Abstract
Dominant paradigms have confined imaginaries to narrow, hegemonic narratives, severing them from plural, relational, and non-domesticated possibilities. This paper challenges monolithic views of language and material craft by offering a transformative lens on cultural and linguistic dynamism within design research and practice. Drawing on “savage” futures (Lévi-Strauss, 1966) and “translanguaging” (Lee, 2015; García & Kleifgen, 2020), we highlight the situated creative practices of peripheral craft makers as mediums for multilingual storytelling, identity negotiation, and speculative futures. Translanguaging extends beyond language, involving embodied, material, and affective communication as non-hierarchical resources for collective worlding and shared meaning-making. Through participatory craft projects in the Global South, ‘making’ emerges as a situated site for dialogue, situated learning, and reworlding, enabling new coexistence imaginaries. This work contributes to design by introducing a lexicon and methodology that amplify marginalised voices and promote equitable, dynamic, pluralistic futures responsive to ecological and social crises.
Keywords
Savage; Translanguaging; Craft; Making practices
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2333
Citation
Meyer, G., Mirza, S., and Calafato, R. (2026) Crafting savage futures: Translanguaging and the material politics of peripheral making, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2333
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Crafting savage futures: Translanguaging and the material politics of peripheral making
Dominant paradigms have confined imaginaries to narrow, hegemonic narratives, severing them from plural, relational, and non-domesticated possibilities. This paper challenges monolithic views of language and material craft by offering a transformative lens on cultural and linguistic dynamism within design research and practice. Drawing on “savage” futures (Lévi-Strauss, 1966) and “translanguaging” (Lee, 2015; García & Kleifgen, 2020), we highlight the situated creative practices of peripheral craft makers as mediums for multilingual storytelling, identity negotiation, and speculative futures. Translanguaging extends beyond language, involving embodied, material, and affective communication as non-hierarchical resources for collective worlding and shared meaning-making. Through participatory craft projects in the Global South, ‘making’ emerges as a situated site for dialogue, situated learning, and reworlding, enabling new coexistence imaginaries. This work contributes to design by introducing a lexicon and methodology that amplify marginalised voices and promote equitable, dynamic, pluralistic futures responsive to ecological and social crises.