Further reading on Decolonising design
The Decolonising Design Collective’s ‘A Manifesto for Decolonising Design’ was published in 2017 and states as current problems in the design industry:
“Much of the academic and professional discourse within the design disciplines over the last century has been bereft of a critical reflection on the politics of design practice”
And
“design theory, practice, and pedagogy as a whole are not geared towards delivering the kinds of knowledge and understanding that are adequate to addressing longstanding systemic issues of power”
“These issues are products of modernity and its ideologies, regimes, and institutions reiterating, producing and exerting continued colonial power upon the lives of oppressed, marginalized, and subaltern peoples in both the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world.”
“This planet, shared and co-inhabited by a plurality of peoples, each inhabiting different worlds, each orienting themselves within and towards their environments in different ways, and with different civilizational histories, is being undermined by a globalized system of power that threatens to flatten and eradicate ontological and epistemological difference, rewriting histories and advance visions of a future for a privileged few at the expense of their human and nonhuman others.”
“mainstream design discourse has been dominated by a focus on Anglocentric/Eurocentric ways of seeing, knowing, and acting in the world”
And see potential solutions / ways forward as:
“a sharper lens needs to be brought to bear on non-western ways of thinking and being, and on the way that class, gender, race, etc,. issues are designed today.”
“highlighting of these issues through practices and acts of design, and the (re)design of institutions, design practices and design studies […] to be a pivotal challenge in the process of decolonisation”
They state that it’s not enough to increase diversity but that we must “seek the radical transfiguration of these structures through the critical eye of the programmatic imagination that dares to identify the possibilities and conditions that will give us alternatives to the now.”
Decolonising Design Collective. (Revised 2017, June 27). A Manifesto for Decolonising Design. Available at: https://www.decolonisingdesign.com/statements/2016/editorial/ (Accessed 26 November 2024)