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Contemporary Industrial Design, as professional and academic practice, exists intertwined with the global hegemonic power structures of coloniality (Buckley 1986; Escobar 2018a; Mareis and Paim 2020). Problematizing this situatedness, the effort of Decolonizing Design emerges as a twofold effort: first to unlink it from this structure, opening up for diverse understandings of Design and, second, to remove oppressive behaviors from Design. In this paper we present a decolonial intervention in an Industrial Design education in the Global North as an exploration of how to shift Design towards decolonial emancipation. From this project, we suggest the categories of listening, learning, and loving as guidelines for decolonizing Design. We conclude arguing that the work necessary to dismantle Design as we know it and explore decolonial directions demands that we continually work to break and counterbalance the allegiance to its Eurocentrism and oppressive ways of working.

Decolonization is a situated effort as it relates to the relations of privilege, power, politics, and access (3P-A, in Albarrán González’s terms) between the people involved in design in relation to wider societies. This complexity creates certain challenges for how we can understand, learn about, and nurture decolonization in design towards pluriversality, since such decolonizing effort is based on the relationship between specific individuals and the collective. In this paper, we present and discuss the ‘River project’, a participatory space for decolonizing design, created for designers and practitioners to reflect on their own 3P-A as a way to create awareness of their own oppressive potential in design work. These joint reflections challenged ideas of participation and shaped learning processes between the participants, bringing to the foreground the importance of seeing and allowing for a plurality of life and work worlds to be brought together. We build on the learnings from this project to propose the notions of pluriversal participation, pluriversal presence, and pluriversal directionality, which can help nurture decolonizing designs towards pluriversality. We conclude by arguing that, for nurturing pluriversality through Participatory Design, participation, presence, and direction must be equally pluriversal.

Este artículo argumenta que si queremos llegar al Diseño para la pluriversalidad, no podemos hacerlo desde una noción universalista de lo que significa ser Diseñador. Este artículo describe brevemente los esfuerzos para descolonizar el Diseño, para luego examinar dos aproximaciones de Diseño en métodos de Diseño comprometidos socialmente, que enmarcan cómo los Diseñadores conectan a lugares y personas: Diseño Situado y Empatía en el Diseño. Estos discursos son luego matizados con un lente decolonial, detallando cómo los Diseñadores se sitúan y se comprometen a través de la matriz colonial del poder. Este análisis sirve como un mapa de aspectos a tener en cuenta para comprender la relación del Diseñador con lugar, historia, profesión y personas en la matriz colonial del poder. El artículo sugiere la normación de awarenessing, una toma de conciencia reflexiva orientada a la acción, sobre la propia posicionalidad, la flexibilidad en los procesos de Diseño y la incorporación de aspectos personales en el Diseño como posibles formas de abrir posturas pluriversales en el Diseño. El artículo concluye delineando las implicaciones potenciales de estas posturas para hacer, escribir y enseñar Diseño.

This paper argues that if we aim to Design for pluriversality, we cannot do so from a universalist notion of what it means to be a Designer. This paper briefly describes the efforts of decolonizing Design, then looks into two Design approaches in socially engaged Design methods that frame how Designers connect to place and people: Situated Design and Design Empathy. These discourses are then further nuanced by adding a decolonial lens, nuancing how Designers are situated and engage through the colonial matrix of power. This then serves as a map of aspects to be taken into consideration for nuancing a Designer’s relation place, history, profession and people in the colonial matrix of power. This paper then suggest the notions of awarenessing, an action-oriented reflective awareness on one’s position, flexibility in Design processes and the incorporation of personal aspects into Designing as possible ways to open up for pluriversal Design stances. The paper concludes by outlining potential implications of opening up for such stances in doing, writing and teaching Design.

To explore dismantling oppressive power relations in design, we bring to fore design encounters through the lens of relationality and improvisational competence. This paper is based on the premise that, if we are to move toward decolonizing design, design(ers) needs to re-think the organization of the design encounter and how we as designers practice participation in such encounters. We emphasize the improvisational nature of turn-taking in dialogue amidst asymmetric and dynamic power relations, with design’s commitment to generating resources for future practices, and decolonization’s commitment to re-configure power structures. After problematizing the design encounter from a power relation perspective, we explore practice models for developing improvisational competence. We do this by looking at the two improvisational dialogic practices of Capoeira and Improv Theater. We focus on what it can mean to develop skills in “improvisational competence” of relationality in design. We first touch on our previous Participatory Design work in the language learning “in the wild” agenda and then draw on each of our personal improvisational practices: Capoeira martial art, and improvisational theater. We then outline possibilities for relational improvisational design dialogue and conclude by outlining how it can be practiced in Design education and practice.

