rather than just removing Eurocentric content from courses (Schultz et al. 2018). ...
Design education in Australia is still largely dominated by Westphalian perspectives, values, histories and ways of learning. The focus on Euro‐western aesthetics, technologies, timelines and processes marginalises other identities, cultures and places. This signals to students that they should internalise, value and master dominant narratives, knowledges and ways of designing. Responding to this legacy, this article details the development of an intersectional and transformative framework to guide pedagogy for design education futures. Drawing from intersectional, student‐centred and transformative learning theories, we argue that students can develop self‐awareness and critical evaluation skills through understanding and designing within their own histories and cultures. In applying our framework, we reflect on how we developed a communication design history curriculum that centres on previously marginalised designers and prioritises pluralistic work that comes out of diverse cosmologies, perspectives and points of view. Early results demonstrate that offering spaces for students to connect design to their own intersectional identities increases self‐reflection and belonging, while engaging students to contribute new knowledges and perspectives to design history than we have had in the past. We hope this framework contributes to design education moving towards and respecting expanded ways of thinking, seeing and teaching design.
... & Gonzatto, 2020) son solo algunos de los enfoques que hacen que la investigación en diseño pase de la denuncia al anuncio de nuevas realidades. Este cambio es el resultado dialéctico de que los movimientos sociales lleguen a la práctica del diseño y, al mismo tiempo, la práctica del diseño llegue a los movimientos sociales (van Amstel et al., 2021). ...
... Estos procesos generan estructuras sociales estables, aunque menos visibles, que incluyen objetos cotidianos que han sido diseñados por los opresores para ser utilizados (o no utilizados) por los oprimidos, de forma que se acentúan las diferencias negativas. El papel del diseño en la estructuración de la opresión ha sido en gran medida desconocido por la investigación y la historia del diseño (al igual que ocurre en otros campos); sin embargo, podemos ver un movimiento reciente, impulsado por los movimientos sociales, que reconoce la complicidad del diseño con el racismo (Souza, 2020), la heteronormatividad (Santos, 2018), el capacitismo (Liao & Huebner, 2021), el colonialismo (Angelon & van Amstel, 2021;Schultz et al., 2018), el usuarismo (Gonzatto & van Amstel, 2022) y otras formas de opresión estructural. ...
... El diseño pluriversal (Noel, 2020), los diseños feministas (Bardzell, 2010), la justicia social en el diseño (Costanza-Chock, 2018), el diseño multiespecies (Westerlaken, 2020), el diseño para la liberación (Jack & Tuli, 2021), las perspectivas del sur sobre el diseño (Gutiérrez Borrero, 2015; Reynolds-Cuéllar et al, 2022) y el taller antropofágico (van Amstel & Gonzatto, 2020) son solo algunos de los enfoques que hacen que la investigación en diseño pase de la denuncia al anuncio de nuevas realidades. Este cambio es el resultado dialéctico de que los movimientos sociales lleguen a la práctica del diseño y, al mismo tiempo, la práctica del diseño llegue a los movimientos sociales (van Amstel et al., 2021). ...
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 de ocupar, reclamar, reparar y restaurar lo que los opresores han hecho con él. Algunos de los enfoques que hacen que la investigación en diseño pase de la denuncia al anuncio de nuevas realidades. De no hacerlo, podría prevalecer el fatalismo, aun siendo crítico con la realidad actual. En el caso del diseño, esto significa dedicar el mismo esfuerzo a analizar los diseños opresivos que a desarrollar diseños liberadores. En sintonía con esta implicación, este número especial destaca las investigaciones que contribuyen tanto a agudizar la comprensión de la opresión en el diseño como a aumentar la solidaridad entre las distintas luchas por la liberación que atraviesan el diseño.
... Methodologically, our research project involves practice-based design research (Vaughan et al., 2017) in theatre laboratories, improvisation rehearsals, literature discussion, designing theatre props, designing a public controversy, and reflective writing. The article contributes to the scholarly discussions on decolonizing the design body (Angelon & Van Amstel, 2021;Schultz et al., 2018) and relational design (Almeida et al. 2019;Blauvelt, 2008). We expect to come to terms with design wickedness by the end of this paper, or perhaps, to stimulate further repercussions. ...
... To come to term with wickedness in design, we advise seeing how this concept evolved and revolved in contemporary culture. As part of the culture, design research also reproduces tropes that are dealt with differently in other fields, including colonialist tropes (Angelon and Van Amstel, 2021;Schultz et al., 2018). Seeing how wickedness has been dealt with by fantastic literature and theatre might refresh the current way design research frames this aspect of human reality. ...
... We argue that the transdisciplinary and transgressive qualities of wickedness carry the potential for other kinds of design thinking, developed from epistemologies of the South (Gutierrez Borrero, 2015). When designing this Forum Theater play, we were influenced by feminist epistemologies as much as decolonial monstruosities (Angelon & Van Amstel, 2021), visions that are synthesized in the encounter of the feminist witch and in the proletarian Caliban (Federici, 2004). The character Doris in our play incarnated contradictorily both archetypes as she changed her augmented reality costume to display different emotions. ...
