Upcoming Events

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Design education is dominated by Western discourses reinforcing modern-colonial views of design as ‘universal’. This is infused with the idea of the designer as ‘neutral’ without acknowledging the influence of the designer’s background based on their disciplinary training, worldviews, and identities. To challenge these, design educators and students must be aware of the influence of power, politics, privilege, and access (3P-A) imbalances we carry in our different roles based on our distinct positions and identities. It is important to move away from dominant design and embrace diverse ways of knowing, doing, teaching, and learning design in tertiary education. For this purpose, the founding members of the InterDesigning Network suggest craft-making as a decolonial embodied practice to visualise and materialise concepts to support awareness, in this case, using diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) dimensions through an intersectional lens. This approach aims to be an introductory exploration of our positionalities based on our different locations and reflect how our identities, positions, power, and agency can contribute to weaving collective aspirations contributing to pluriversal design education.

Design education is dominated by Western discourses and Euro-Anglocentric narratives, even in geographical locations that are distant from Europe or North America. This reinforces modern-colonial views of design as universal (Schultz et al., 2018), commercially driven (Noel, 2020), with a European aesthetic canon (Angelon and Van Amstel, 2021) or an “aesthetics of whiteness” (Sánchez and Sánchez, 2022, p. 3). Nevertheless, this dominant design approach is infused with the idea of the designer as ‘neutral’ without acknowledging that their background, based on their disciplinary training, worldviews, and identities, influences the process, methods and outputs of the design projects. This neutrality is also pervasive within design education, and inturn impacts the type of projects proposed by design students, and their adherence to dominant aesthetics and processes, often disconnected from their identities, knowledges, and worldviews. Consequently, ‘other’ cultures, places and knowledges outside of Western discourses of design end up being marginalised or not considered ‘proper’ design, such as in the case of craft, artisan, or maker-related work (Tunstall, 2013).

The embodied practice of craft-making serves to visualize concepts in the unseen, making them tangible in the physical realm through our hands (Albarran and Wilson, 2022). Echoing Perez-Bustos and Botero (2023) ideas of embodied and material design practices, it is intended this craft-making approach becomes “a way of understanding that the knot or stitch made as a record was a material memory of what had been lived, experienced” (p. 9). In this case, we draw together Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) dimensions with an intersectional lens to create an entry point for self-reflection and positionality in educational contexts and encourage dialogue amongst design educators.

Positionality establishes the disclosure of our position and the understanding of how we might benefit or be disadvantaged due to historical legacies, used as a decolonial and pluriversal design approach (Noel et al, 2023; St John et al., 2023; Schiffer, 2020). Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognise that our positionality’s oppressions and privileges might change by shifting localities. This served as the catalyst to critically reflect on power, politics, privilege and access (3P-A) imbalances (Albarran Gonzalez, 2020) in our different roles based on our positions and identities, rather than being conceived as a fixed trait. To support the embodiment and visualisation of localities, craft-making is complemented with spatial explorations to experience the relational shifts of our 3P-A through our bodies. In this sense, our distinct ‘alities’ as design educators become a pathway for self-reflection on our own inter spaces as an embodied practice (St John et al., 2024). This embodied reflection and collective awareness aims to become a ‘call-to-action’ and use our agency to contribute to weaving collective aspirations towards pluriversal design education.

Programming

This workshop is part of InterDesigning Network¹ work done in the Asia-Pacific region as design educators and researchers. Building from our previous research and symposium, one of the members will host a face-to-face / half-day workshop in Boston for an embodied craft-making session to visualise and materialise our positionality and localities using DEI and intersectional dimensions for self-reflection and awareness of 3P-A.

Through a live-embodied experience, this workshop has different intentions. We want participants to experience: a) how our hands and bodies, through craft-making and spatial exploration can contribute to an embodied sense-making of concepts, b) how craft-making can be used as a ‘soft’ entry point to discuss ‘sensitive’ topics such as power and privilege and as an outlet to express related emotions, and c) as a symbolic and embodied move from emotions to action, using our agency as individuals and as a collective to contribute to change.

The workshop aims to serve as a collective embodiment of interactions and identification of common patterns and to co-create woven connections of experiences, past and present reflections, and future aspirations towards pluriversal design education.

¹ We are a collective of design educators from across the Asia Pacific region engaged with a range of separate yet related questions on how to co-create decolonial, pluriversal, and intersection voices, materials, themes, and approaches within our teaching. We encourage more diverse ways of teaching and designing within tertiary institutions. This is our platform for co-creating and sharing this knowledge. https://interdesigning.com/

Past Events

InterDesigning

Symposium

Co-creating the Praxis of Teaching Decolonial, Intersectional and Pluriversal Design and Histories. You are warmly invited to join the InterDesigning symposium that will bring together design scholars, educators, and practitioners across Oceania to explore and co-create more diverse ways of teaching and designing within tertiary institutions.

Watch the Symposium recording:

The InterDesigning network will be presenting at the Thriving Futures 2023 ACUADS conference. Our presentation ‘Wellbeing in dialogue: How to innovate design teaching through positionality, intersectionality and pluriversal approaches’ centres key praxes in design education that have the potential to increase students’ sense of belonging while improving staff confidence and ability to teach from and including diverse perspectives. Through these praxes, we aim to contribute to Design staff and student wellbeing and support the discipline in fulfilling its societal role of foregrounding culture, care, and community.