Abstract
Designer's position and authority have long been challenged. However, “Design” has only recently stated responsibility for its direct impact on social structures (Escobar, 2017; Fry, 1999; Maze, 2019). Among many new “Designs”, there is an emerging decolonizing design movement in which members pursue ontological change rather than additive diversifying measures that would only uphold and sustain colonial institutions and systems. This paper focuses on design critiques related to Design’s ability to perpetuate coloniality. Starting from our lived experiences, we expand on how Design alienates different worldviews by promoting, appropriating, and erasing the subaltern population. Following that, we present our methodological approach and experiences from various workshops, focusing on identifying values within design practitioners and how they could recognize power in play, and practice reflection and alignment of their value systems. We propose diving into cosmological frameworks as an alternate and speculative reality where the pluriverse is materialized through interactive narratives.
Keywords
Identity systems, Identity hegemony, Decolonizing design, Design pluriverse
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.606
Citation
Jain, A., Supatkar, V., Tang, Y.,and Sial, M.(2023) Glitch Pluriverse, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, 9-13 October, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.606
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
pictorials
Included in
Glitch Pluriverse
Designer's position and authority have long been challenged. However, “Design” has only recently stated responsibility for its direct impact on social structures (Escobar, 2017; Fry, 1999; Maze, 2019). Among many new “Designs”, there is an emerging decolonizing design movement in which members pursue ontological change rather than additive diversifying measures that would only uphold and sustain colonial institutions and systems. This paper focuses on design critiques related to Design’s ability to perpetuate coloniality. Starting from our lived experiences, we expand on how Design alienates different worldviews by promoting, appropriating, and erasing the subaltern population. Following that, we present our methodological approach and experiences from various workshops, focusing on identifying values within design practitioners and how they could recognize power in play, and practice reflection and alignment of their value systems. We propose diving into cosmological frameworks as an alternate and speculative reality where the pluriverse is materialized through interactive narratives.