Contemporary design thinking is often described as a designerly approach to dealing with wicked problems – problems that are too complex and deemed impossible to fix, but that can be tamed and solved with proper design methods. Wickedness is a fundamental justification for designing things as a leap of faith or even as a kind of magic. This practice-based design research questions this justification while also opening up new understandings of wickedness. By creating a Forum Theatre session with characters inspired by the musical Wicked as allegories for different design agents/subjects in an online event, the authors engaged design spectators in critical thinking of their own roles and practices from a broader social and political perspective. We conclude that wickedness is not necessarily a nasty quality of design problems and solutions but a relational quality that can be explored by anti-oppressive approaches to design thinking and design doing.
... A reFlexive CritiCAl literAtUre review oF indigenoUs ArtisAn CommUnity engAgement in deColoniAl edUCAtion And Knowledge Co-ProdUCtion with design ProgrAms in lAtin AmeriCA Many authors have discussed colonial, modern, and Eurocentric ideas negatively influencing contemporary design education, as well as affecting our understanding of differences (Campos García, 2021;Hernández, 2021;Wong-Villacres et al., 2020). Some scholars link this influence to the oppressor-oppressed relationships, which are structural in many educational contexts, and often unconsciously internalized by individuals (Angelon & van Amstel, 2021;Mazzarotto & Serpa, 2022;Saito et al., 2022;Serpa, 2023). According to Trias Cornú (2020), Montes Cruz (2023), and Okabayashi and Loschiavo dos Santos (2022), several design academies have served to perpetuate Eurocentric and colonial ideals in both professional and educational design practices. ...
... There is also a significant trend showing how leaning toward relational practices affects the way we reflect within classrooms (Clark & Torretta, 2022). Most critical decolonial studies focusing on educational themes reveal authors' tendencies to engage more personally and closely with participants (Angelon & van Amstel, 2021;Torretta, 2023). This also translates into a more active role in collaborative fieldwork, engaging with others and reflecting on these interactions (Albarrán González, 2020;Clark & Torretta, 2022;Montes Cruz, 2020;Montes Cruz et al., 2023;Pérez-Bustos et al., 2022;Reina-Rozo et al., 2024). ...
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.
... If we can learn from the Black movement (and other social movements that have adopted this strategy), there are some advantages in assuming this identity to dialectically overcome this very distinction (Fanon, 2007). By affirming the user identity [11], even if we may look strange or monstrous (Angelon and Van Amstel, 2021), we can make the issue more visible to society, who is the collective body that can indeed overcome the oppression. By that, we acknowledge that it is necessary to strengthen dialog with other studies of oppression, such as feminist theories (Bradley et al., 2015;Bardzell and Bardzell, 2015b;Castelini, 2018), critical race theories (Gary and Vines, 2013;Ogbonnaya-Ogburu et al., 2020) and decolonial theories (Alvarado et al., 2021;Bidwell, 2016) in order to open up new perspectives over HCI, mainly to deal with the intersectionality between multiple oppressions that affects the same individual or social group (Rankin and Thomas, 2019;Schlesinger et al., 2017). ...
... 2. By alleged designers, we refer to the social group that includes interaction designers and all design, computing and informatics specializations that hold the privilege of defining computers' ends, including those who wear engineering's, scientist's, or entrepreneur's hats. We consider that this social group also constitutes a collective body, a collective designer (Ehn and Badham, 2002), a design body (Angelon and Van Amstel, 2021) that designs in tune with other social groups they are part oftypically, part of the same (developed) nation, (central) locality, (bourgeoisie) class, (man) gender and (white) race (Sturm et al., 2015;Suchman, 2002). ...
PURPOSE: This research theorizes the condition of human beings reduced to being users (and only users) in human-computer interaction (HCI), a condition that favors them becoming objects or targets of commercial dark patterns, racialized profiling algorithms, generalized surveillance, gendered interfaces and heteromation.
DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The reconceptualization of the users’ condition is done by confronting HCI theories on users with a dialectical-existential perspective over human ontology. The research is presented as a conceptual paper that includes analyzing and revising those theories to develop a conceptual framework for the user oppression in HCI.
FINDINGS: Most HCI theories contribute to the user oppression with explicit or implicit ontological statements that denies their becoming-more or the possibility of users developing their handiness to the full human potential. Put together, these statements constitute an ideology called userism.
SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS: HCI needs to acknowledge its role in structuring oppression not just in sexism, racism, classism and ableism, but also the specific relation that pertains to HCI: userism. Similar to other fields, acknowledging oppression is the first step toward liberating from oppression.
ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The user is an existential condition for HCI theories, yet few theories can explain in depth how this condition affects human development. From the dialectical-existential perspective, the user condition can be dehumanizing. Computers may intensify existing oppressions through esthetic interactions but these interactions can be subverted for liberation.
