Abstract
In a world on the verge of collapse, it becomes critical to rethink the education of designers, usually trained to reproduce and maintain the capitalist machine. Here, Advocating for a political praxis that avoids universality and understands itself as situated and located, I bring La Paperson’s concept of scyborg to think about how design academia can reflect and become a practice of decoloniality. As someone that collects scraps, components that no longer present value for the system, the scyborg can appropriate and reorganize them, acting like a virus in the system. By creating a mess in the apparatus using its own structures, the scyborg could disassemble the machine from within, in order to decolonize the University. Learning from the scyborg’s strategy, designers can become this ‘ghost in the machine’, responsible for the dismantling and reorganization of secular colonial structures, thus helping to break the cycle that left the planet damaged.
Keywords
decoloniality; scyborg; design pedagogy; design academia
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0011
Citation
Meliande, C.(2021) Scyborg Designer: The Ghost in the Machine, in Leitão, R.M., Men, I., Noel, L-A., Lima, J., Meninato, T. (eds.), Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling, 22-23 July, Toronto, Canada. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0011
Creative Commons License
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Included in
Scyborg Designer: The Ghost in the Machine
In a world on the verge of collapse, it becomes critical to rethink the education of designers, usually trained to reproduce and maintain the capitalist machine. Here, Advocating for a political praxis that avoids universality and understands itself as situated and located, I bring La Paperson’s concept of scyborg to think about how design academia can reflect and become a practice of decoloniality. As someone that collects scraps, components that no longer present value for the system, the scyborg can appropriate and reorganize them, acting like a virus in the system. By creating a mess in the apparatus using its own structures, the scyborg could disassemble the machine from within, in order to decolonize the University. Learning from the scyborg’s strategy, designers can become this ‘ghost in the machine’, responsible for the dismantling and reorganization of secular colonial structures, thus helping to break the cycle that left the planet damaged.