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, artificiality, modernity, Eurocentrism, capitalism, Indigenous Knowledge, pluriversality, continental philosophy, pedagogy, materiality, mobility, language, gender oppression, sexuality, and intersectionality.

Keywords:

• Design Studies
• decoloniality
• ontological designing
• pluriversality
• Global South

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tristan Schultz

Tristan Schultz is an Aboriginal and Australian designer, strategist, and researcher examining intersections between decolonial thinking, ontological design, and sustainability. He holds a B. Design, M. Design Futures (Hons) and is a PhD Candidate, a lecturer in the Design Program at QCA, Griffith University, and founder of the design practice Relative Creative.

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Danah Abdulla

Danah Abdulla is a designer, educator, and researcher. Her research explores design cultures and possibilities of design education in the Arab world. She is a Lecturer on the BA (Hons) Design Management and Cultures at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.

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Ahmed Ansari

Ahmed Ansari is a doctoral candidate in Design Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently working on reconstructing a South Asian philosophical genealogy of technics, and tracing histories of design education in Pakistan. He teaches seminar courses in systems thinking, critical and cultural theory, and philosophy of technology at CMU.

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Ece Canlı

Ece Canlı is a design researcher and artist, investigating the relationship between body politics and material practices from a decolonial queer feminist point of view. She recently completed her PhD in the Design program at University of Porto, fully funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).

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Mahmoud Keshavarz

Mahmoud Keshavarz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Engaging Vulnerability Research Program, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Parsons School of Design and University of Gothenburg. He is the author of The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility and Dissent, forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic.

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Matthew Kiem

Matthew Kiem is a Sydney-based designer, researcher, and educator. He has recently completed his PhD at Western Sydney University on the topic of the Coloniality of Design. His thesis examines the meaning of ontological designing in light of decolonial thinking, with a particular interest in the settler colonial dynamics of Australia.

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Luiza Prado de O. Martins

Luiza Prado de O. Martins is a Brazilian researcher and artist. Her work looks at questions of gender, technology, and the body. She is one half of the artistic research duo “A Parede” and holds a PhD in Design Research from the University of the Arts Berlin.

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Pedro J.S. Vieira de Oliveira

Pedro J.S. Vieira de Oliveira is a Brazilian researcher and artist in sound studies. He holds a PhD in Design Research from the University of the Arts Berlin, and is one half of “A Parede.”

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