KEYWORDS: Users, Human-Computer Interaction, Oppression, Ontological design, Social justice informatics, Userism
... Our meeSngs are an open space where everyone is encouraged to speak, regardless of their origin or academic background, because we agree with Freire that everyone has something to learn and teach. This dialogical approach deconstructs the cultural invasion that we suffered (and sSll suffer) in our design pracSces and thoughts (Angelon and Van Amstel, 2021), cuYng the umbilical cord that links design with capitalism. ...
... From these readings, discussions, and caregiving, our foundaSons for acSng together in concert were greatly expanded beyond what we could get from our culturally invaded design praxis (Angelon and Van Amstel, 2021). Our inspiring authors did not ignore what had previously been produced by the metropolises. ...
Design research is geting interested in social movements in recent years. Organizing tactics like coalition-building have been taken from civil rights movements and turned into operative concepts such as designing coalitions that point towards converging interests. As such, this concept cannot support social movements, which are not formed by common interests, but by pressing social needs ignored in official and everyday politics. This advances further the revision of the designing coalition concept based on feminist literature and on the authors' experience in weaving the Design & Oppression Network in Brazil. This network was formed in 2020 by design professors, students, and professionals from all over Brazil, as well as from other countries. From its inception, the network was concerned with the Latin-American reality — colonized, culturally invaded, underdeveloped, and oppressed in various ways by the Global North. The network approaches design as a pedagogical and critical process so that the production of design space becomes an opportunity for listening, reflection, dispute, synthesis, mutual care, and insurgence acSons against all forms of oppression. From this experience, we propose the alternative concept of insurgent design coalitions to deepen design engagements with social movements.
... Engaging with making, aided students in the embodiment and materializations of the critiques. Working with physical messes through soap-making seemed to open up other aesthetics that were not reflective of the neat and clean narratives of "good modern design" (for more on this see Angelon & van Amstel, 2021). Many of the students that participated reflected on the ways that being in a mess can be uncomfortable and that analyzing the biases and assumptions of your learned practice, can, in a similar way, be uncomfortable. ...
Design educators often utilize methods to teach students the practices of design. Yet, these popularized methods often wash away mess and inadvertently cultivate aesthetic hygiene among designers. In response, this research explores the following question: How can we instill critical aesthetic reflexivity among designers about the ways that design methods cultivate aesthetic hygiene? In two workshops with design students and practicing designers, we worked with soaps as tangible metaphors to explore the mess that popular methods erase. Exhibited together with prompting questions, these soaps were then used to spark conversations among design educators. Through our analysis of this process, we highlight four material expressions of how design methods repress mess and critical pedagogical questions for cultivating aesthetic reflexivity.
... Design education in underdeveloped countries strives to form design bodies capable of applying those theories and toolkits (Angelon and Van Amstel, 2021). The colonised design student body learns what good design is to save others from bad design, meaning saving from the indigenous, popular, traditional, and locally grounded designs. ...
... We are also inspired by and align with the growing body of scholarship that challenges dominant design discourses and considers how pluriversal approaches can foster necessary change to decolonise education systems (Angelon & Van Amstel, 2021;Cheang & Suterwalla, 2020;Noel et al., 2023). Grounded in the Mexican Zapatista resistance movement's motto of a 'world in which many worlds can fit' (Escobar, 2018, p. 16), pluriversality advocates that many forms of design practice can coexist and that there is no universal way to know, teach, and learn. ...
... Then, they developed a shared conceptual vision for the lab using a metaphorical Lego model ( Figure 3). As we understood the nuances of each participant's body, we tried to assemble a collective body like Angelon and Van Amstel (2021) have done in the precursory activities of the lab. In parallel and in connection to Nosso LADO, other participants proposed a new WG to make a wall mural celebrating Paulo Freire's hundredth birthday. ...
... Then, they developed a shared conceptual vision for the lab using a metaphorical Lego model ( Figure 3). As we understood the nuances of each participant's body, we tried to assemble a collective body like Angelon and Van Amstel (2021) have done in the precursory activities of the lab. In parallel and in connection to Nosso LADO, other participants proposed a new WG to make a wall mural celebrating Paulo Freire's hundredth birthday. ...
... Then, they developed a shared conceptual vision for the lab using a metaphorical Lego model ( Figure 3). As we understood the nuances of each participant's body, we tried to assemble a collective body like Angelon and Van Amstel (2021) have done in the precursory activities of the lab. In parallel and in connection to Nosso LADO, other participants proposed a new WG to make a wall mural celebrating Paulo Freire's hundredth birthday. ...
... Isso implica em uma educação bancária que perpetua o ciclo de opressão entre professores e estudantes, em que pessoas oprimidas são tratadas como receptáculos de conhecimento (Freire, 1974). Na Educação em Design não é diferente: os corpos dos estudantes são treinados para reproduzir gestos visuais colonizados, como se não houvesse uma estética própria no seu território de origem (Angelon & Van Amstel, 2021). Esse tipo de educação bancarizada e colonizada nutre uma consciência ingênua sobre a realidade brasileira (Vieira Pinto, 2020), que não conhece seus determinantes históricos, deixando os estudantes num estado de apatia e acriticismo em relação à profissão. ...
