Abstract
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.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2020.021
Citation
Noel, L.(2020) Envisioning a pluriversal design education, in Leitão, R., Noel, L. and Murphy, L. (eds.), Pivot 2020: Designing a World of Many Centers - DRS Pluriversal Design SIG Conference, 4 June, held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2020.021
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Envisioning a pluriversal design education
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.