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Decolonizing design research
Abstract
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.
... Gui Bonsiepe (1977) has long noticed that industrial design actively contributes to and maintains such dependence relations by exporting products designed in the metropolis to former colonies. By the same token, design research done in the Global South serves as raw materials or commodities imported from former colonies, such as ethnographic data (Azoulay, 2019), which are then converted into manufactured artefacts in world market factories, and finally exported back to the places of origin in the form of design theories and toolkits (Ansari, 2019;Van Amstel, 2023). ...
... From a more recent example in Malaysian Borneo's Bawang Assan, community values such as berserakup (cooperation) and tanggung-jawab (responsible approach) are championed to govern technology design (Loh, Zaman & Hamid, 2022). Altogether, decolonising approaches and mindsets have been an emerging, significant movement to reawaken recognition of pre-entangled relationships with environments, and have formed an important watershed for discourses in Design for Sustainability, Social Innovation and Decolonising Design (see Albarrán González, 2022;Kiem & Ansari, 2021;Schultz et al., 2018;van Amstel, 2023). Such a watershed has generated possibilities for designing from different epistemologies, standpoints and sociopolitical-economic frameworks. ...
Colonialidade do fazer são processos ideológicos, culturais, políticos e mercadológicos que operam para identificar, categorizar e hierarquizar diferentes práticas do fazer, de modo a priorizar os fazeres de interesse do Norte Global, frente aos fazeres do Sul Global. Essa colonialidade perpassa o Design, quando este reproduz uma divisão geopolítica entre projetar e fazer, típica do colonialismo. Trata-se de uma relação opressiva na qual nações desenvolvidas projetam a si mesmas a partir dos fazeres das nações subdesenvolvidas. Neste artigo, exploramos o potencial analítico da colonialidade do fazer em casos de design de moda, design de interação e design gráfico. A análise se dá no contexto de uma aula sobre o tema no curso internacional “Designs of the Oppressed”, oferecido pela rede Design & Opressão em 2022. Identificamos como a colonialidade do fazer ajuda a evidenciar a corporeidade de quem faz o fazer, produzindo e usando, assim como contribui no debate sobre a diferença colonial entre trabalho manual/intelectual nas práticas de design. Como ferramenta analítica e crítica em design, a colonialidade do fazer pode inserir o Design de maneira engajada na crítica dos modos hegemônicos de produção a das suas relações de poder.
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.
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 and Ulm, focused on graphic and product or industrial design. The design community has placed several calls to re-imagine a future design education. This contribution shares several sketches of design curricula driven by pluriversal issues, epistemologies and ontologies, and not created as a recreation of what already existed. These explorations were created, over several years, as responses to needs of people in the Caribbean and Latin America. One image looks at design education from people from most 'vulnerable' countries, using definitions by the United Nations. Another looks at empowering and liberatory design education, building on critical pedagogy principles of Freire and Shor. A third image looks at a design curriculum through a decolonial lens. A fourth image examines the skills that design education could foster. While a fifth image explores a design curriculum that celebrates a pan-African identity. While none of these sketches is a complete curriculum, each is an invitation to other educators to challenge existing paradigms of design education and to create relevant curriculum for diverse audiences. While these curricular experiments are built around the experiences of people from the Global South, these curricula, based by different epistemologies may also provide some insights into what might be missing from design curricula in the Global North.
A world of many centers is a world where multiple worlds can flourish-where communities outside of the Center can design their own life projects, which reflect who they are, what they value, and who their ancestors had been. This paper argues that a Pluriversal Design-which aims to nurture alternative models of life and ways of world-making-is necessarily desire-based, in contrast with conventional needs-based approaches. I make a case for Social Design researchers and practitioners to hone our craft to respond primarily to the communities' desire, in contrast with the current focus on their needs, problems and deficits. I argue that needs-based approaches are conservative, implying the reproduction of a model of life-i.e., what is 'desirable' is supposedly know from the start and/or externally defined. Such approaches do not encourage the creation of new 'possibles'. On the other hand, a desire-based approach is open-ended. In terms of creating a world of many worlds, what is the final result? We do not know yet; we will be doing something that has never been done before. Metaphorically, desire-based social change is about trailblazing with the help of a compass. Desire is the force that we have to engage when our task is to create new ways of shaping the human presence on this planet and new ways of world-making and open-ended process towards the Pluriverse.
This paper advances the idea that Oswald de Andrade's Anthropophagy, formulated for the first time in 1928, can be read as a decolonial project avant la lettre. In order to establish this thesis, we will reconstruct the project of the Brazilian thinker through a detailed analysis of the first aphorism of his Manifesto Antropófago (Anthropophagist Manifesto). We will argue that, similarly to what will be later articulated by the decolonial approach, Andrade indicates: (i) that the cultural and economic dimensions of colonialism are entangled ramifications of a larger structure of domination; (ii) that capitalism is an aspect of this larger structure; and (iii) that it is necessary to articulate a third political path irreducible to both capitalism and communism. Anthropophagy would thus function not only as the evident metaphor of cultural appropriation, but also as a diagnosis of the colonial domination and as a therapeutic apparatus within a decolonial project.