Estudantes e profissionais de design costumam enfrentar crises existenciais ao se depararem com a contradição entre uma educação formal bancarizada e as demandas do mercado de trabalho. A presente pesquisa apresenta o Baralho de Crises, uma ferramenta que codifica visualmente as crises existenciais vivenciadas por estudantes desta área como temas geradores para a educação crítica. As crises são teorizadas e representadas como situação-limite, momento em que uma opressão é vivenciada de maneira intensa. A hipótese é que essa abordagem favorece o reconhecimento de si e do outro, abrindo o espaço de possibilidades de reação à opressão por meio de um ato-limite. O trabalho descreve o processo de construção da linguagem visual dessa ferramenta, além de relatar um experimento de educação crítica realizado com estudantes de design. Por fim, a hipótese é verificada a partir dos resultados experimentais.
... Furthermore, they are artefactual, too, in the sense of retaining a material dimension in lived experience that cannot be entirely reduced to the 'natural world' nor to the 'human inner-self'. Because human bodies live in this dual role of shaping and being shaped, they can be considered designerly; in other words, human bodies are always design bodies (Angelon & van Amstel, 2021). The design and enactment of bodily artefacts in services is best evidenced when design bodies use body images to attain ends in interpersonal relations. ...
This chapter discusses how human bodies can be approached as materials for service design. Service design often involves human-to-human exchanges and the way humans use their bodies to mediate these exchanges can be designed and enacted as artifacts. Using a postphenomenological perspective, the chapter frames the human body as a key service interface, acknowledging that human bodies, like other forms of technology, can be designed as artifacts. The chapter also discusses how body schemata and body images, which are not necessarily co-extensive with the boundaries set by the human skin, can be extended and influenced through technology. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of understanding and designing human bodies as a material in service design to create meaningful and effective service experiences.
... Furthermore, they are artefactual, too, in the sense of retaining a material dimension in lived experience that cannot be entirely reduced to the 'natural world' nor to the 'human inner-self'. Because human bodies live in this dual role of shaping and being shaped, they can be considered designerly; in other words, human bodies are always design bodies (Angelon & van Amstel, 2021). The design and enactment of bodily artefacts in services is best evidenced when design bodies use body images to attain ends in interpersonal relations. ...
... The politics are entangled with the personal because we are constantly manoeuvring inside the complexities of teaching and researching within what we have experienced as the dominant framing of Design. This lineage of Design comes with ideologies and pragmatism for Design to shape and materialise our current and future worlds according to scripts for advancement, democracy, empowerment, market growth or problem-solving (Angelon & van Amstel, 2021;Chin, 2019). For those who accord with such values, Design's operating system is taken as a given, even celebrated. ...
Rooted in the places, cultures, histories and wisdoms of the diverse Asia-Pacific region, this Book Introduction chapter introduces heterogeneous practices of designing social innovation that address various social, political and environmental challenges. In contrast to dominant notions of design from the Global North that evolved through industrialisation and modernist thinking, the examples in this book speak to designing that is embodied, relational, temporal, ontological and entangled deeply with ecologies. This edited volume shares rich and detailed stories from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Samoa, Thailand and Vanuatu that offer honest and critical reflections from practitioners and scholars on designing social innovation. Contributors explore issues of ethics, politics and positionality in their work. The book highlights the importance of respecting multiple knowledge streams, worldviews and practices situated in a place. This then supports a plurality of designing social innovation. In all, this book offers ways to sharpen focus on entangled pluralities as a central condition for designing. It is a contribution of hope and inspiration that are becoming more urgently needed in the volatile uncertainties of this world. The book will be of interest to scholars working in social innovation, service design, social design, participatory design, design anthropology and Asian studies.
... , and anthropophagic studio (van Amstel & Gonzatto, 2020) are just some approaches that shift design research from denouncing to announcing new realities. This shift is a dialectical result of social movements reaching design practice while, at the same time, design practice reaching social movements (van Amstel et al., 2021). ...
... In the design field, populated mainly by middle-class workers, this never-fulfilling ambition turns into reproducing theories, methods, practices, and esthetics from the Global North. As these do not address the oppressed reality that Global South designers live and work, design workers and students get increasingly alienated from their surrounding reality by studying the Global North design literature (Angelon and Van Amstel, 2021). If we wanted to be responsive to our context, we realized we needed to reconstruct the foundations of design based on the concept of oppression. ...
Design can be both a practice of freedom or a practice of oppression, depending on who designs and whose intentions are prioritized. When this practice underestimates, excludes, disrespects, or deceives people who are part of oppressed groups, it intensifies oppression. Design as a practice of freedom takes more than a new design method. It requires the union of the oppressed. This paper describes the weaving of the Design & Oppression network, which responded to the growth of political authoritarianism and naive consciousness in design. The network's goal is to establish bonds of solidarity between all struggles against oppression that cut across design. Its critical pedagogy draws from the Latin American tradition of critical thinking in Education, Arts, and Sociology, promoting both professional training and concrete social actions.
