Towards a radically inclusive design – indigenous story-telling as codesign methodology

ABSTRACT

Indigenous design methodologies provide a way to address the ‘always situated-ness’ of the designer, and so too those with whom we work. Looking at story-telling as a specific indigenous design methodology, this article helps show how these methodological approaches can help us to create a space of mutuality that can open up new ways of being in the world. This new awareness, attenuated through the use of these forms of indigenous methodologies, can then in turn open up new ways of codesigning the worlds in which we live. Focusing on an example of an indigenous story-telling codesign process with a First Nations group in Prairies Canada the article explores how a sensitivity to design methodologies is an important aspect of both preventing design from collapsing into neo-colonialism and helping bring into being worlds that are respectful and welcoming of difference and interconnectedness – a radically inclusive design.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous
• design methods
• design research
• decolonial
• codesign
• user research

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. By using the term decolonial here, I signal the active role that we, as designers and those that we design with, can play in dismantling a global hegemonic system that has for so long ignored or delegitimised different ways of knowing and being in the world as part of a structure of domination (Schultz et al. 2018).

2. Smudging is a ceremony practiced by Nêhiyawak that involves the burning of sacred herbs, in this case sweetgrass, for spiritual cleansing and blessings.

3. The Indian residential schools were a network of government-funded boarding schools for Indigenous Canadians created to remove Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and assimilate them into dominant Canadian culture over the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.