Abstract

Fifteen years ago, I began a design collaboration with Sarah Corona Berkin, a professor at the Universidad de Guadalajara, and a group of Wixáritari teachers and community leaders in San Miguel Huaixtita, Jalisco, México. My students at the University of Florida and I worked with Corona Berkin in the classroom and with the Wixáritari in San Miguel Huaixtita, to create a new cultural artifact—a calendar—with and for the community. This project started me on a path working with Indigenous groups in various parts of México to bring western design concepts into conversation with Indigenous epistemologies. In subsequent collaborative projects, in which contemporary Indigenous people have sought design for their products and services, I and my students have sought to decenter our western approaches to design, and to make design available and vulnerable in the face of knowledges and practices that are central to those with whom we work. We are guided by dialogue with the goal of mutual transformation as we make many centers visible. Here I share some lessons learned on the relationship between western design and Indigenous epistemologies, and about how design itself should be transformed by such encounters as we create un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.

Keywords

Indigenous, dialogue, codesign, horizontal design

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Jun 4th, 12:00 AM

Embracing Many Worlds: The Wixárika Calendar

Fifteen years ago, I began a design collaboration with Sarah Corona Berkin, a professor at the Universidad de Guadalajara, and a group of Wixáritari teachers and community leaders in San Miguel Huaixtita, Jalisco, México. My students at the University of Florida and I worked with Corona Berkin in the classroom and with the Wixáritari in San Miguel Huaixtita, to create a new cultural artifact—a calendar—with and for the community. This project started me on a path working with Indigenous groups in various parts of México to bring western design concepts into conversation with Indigenous epistemologies. In subsequent collaborative projects, in which contemporary Indigenous people have sought design for their products and services, I and my students have sought to decenter our western approaches to design, and to make design available and vulnerable in the face of knowledges and practices that are central to those with whom we work. We are guided by dialogue with the goal of mutual transformation as we make many centers visible. Here I share some lessons learned on the relationship between western design and Indigenous epistemologies, and about how design itself should be transformed by such encounters as we create un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.

 

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