As design attempts to tackle environmental and social issues, it has found itself intertwined with and bound to an oppressive global paradigm that has created the problems in the first place. Consequently, the effort of disentangling design from its current paradigm has been gaining attention under the emerging focus of decolonising design (Mareis and Paim, 2020; Tlostanova, 2017) and design for pluriversality (Escobar, 2018; Noel, 2020). These efforts have argued for allowing various ways of defining and doing design to coexist as a way forward. However, if on one side we have design intertwined with oppressive global structures, and on the other side we have the desire to allow the co-existence of pluriverses of designing, we are left with a gap in between. What are possible openings to move from contemporary design to pluriverses of designing? 

This dissertation tackles this question to explore openings to move towards pluriverses of designing. Building on work done by scholars such as Escobar (2018a, 2018b, 2015), Noel (2020) and Vázquez (2017), this design research program seeks to contribute to decolonising design by providing examples and orientation points to move towards pluriversality. To do so, it uses a practice-based design research approach where practice and moving are framed by the Afro-Brazilian decolonial martial art of Capoeira, which focuses on finding openings to escape from colonial oppression. Capoeira allows us to look at how contemporary design moves in order to identify its flaws and use these as openings towards other ways of designing.

This dissertation moves through several levels of abstraction, taking an up-close look at the entanglement of design and oppressive global structures as a starting point and then moving down in scale through the efforts of Design for Sustainability, decolonising design and design for pluriversality. Reaching the level of focus on situated design action, this work presents a collection of six collaborative movements in the form of academic publications. Drawing on these movements, the work outlines possible aspects for fomenting decolonial design stances to move towards pluriversality and traces the possible implications for doing, writing, teaching and understanding design. The concepts of awarenessing, pluriversal directionality and bringing personal stances into defining designing are proposed as orientation points to move towards pluriverses of design.

We take the position that, if we wish to move toward decolonizing design, design(ers) needs to re-think the organization of the design encounter and how we as designers practice participation in that encounter. We emphasize the improvisational nature of turn-taking in “real-time” dialogue amidst asymmetric and dynamic power relations, with design’s commitment to generating resources for future practices, and decolonization’s commitment to re-configure power structures. Improvisational design dialogue – unraveling partial glimpses of our individual and collective journeys in improvised performances of potential realities through a dance of multimodal, partially distributed, partially synchronized dialogue in the “design present”. 

What if this abstract was actually the middle of the story? And instead of it being a summary of what we try to do in this workshop, by individual ‘heroes’ that summarize the whole text, this section would be a collective account of why the text is worth reading and sharing. What if this section was not the beginning of a linear story, but a passage in a circular (re)telling of a shared experience? What if experimenting with such non-linear stories might change the way we tell stories in and through design? In this workshop we invite the design research community to explore how to situate sustainability through storytelling. In this workshop we explore how to bring forward individual neglected stories, dislodging heroic and universalist narratives, to explore how we can collectively listen, share, co-create and tell stories that can contribute to survival across individual and social scales.

Our contemporary world is organized in a modern/colonial structure. As people,professions and practices engage in cross-country Design for Sustainability (DfS), projectshave the potential of sustaining or changing modern/colonial power structures. In suchproject relations, good intentions in working for sustainability do not directly result inliberation from modern/colonial power structures. In this paper we introduce threeapproaches in DfS that deal with power relations. Using a Freirean (1970) decolonialperspective, we analyse these approaches to see how they can inform DfS towards beingdecolonial and anti-oppressive. We conclude that steering DfS to become decolonial orcolonizing is a relational issue based on the interplay between the designers’ position inthe modern/colonial structure, the design approach chosen, the place and the peopleinvolved in DfS. Hence, a continuous critical reflexive practice is needed in order to preventDfS from becoming yet another colonial tool.

This chapter introduces a “Rally Course” as a novel CA-inspired approach to teaching a second language. This approach builds on an understanding of language learning as a social process that is closely intertwined with L2 speakers’ evolving membership in the surrounding community. It addresses the need to develop experiential pedagogies that widen learners’ opportunities for interaction and support the socialisation process. Building on recent pedagogical initiatives supporting language learning in the wild, we illustrate the overall structure of the Rally Course, describe the main materials that were designed to support the learning objectives and present a case analysis of a student carrying out a pedagogical activity supported by the materials.

There is often a great difference between what a student learns in a second language class and the competence a student needs to use a second language in the context of everyday life. The ability to speak a language and the ability to participate in everyday activities using a language are tightly linked. For many, the goal of language learning is to be able to participate competently in activities with other people using the target language, whether it is in a simple service interaction such as ordering food at a restaurant, or joining a conversation with colleagues during a break at work, or more involved types of participation such as interacting with the hospital staff during an emergency, or giving a presentation to a room full of colleagues, investors, or a scientific community. These interactive situations are potentially influenced by the physical environment, surrounding physical artefacts, gestures and other bodily actions. Often these situated interactions are influenced by what each of the participants may have been doing before and what they are intending to do afterward, and the practices they have developed in similar situations, and the relationships they have developed with the other participants. 

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These materials introduce a set of concepts, 'toolboxes' and examples for supporting a reflective experiential language learning practice where the learner uses the social interactions in everyday situations as the basis for reflection and future action.