The anthropophagic studio: towards a critical pedagogy for interaction design

ABSTRACT

The design studio is the standard approach for interaction design education in the Global North. Nevertheless, in the Global South, this approach is not directly applicable due to authoritarian educational systems founded on colonialist ideologies. This research reports on an attempt to appropriate the design studio and fundamental interaction design concepts in Brazil. Following the anthropophagy tradition of hybridization, the foreign concepts were not rejected but devoured and digested together with Global South concepts, such as radical alterity, mediation, and oppression to form what we call the anthropophagic studio. The process gradually revealed to students and researchers the role of interaction design in reproducing other historical oppressions beyond colonialism. This finding points to the need for a critical pedagogy that can aptly tackle technology-mediated oppression.

KEYWORDS:

• Design studio
• interaction design education
• anthropophagy
• critical pedagogy
• cultural studies

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the students who participated in shaping the anthropophagic studio at PUCPR and who graciously authorized the publication of this account including their images. We are also grateful to Mateus Filipe Pelanda, Fernando de Sá Moreira, and three anonymous reviewers for the insightful comments on earlier versions of this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Dr. Frederick van Amstel is Assistant Professor at the Industrial Design Academic Department (DADIN), Federal University of Technology – Paraná (UTFPR), teaching courses related to interaction design, experience design, and service design. His recent research is focused on the contradiction of oppression and the possibility of designing for liberation.

Dr. Rodrigo Freese Gonzatto is Adjunct Professor at the School of Fine Arts in Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR), teaching courses related to interaction design, digital culture and human–computer interaction. His research is focused on users and the production of existence through technology.

Notes

1 A.Telier is a pseudonym shared by Thomas Binder, Giorgio De Michelis, Pelle Ehn, Giulio Jacucci, Per Linde, and Ina Wagner. Their joint work can be traced back to the collective systems design movement initiated in Scandinavia in the 1970s, which also uses the term collective designer to identify such collective authorship (Ehn and Badham 2002). This movement lost steam in Scandinavia in the last decades, possibly due to the cultural shift towards individualism, and the increasing commercial orientation of the interaction design studios' funding partners (Malmborg 2004). This shift may explain the elitist attitude to digital media that A.Telier found among their students.

2 We use the contemporary division between Global North and Global South (Santos 2018; Escobar 2018) to promote the dialogue and aggregate earlier concepts such as eurocentrism (Andrade 1928), underdevelopment (Vieira Pinto 1960; Vieira Pinto 2005), and oppressed reality (Freire 1970; Freire 2016) that were used by Brazilian authors to describe the colonization practices that are still in place even after the political independence. The permanence of a colonized mindset in Global South is sometimes captured by the term coloniality (Quijano 2007), which is used, for example, to denounce the reproduction of a modern/colonial view of the world through design (Tlostanova 2017). However, we prefer to follow Santos (2018) in keeping the term colonization to emphasize the oppressive relation which asserts economic, political, or technological dependences between metropolis and colonies. This also helps us to critically approach new forms of the same relation, such as digital colonialism (Kwet 2019) and data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias 2018).

3 Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) was a key figure in the Brazilian modernism movement. He studied and traveled through Europe between 1912 and 1922. When returning to Brazil, he sought ways to modernize the cultural scene. In this way, he became an accomplished bohemian, journalist, writer, poet, and playwright. Nunes (1979) describes the relevance of anthropophagy for his biography.

4 Black God, White Devil (1964) was launched two months after the implementation of a right-wing military dictatorship. The poster makes a clear statement against the regime with a combination of visual patterns from soviet constructivism and cordel literature. The juxtaposed images of Christian cross, man, and sun synthesize the critical ambiguity of the movie plot. Rogério Duarte envisioned Brazilian industrial design contributing to the political challenge of modernizing the country without falling to the modern pretense neutrality: "We are confident of our absorptive power, anthropophagy, which is capable of transforming everything that influences us" (Duarte 1965). Sadly, this existential project was interrupted by the military dictatorship in 1968, when Rogério Duarte was unlawfully sent to prison and tortured. After that, he faced serious psychological burden and ostracism.

5 Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Santos 2018) has a similar concept called intercultural translation, which applies not only to North-South exchanges like in anthropophagy, but also to South-South knowledge, like in the World Social Forum and similar initiatives that connects the Global South.

6 This model is our interpretation of anthropophagy as practiced by Brazilian modernism artists. We could not find any work that clearly describes this process. The closest we could find is an anthropophagic method for critical management (Wood Jr and Caldas 1998; Pinto 2014), however, we believe that hybridization processes are not as straightforward as prescribed by this method. According to Canclini (1995), these are characterized by ins and outs, back and forth movement, and detours.

7 The pioneering work relating critical pedagogy to interaction design was done by Maria Cecília Baranauskas and her colleagues, who developed an entire research program on socially responsible computing inspired by Freire (Baranauskas, Hornung, and Martins 2008). Later on, Ecivaldo Matos applied Freire's notion of dialogical interaction to complement usability evaluations of educational technologies (Matos 2013). Recently, E. Schultz et al. (2020) digested Freire’s dialogism with Papert's constructionism to provide for creative coexistences. In a different stream, Judice (2014), Canônica et al. (2014) and Serpa et al. (2020) found commonalities between participatory design and Freire’s critical pedagogy. In a similar vein, Sant'Anna and Reis Alves (2017) presented critical pedagogy in the Interaction Design Education Summit. Finally, we point to the substantial work done by Claudia Bordin Rodrigues, who studied hope as a foundation for critical pedagogies in interaction design education (Bordin Rodrigues 2017; Bordin Rodrigues 2019).