What Is at Stake with Decolonizing Design? A Roundtable

Abstract

This roundtable was conducted by the eight founding members of Decolonising Design Group in October 2017, using an online messaging platform. Each member approached design and decoloniality from different yet interrelating viewpoints, by threading their individual arguments with the preceding ones. The piece thus offers and travels through a variety of subject matter including politics of design,

Design for Sustainability

“…However, although it is true that some European universities did play an important role, it is also true that key publications on the topic published in the last 10 years have been authored by academics who are representative of different regions of the world. DfBoP is also sometimes criticised when applied by designers from Western countries (see, e.g., Schultz et al, 2018). It is true that some organisations, such as Design Without Borders (see Skjerven, 2017) have operated in low-income contexts, mainly through Western designers, but it should be noted that this was initially due to a lack of professionally trained local designers.…”

“…Still, debate is ongoing about the extent to which this is done from a Western design perspective to the detriment of indigenous knowledge and values. To find out more about the debate on what has been called decolonising design, refer to, e.g., Schultz et al (2018).…”

Decolonizing Participatory Design: Memory Making in Namibia

“…In common with other authors, we argue that the task of decolonizing design discourse is ontological in nature. The radical transformation of design requires a transdisciplinary and transcultural dialogue [15,40]. Schultz et al [40] suggest that only through the inclusion of marginalized perspectives-such as the previously colonized, indigenous communities and the socio-economically marginalized-can we break out of our own "colonized minds" and manage to achieve plurality in design.…”

“…The radical transformation of design requires a transdisciplinary and transcultural dialogue [15,40]. Schultz et al [40] suggest that only through the inclusion of marginalized perspectives-such as the previously colonized, indigenous communities and the socio-economically marginalized-can we break out of our own "colonized minds" and manage to achieve plurality in design. This is what Escobar [14,15] terms a pluriversal world, "a world where many worlds fit. "…”

Autonomous design and the emergent transnational critical design studies field

“…(ii) The emergence of a transnational space, anchored chiefly but not exclusively in the Global South, that problematizes anew design's embeddedness in global historical relations of power and domination, variously explored in terms of design's relation to histories of colonialism and imperialism, its functioning within the modern/colonial matrix of power, the geopolitics of knowledge (eurocentrism), racism, and patriarchal capitalist colonial modernity. This second feature is attested by novel framings of design praxes, such as those going on under the rubrics of decolonial design (Schultz, 2017;Schultz et al, 2018); designs of, for, by and from the South (Gutiérrez, 2015a(Gutiérrez, , 2015bAnsari, 2016;Fry, 2017b;Escobar, 2017) 2 ; design by other names; the decolonization of design (Tunstall, 2013;Ansari, 2016;Tlostanova, 2017;Vásquez, 2017); indigenous and multicultural design and visual sovereignty 3 ; alter-design (López-Garay and Lopera, 2017); design in the borderlands (Kalantidou and Fry, 2014); and autonomous design (Escobar, 2018). It should be stressed that these trends often overlap; they are diverse and heterogeneous, in some cases even within each trend.…”