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 paper provides a historical account of cannibalism as used to explain how Brazilians integrate foreign cultural influences into their own culture and introduces a design praxis based on it. From Modernism to Digital Culture, cannibalism is a recurring tactic used to overcome cultural traditions without throwing them out. It proposes the hybridization of old and new forms in festive celebrations. Design Livre is an approach that combines the principles of Free Software with design methodologies, aiming to enable participation in the design process by anyone. Sharing source-code is not considered enough to enable such participation, thus Design Livre goes back to the level of metadesign-the underlining structures of design process-to subvert formalism and maximize appropriation. An example of a cannibal ecosystem developed by Faber-Ludens is described to instigate questions on intellectual property in design, co-creation, embodied relationships, and culture.
A complexidade dos processos comunicacionais mediados pela tecnologia tem atraído a atenção de diversas áreas. Numa perspectiva pragmática, o Design de Interação visa a adequação destas mídias à uma determinada comunidade, porém, esse processo se dá num cenário político de conflitos culturais. A proposta de Design Participativo defende a autonomia do indivíduo para desenvolver os usos sociais da técnica, enquanto a proposta de Software Livre especifica critérios legais e organizacionais para que isso possa acontecer. A convergência destas propostas em projetos de websites colaborativos faz necessário tomar processos de produção e de uso em conjunto, como no conceito de mediações de Jesús Martín-Barbero. Para investigar possíveis contribuições entre estas abordagens, este texto inclui o estudo de caso do processo participativo de reformulação de um portal Web de uma comunidade que produz software livre para escritório, envolvendo especialistas, colaboradores e usuários. Usando canais como listas de discussão, wiki, audioconferências e sala de bate-papo, foram discutidos a identidade visual do portal, os seus serviços e a organização da informação. A síntese das discussões levou a uma nova estratégia de apresentação dos produtos da comunidade — enfatizando seus benefícios práticos — e no tratamento dos usuários, que teriam acesso mais fácil aos serviços disponibilizados. Com base nas discussões, foram elaborados modelos para o desenvolvimento do novo portal.
How posthumanist design enables a world in which humans share center stage with nonhumans, with whom we are entangled.
Over the past forty years, designers have privileged human values such that human-centered design is seen as progressive. Yet because all that is not human has been depleted, made extinct, or put to human use, today's design contributes to the existential threat of climate change and the ongoing extinctions of other species. In Things We Could Design, Ron Wakkary argues that human-centered design is not the answer to our problems but is itself part of the problem. Drawing on philosophy, design theory, and numerous design works, he shows the way to a relational and expansive design based on humility and cohabitation.
Wakkary says that design can no longer ignore its exploitation of nonhuman species and the materials we mine for and reduce to human use. Posthumanism, he argues, enables a rethinking of design that displaces the human at the center of thought and action. Weaving together posthumanist philosophies with design, he describes what he calls things—nonhumans made by designers—and calls for a commitment to design with more than human participation. Wakkary also focuses on design as “nomadic practices”—a multiplicity of intentionalities and situated knowledges that shows design to be expansive and pluralistic. He calls his overall approach “designing-with”: the practice of design in a world in which humans share center stage with nonhumans, and in which we are bound together materially, ethically, and existentially.
This article discusses the Brazilian Digital Culture Forum, and the platform www.culturadigital.br, created by the Ministry of Culture to bring together managers, researchers, designers and artists in the discussion and formulation of cultural policies for the country. The aim is to present it as "a new way of making public policy" insofar as it proposes a dialogue with society about the new challenges of the digital scene, using for this, a collaborative tool, comprising the role of social networks today. However, the creation of a Digital Culture Forum to discuss and manage public policies cannot be separated from a larger process by which the country passed since 2003, when the emergence of networks using new technologies found then in government an opening to the institutionalization and augmentation of ongoing experiments. What quest to present here is the concept of "digital culture" built by the Brazilian government in this period, and also the context that led to the existence of this Forum, as well as identifying some consequences of this “networks policy” in terms of civil society.
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
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.
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.
This article addresses the Tropicalist movement, the iconic Brazilian countercultural phenomenon from the late 1960s. The discussion focuses on its main visual manifestation: graphic design. We aim to demonstrate that the work of graphic designer Rogério Duarte is one of the structural pillars of this anti-establishment movement. Tropicália is often associated with music, while other contributions such as graphic design are less known or taken as a later visual response. We propose and present an analysis of the role of Duarte at the creation of the movement and its development during the late 1960s and early 1970s. His critical vision and knowledge of the Brazilian cultural mosaic led to the construction of one of widest countercultural movements of the 20th century, with a range of manifestations that included not only graphic design and music, but also theatre, cinema, and the visual arts. Tropicália was indeed more political than the American and British psychedelic manifestations, in which it was visually inspired. It was also more than a cultural movement or an anti-academic manifestation: it was a means to criticize and work around the Brazilian government and its oppression.
In Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth. Noting that most design—from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments—currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argues for the development of an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches. Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human experience based on the radical interdependence of all beings. Mapping autonomous design’s principles to the history of decolonial efforts of indigenous and Afro-descended people in Latin America, Escobar shows how refiguring current design practices could lead to the creation of more just and sustainable social orders.
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.
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