... It has been shown that positive attitudes regarding a subject matter help the learning environment and vice versa [2]. For several authors, knowing the internal processes of the students has influenced and helped improve their learning [3]. ...
Corporal expression is a content that is forgotten by most educators but has been proved to bring numerous benefits to students of all ages. Teacher perceptions and beliefs play a fundamental role in the teaching-learning process, influencing students to a great extent. This study aims to present the factor structure and reliability of a questionnaire for the assessment of teachers’ perceptions about corporal expression. The sample consisted of 212 Spanish prospective teachers who completed the questionnaire to assess their readiness and appreciation about corporal expression. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, as well as reliability testing, were carried out. The results showed a factor structure with 3 dimensions (pleasure, preference, and evaluation of corporal expression) composed of 23 items with good and excellent goodness-of-fit values and high reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.71–0.93). Thus, the questionnaire can be considered a quick and easy-to-apply tool to analyze prospective teacher’s perceptions about their preparation to address their students’ corporal expression, allowing stakeholders to take actions to promote it.
Design research played and still plays a significant role in the coloniality of making. By transforming natural commodities imported from former colonies into manufactured Things that are later exported back to such places, design research contributes to keeping the geopolitical divide between designing and making, which is so typical of colonialism. Nevertheless, counter-hegemonic efforts, such as the decolonizing design movement, seek to open up design research to support autonomous development in former colonies and their diaspora. While adding a dialectical-existential perspective to this movement, this chapter scrutinizes the colonial legacy of design research and proposes subverting it through anthropophagy and similar alter/native universals.
Expression method and aesthetic expression of fashion design from different essential perspectives is the main focus of this study. From ancient times to the present, people's pursuit of the natural beauty of clothing has been expressed in both the East and the West. The multi-dimensional evaluation model of clothing beauty combines various factors. It is a comprehensive evaluation model of clothing beauty. By using scientific calculation methods to evaluate clothing beauty in multiple dimensions, it helps to better integrate design into art and life. The real meaning of the beauty of simplicity in fashion design lies in respecting the existence of natural forms and focusing on the harmony of nature.
This article reports on and analyzes the experience of undergraduate Industrial Arts Graphic Design students autonomously planning and holding an event (préocupe) using action research methods to address two issues: fragmentation of the student body and the feeling of inadequacy. By framing Vieira Pinto’s concepts of 'work' and 'critical consciousness', this research confirmed that students’ existential reality is akin to that of the working classes: they both work for others when performing their regular activities. The paper presents the statements of students gathered in a collective interview to demonstrate that préocupe instantiated the pedagogical essence of striking: developing the class’s critical consciousness. This work pertains to other initiatives challenging the spread of neoliberal education worldwide, and is a meaningful contribution to critical pedagogy practices in design education, with accounts of students developing both operational graphic design skills and critical consciousness autonomously.
Este artículo relata y analiza la experiencia de los estudiantes de Diseño Gráfico para las Artes Industriales que planifican y realizan de forma autónoma un evento (denominado préocupe) utilizando métodos de investigación-acción para abordar dos asuntos: la fragmentación del alumnado y el sentimiento de inadecuación. Enmarcando los conceptos de “trabajo” y “conciencia crítica” de Vieira Pinto, esta investigación confirmó que la realidad existencial de los estudiantes es afín a la de las clases trabajadoras: ambos grupos trabajan para otros cuando realizan sus actividades habituales. El artículo presenta las declaraciones de los alumnos, tal como fueron recogidas en una entrevista colectiva, para demostrar que el préocupe instanciaba la esencia pedagógica de la huelga: desarrollar la conciencia crítica de clase. Este trabajo se relaciona con otras iniciativas que desafían la propagación de la educación neoliberal en todo el mundo y es una contribución significativa a las prácticas de pedagogía crítica en la enseñanza del diseño, con relatos de estudiantes que desarrollan tanto las habilidades operativas del diseño gráfico como la conciencia crítica de forma autónoma.
This research reports on a democratic design experiment organized by design students to unleash radical imagination in metadesign regarding the contemporary body and its political identity often underestimated. The socially engaged design practice welcomed dissensus as a source of creativity and diversity, it emerged from the activation of the political body as a fulcrum for collectively imagining future scenarios.
La colonización de la subjetividad es una captura que posibilita los actuales fenómenos globales de obediencia inconsciente y apego a ciertas estructuras de poder, que operan como un orden que va en contra de los intereses de poblaciones enteras. Colonización de la subjetividad y obediencia inconsciente son dos categorías que surgen de nuestro trabajo de investigación, caracterizan a la subjetividad neoliberal y dan cuenta de que neoliberalismo y democracia se excluyen.
Recent literature on Participatory Design describes the act of designing coalitions around a matter of concern. This paper challenges the notion of concern as the ontological basis of coalitions. Coalitions are, in fact, political organizational forms that have a long history in civil rights movements, characterized by the provisional union of different oppressed groups in times of intense repression. According to feminist literature, what unites people in feminist coalitions are matters of care and not matters of concern. Following this shift of perspective, this research critically revises the notion of designing coalitions while analyzing a codesign project for increasing women coffee workers' visibility in a particular region of Latin America.
Este artículo tiene como objetivo analizar la enseñanza del diseño através de estúdios decoloniales. Esto para demonstrar como la colonización de subjetividades interfiere en la enseñanza del diseño y su proceso creativo. Para basar teóricamente los estúdios decoloniales se utilizaron las investigaciones de: Nora Merlin (2019), Victor Kon (2019), Ramón Cabrera (2019), Maria Rita Kell (2019); mientras que, para apoyar la enseñanza del diseño se basa en el trabajo de Ana Mae Barbosa (2008), Lina Bo Bardi (1994) y Adélia do Vale Araújo Cordeiro Almeida (2019). Los análisis revelaron que la colonización todavía interfiere en la comprensión del diseño brasileño y en la elaboración de cursos de diseño, lo que causa um prejuicio con respecto a un proceso creativo autónomo que permite el desarrollo de lenguajes de autor.
Resumo Este artigo intenta analisar como as funções do desenho cambiaram para um disciplinamento do corpo no âmbito escolar, imbricado à Revolução Industrial. Em outras palavras, como as práticas de desenho, imersas em processos de disciplinarização, abandonaram as finalidades e a configuração de seus diversos campos sociais de origem para incorporar-se e sujeitar-se às finalidades escolares. O que reforça a compreensão de que os saberes escolares são gerados em meio a práticas, experiências e questões que uma sociedade se impõe como verdades e normas sociais, políticas e culturais.
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.
This article explores a fallacy, known as “gender ideology”, that came to the surface in the discussions about the current Education Plans. It revisits international and national frameworks arising since 1948 on human rights and education, gender equality and the eradication of discrimination and violence based on gender, sexual orientation and gender identity. Arguments made by reactionary and/or uncritical segments of society against the inclusion of these themes in the Education Plans are examined. The article concludes by pointing to the need for other sectors to become engaged in order to reduce bias and contribute towards Brazilian Education incorporating gender equality and respect for sexual diversity.
Hélio Oiticica e Lygia Clark, expoentes do experimentalismo nas artes plásticas nos anos 1960 e 1970 no Brasil construíram percursos que nasceram na pintura e se projetaram para o espaço tridimensional. Cada um a seu modo construiu intenso cruzamento arte-vida e ambos nutriram grande admiração mútua. Como vetor motriz comum, o conceito de “não-objeto” formulado pelo crítico Ferreira Gullar os articula na superação de uma arte de cunho geométrico-representacional para a proposição de experiências artísticas vivenciais centradas no corpo.
É no sentido desses fluxos que aparecem em suas obras as noções de “arquitetura”. O texto centrará foco em um corte estratégico que passa por proposições realizadas em torno de 1969; estas não só apresentam inegável sincronia quanto às questões relativas ao aspecto arquitetural, como constituem visadas privilegiadas da totalidade das reflexões que os artistas processaram. O recurso à referência a algumas obras anteriores que realizaram decorre do entendimento que se tem delas como desdobramentos de totalidades (Merleau-Ponty, 1990) e, como tais, são germinação em potência das proposições foco deste texto.
O artigo aborda certas relações do artista plástico Hélio Oiticica com a dimensão "popular" da cultura brasileira no período entre 1964 e 1968 tal qual expressas em alguns de seus textos e obras de arte. Freqüentemente depreciada como algo atrasado ou idealizada do folclore, a imagem do "povo" no Brasil sempre foi construída pelo olhar distanciado da cultura "oficial" dominante. Ligada ao cenário político-cultural dos anos sessenta, a "anti-arte" de Oiticica foi uma das manifestações artísticas que contestaram a simultânea idealização e exclusão da cultura popular pelo discurso nacionalista e identitário, procurando antes compreender e assimilar seu potencial criativo e transgressor. Transpondo tanto convenções sociais quanto artísticas, tal atitude se oporia aos preconceitos e imagens populistas do Brasil.
The design studio is the standard approach for interaction design education in the Global North. Nevertheless, in the Global South, this approach is not directly applicable due to authoritarian educational systems founded on colonialist ideologies. This research reports on an attempt to appropriate the design studio and fundamental interaction design concepts in Brazil. Following the anthropophagy tradition of hybridization, the foreign concepts were not rejected but devoured and digested together with Global South concepts, such as radical alterity, mediation, and oppression to form what we call the anthropophagic studio. The process gradually revealed to students and researchers the role of interaction design in reproducing other historical oppressions beyond colonialism. This finding points to the need for a critical pedagogy that can aptly tackle technology-mediated oppression.
Risk in education in the creative field of communication design is usually seen in connection with creativity as subjective expression and innovation as desired impact. This article positions risk in relation to the political in design education. It puts forward the argument that a particular type of risk-taking in education can work towards shifting design from a position of a service-providing activity towards a more emancipated practice, which would not comply with the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. To counter the current state of compliance this article suggests a three-level model of extradisciplinary risk-taking as institutional critique. The case of Memefest and Design Futures is discussed. Theoretical analysis is combined with (auto) ethnography and qualitative research.
A new approach to theory development for practice-driven research, proposing that theory is something made in and through design.
Tendencies toward “academization” of traditionally practice-based fields have forced design to articulate itself as an academic discipline, in theoretical terms. In this book, Johan Redström offers a new approach to theory development in design research–one that is driven by practice, experimentation, and making. Redström does not theorize from the outside, but explores the idea that, just as design research engages in the making of many different kinds of things, theory might well be one of those things it is making.
Redström proposes that we consider theory not as stable and constant but as something unfolding—something acted as much as articulated, inherently fluid and transitional. Redström describes three ways in which theory, in particular formulating basic definitions, is made through design: the use of combinations of fluid terms to articulate issues; the definition of more complex concepts through practice; and combining sets of definitions made through design into “programs.” These are the building blocks for creating conceptual structures to support design.
Design seems to thrive on the complexities arising from dichotomies: form and function, freedom and method, art and science. With his idea of transitional theory, Redström departs from the traditional academic imperative to pick a side—theory or practice, art or science. Doing so, he opens up something like a design space for theory development within design research.
In The End of the Cognitive Empire Boaventura de Sousa Santos further develops his concept of the "epistemologies of the South," in which he outlines a theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical framework for challenging the dominance of Eurocentric thought. As a collection of knowledges born of and anchored in the experiences of marginalized peoples who actively resist capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, epistemologies of the South represent those forms of knowledge that are generally discredited, erased, and ignored by dominant cultures of the global North. Noting the declining efficacy of established social and political solutions to combat inequality and discrimination, Santos suggests that global justice can only come about through an epistemological shift that guarantees cognitive justice. Such a shift would create new, alternative strategies for political mobilization and activism and give oppressed social groups the means through which to represent the world as their own and in their own terms.
In recent years, a collaborative approach to solving socio-urban problems has become common. In some cases, organizational changes have been worked out in enterprises and governments to accommodate the collaborative process, and people started recognizing the already present collaborative aspect of the creative process. Nevertheless, a rigorous theoretical/conceptual background that can sustain continuous social innovation based on accountable experimentation is still majorly lacking in these contexts. The specific approach elaborated for Metadesign by the author can provide a bridge between these innovative intentions and a new epistemological framework that has emerged from contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and complexity theory. In the context of the so-called “Smart City”, Metadesign could serve as an accessible approach to the democratic organization of communities so they can perform qualified and consequential creative work, including rethinking their own role in urban planning (meta-action). This approach is based on a new social interaction repertoire, partially derived from the popularization of digital interaction, but also from a new epistemic: complexity theory involves extreme shifts in the prevailing epistemological outlook, requiring new cognitive tools to cope with the increasing cognitive load in social interaction needed in collaborative creative work. This new epistemic also involves changing the way we frame objects of knowledge, recognizing new “objects of design”, of particular interest to the Metadesign action, that can mediate social change in a concerted and conscious manner.Keywords: metadesign, urban planning, social change, innovation, micro-politics, smart cities.
In this text we are reporting back on the practice-based research project Precarity Pilot. The starting point for this research is the fact that in today’s Europe, design graduates are entering into a landscape of precarious work. This research-in-progress thus enquires into how formal and informal design education can be a space where to empower young designers to transformatively engage with the precarious work politics of their profession. As a mid-way result, here we present a series of didactic proposals and strategic questions for how issues of socio-economic precariousness can be transformatively addressed. This result is based on a series of half-day workshops we have been running between 2014 and 2016 with design students, recent graduates and design educators in the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland and Italy. We address these proposals to educators, managers and students alike as we are convinced that everyone involved in education has agency over how the learning process unfolds.
Design Livre is a conversation about creative ways of resisting the bad effects of globalization, such as technological dependence. This article tells the story of how this conversation started, where is it going now, and what is the relevance of its underlying topics.
Augusto Boal's workshops and theatre exercises are renowned throughout the world for their life-changing effects. At last this major director, practitioner, and author of many books on community theatre speaks out about the subjects most important to him - the practical work he does with diverse communities, the effects of globalization, and the creative possibilities for all of us.
For more than four decades, participatory design has provided exemplars and concepts for understanding the democratic potential of design participation. Despite important impacts on design methodology, participatory design has, however, been stuck in a marginal position as it has wrestled with what has been performed and accomplished in participatory practices. In this article, we discuss how participatory design may be reinvigorated as a design research programme for democratic design experiments in the light of the decentring of human-centredness and the foregrounding of collaborative representational practices offered by the ANT tradition in the tension between a parliament of things and a laboratory of circulating references.
The globalization of the world is, in the first place, the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and world capitalism as a Euro-centered colonial/modern world power. One of the foundations of that pattern of power was the social classification of the world population upon the base of the idea of race, a mental construct that expresses colonial experience and that pervades the most important dimensions of world power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. This article discusses some implications of that coloniality of power in Latin American history.
This article examines the reflective turn in student education. It draws on Foucault (1977, 1979, 1980) to analyse a student response questionnaire using a methodology derived from textual analysis. The articles investigates the idea of self-governance and situates the student within a regime of self-examination and self-surveillance. This is linked to a notion of power that operates from within the student, rather than from above. In the process of becoming a ‘student subject’ the student becomes a self-monitoring agent. The author argues that the imperative of confession is used to situate the student within a particular nexus of power. The article interrogates the idea of the rational subject of the enlightenment that is constructed by the questionnaire, and argues that the ‘student’ is a product of discursive educational practices. The notion of learning that is implied by the questionnaire does not directly address issues of class and cultural capital, but these issues can be unpacked from the questionnaire, which also offers up an idealized, masculinized subject position for the learner.
If design used to be a matter of physical form, its subject the material object, it now increasingly seems to be about the user and her experiences. A central problem with this development is the confusion between what we are designing and who is going to use it—the shift towards user design. Trying to optimise fit on basis of knowledge about use and users, we risk trapping people in a situation where the use of our designs has been over-determined and where there is not enough space left to act and improvise.
Em suas aceleradas transformações, o mundo contemporâneo se apresenta diante dos nossos olhos como algo disforme no qual o designer procura caminhos de atuação. Em nossa tese procuramos investigar, dentro do campo da arte-design, práticas de resistência à sociedade de controle ¿ tal como teorizada por autores como Foucault, Deleuze e Guattari, Negri ¿ a partir da metáfora do monstro, ou melhor de monstruações entendidas como processos que emanam diretamente da vida social e alcançam uma dimensão estética. No primeiro capítulo apresentamos experiências históricas: da mestiçagem tal como concebida por Freyre à antropofagia proposta por Oswald de Andrade para a cultura moderna, passando pelo fricção entre arte e etnografia empreendida por Bataille; e mais tarde, das derivas dos Situacionistas aos happennings dos Tropicalistas, passando pelos Parangolés de Oiticica. Sempre no mesmo capítulo, apresentamos nossa proposta teórica de uma estética constituinte ¿ estética da multidão ¿ assim como hipóteses de outros designs possíveis. Nesse sentido, pesquisamos no segundo capítulo práticas estéticas de um precariado constituído por movimentos sociais urbanos ¿ Sem Teto, Sem Emprego e Sem Máquinas Expressivas ¿ em luta nas metrópoles. Denominamos Multiformances suas carnavalizações, performances e ocupações, e as analisamos a partir da filosofia da linguagem. Contudo, a efemeridade dessas manifestações nos levou a investigar como manter algum nível de mobilização política e de consistência estética para além do evento. No terceiro capítulo, analisamos práticas expressivas constituídas imediatamente nas redes sociais e tecnológicas da internet. Denominamos Plataformas essas práticas que distribuem, dispõem e maquinam o evento estético-político. Sua monstruosa cooperação desafia as capturas que caracterizam o capitalismo contemporâneo, dito cognitivo. Para além de um design engajado, concluímos sobre um design encarnado. In its accelerated transformation, the contemporary world presents itself as something disform in which designers seek ways of acting. In our thesis we investigate, within the field of art-design, practices of resistance to the society of control ¿ as it was theorized by authors such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Negri ¿ inspired by the metaphor of the monster, or rather by monstruations understood as processes that emanate from social life and achieve an aesthetic dimension. In the first chapter, we present a few historical experiences: the miscegenation as conceived by Freyre, the friction between art and ethnography undertaken by Bataille and the antropofagia as proposed by Oswald de Andrade for modern culture; and later, derives by the Situationists, parangolés by Hélio Oiticica and happennings by the Tropicalists. In the same chapter, we present our theoretical proposal of a constituent aesthetics ¿ aesthetics of the multitude ¿ as well as hypotheses of other possible designs. Accordingly, in the second chapter, we search for aesthetic practices of a precariate constituted by urban social movements ¿ Homeless, Jobless and Medialess ¿ fighting in the metropolis. We call Multiformances their carnivalizations, performances and squattings, and we analyze them with the philosophy of language. However, the ephemerality of these manifestations led us to investigate how to maintain some level of political mobilization and aesthetic consistency beyond the event. In the third chapter, we analyze expressive practices incorporated immediately in social and tecnological networks of the Internet. We call Platforms these practices that distribute, dispose and machinate aesthetic-political events. The monstrous cooperation of the multitude challenges contemporary capitalism, known as cognitive. Aside from an engaged design, we conclude on an incarnated design.
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