The challenges universities faced during the COVID-19 pandemic put many things in perspective—or should have. Covid, rather than being seen as a “window” of opportunity (the unexpected event)—an unexpected source of systematic innovation (Drucker, 2015)—became a race to keep things as normal as possible. Indicated by their behavioural responses,institutions in general (not just universities) appear to have considered external forces as not part of their world, and therefore these forces were not accounted for in calculations and predictions pertaining to practicalities like budget (cuts) and the size of the student body. In the case of universities, the strategy was to minimise financial risk as much as possible, and so Covid’s presence brought an increase in voltage on student recruitment, and months later, at the start of the autumn 2020 term, the students, as predicted, came.

The period was one of opportunity; to tackle new tasks, to experiment (the importance of which we [1] often tell our students), and for social innovation. But we are not taught to see constraints as opportunities. Instead, we are so comfortable that we see limitations as a nuisance, idling by until the moment we think will pass will pass, but it will not. The moaning continues, rather than accepting the fact that the repertoire of solutions we formerly had are no longer valid, that it is time to think of new ways of tackling the issues that face us. The inability to deal with constraints is tied to resilience. Resilience—a word that has entered the vocabulary of people in many Global North countries—is nowhere to be found. Universities rush to develop resilience in their students, but they adopt a neoliberal definition of resilience; one that emphasises individual responsibility. Their resilience is about recovering and adapting to change on one’s own; looking inward and reviewing one’s own behaviour to identify and endure social problems—displacing the responsibility from the state onto the individual.

It would seem obvious that a once-in-a-lifetime event—a pandemic that has pressed pause on the world—would be reason enough for people to rethink their practices, what they teach, and how structures operate. But the privilege of les trente glorieuses and a general lack of collective resilience has made it appear that it is everyone’s right that life not be disrupted once ‘play’ is hit, and that we can—and should—carry on as normal. This approach has rendered us incapable of acquiring a clear view of reality: we lack imagination, and this has led us to ignore the chance to see what is not there, what could be there, and what has to be there.

We are ultimately, in our inaction, to blame. Activist Micah White tells us that since the 1970s, people are more interested in incremental change—reform—rather than a revolution leading to structural change. The goal should not be reform but reclaiming and rethinking the university. This essay simultaneously considers design education’s need to change and the changes required in universities themselves. After all, we cannot change the teaching of a discipline if we do not address where it is housed. While exploring this at large is beyond the scope of the essay, I will focus on one area for challenging and changing the terms of the conversation: disrupting design education.

I use the word “disruption” because it allows things to move. It emphasises that for real change to happen, energy should not be focused on changing values or changing oneself, but on challenging the social structure that gives rise to the values in the first place. Disruption—to interrupt, to break apart, to force thinking beyond our normal repertoire of solutions. Since 2020, our ways of being and living have changed dramatically. Living in a pandemic has called into question our lifestyles, our knowledge, our preparedness, and has brought sidelined conversations to the forefront. Three years on from the outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent protests against systemic and systematic injustices around the world, design education has largely continued a business-as-usual approach, with a few tweaks. The perpetuation of the “safe” and familiar status quo is a result of heavy demands placed on academics, requiring them to adapt as quickly and efficiently as possible to online teaching and thus focusing on form rather than content. Time to grieve, to think, to re-invent, to mobilise was never an option.

In his article “Graphic Design’s Factory Settings,” written prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jacob Lindgren talked about a graphic design reset. Disrupting or resetting graphic design …

… should challenge graphic design practice and education to be untethered from their one-way relationships to power and knowledge and might occur in parallel or ‘diagonal’ to existing structures. It might be a newly imagined curriculum that places emphasis on feminism, decoloniality, access to tools, anti-capitalism, ecological sustainability, queer praxis, or other positionalities … marginalized or erased by conventional design pedagogy and history. It … cannot happen with existing design conventions entrenched in ‘design thinking,’ or new technologies and streamlined solutions, but instead through a model for graphic design education which questions its hard-coded relationship to capital. If the contemporary definition and standardized practice of design and design education are over a century old, might it be a good idea to reexamine both[?][2]

For more than a decade, we’ve heard calls for transforming design’s role in society by tackling community, political, and social issues that contribute to human well-being. But the propositions and critiques thus far do not offer viable alternatives. These alternatives remain within the conventional definitions of design and are devoid of any politics. We look to the same examples, rely on traditional teaching and learning methods, remain in the service of industry, and define design as an activity exclusively aimed at capitalist economic development.

Design thinkers borrowed methods from other disciplines and made them digestible and easy to use. Instead of transforming the very terms and practices of our discipline, we continuously develop quick ideas based on new technologies and streamlined solutions that do not lead to tangible change and actions in the social sphere. Design should address needs in the world, but the professionalisation of design took place during a very specific time and context and that world no longer exists. The definition of design as a problem-solving discipline leads to narrow solutions that do not address wicked problems. The world we live in has changed, and not only in terms of technological progress.

Unfortunately, new ideas in design have further segregated the discipline. For design to be more relevant to the world around it, designers must extend the discourse outside of themselves, and reach beyond the platforms such as exhibitions, design weeks and the like, that previously defined design. I believe that design education can be a space for consciousness-raising, based on feminist principles, that brings about and facilitates sustained change and new collaborations.

Design as ontological

We are grasping the consequences of a world made unsustainable by design, but the definition of sustainability that we’ve adopted is not equipped to deal with these consequences. “All design-led objects, tools, and even services bring about particular ways of being, knowing, and doing,” Arturo Escobar says.[3] This means that design is ontological. As Anne-Marie Willis states,

…[w]e design … we deliberate, plan and scheme in ways which prefigure our actions and makings – in turn we are designed by our designing and by that which we have designed (i.e., through our interactions with the structural and material specificities of our environments) – we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us.[4]

An object, once designed, is more than a mere artefact providing a service to its users, but "has manipulated the environment by the resources it has used, the skills that were used, the labour that was invested in it, and so on”.[5]

A feminist history is a messy history...

Students are challenging the foundations of design and demanding an education that better represents them and their experiences. Some universities have adopted the calls to decolonise the curriculum, but most focus on quick-fix solutions that lead to an additive approach. For example, many equate decolonising the curriculum with adding women to the design canon, where anything having to do with the female gender is seen as covering feminist ground, even if it does not contain a feminist perspective. “Gender” is often associated with an essential understanding of feminism where the focus would be on discussing exclusively female designers. This is a binary and reductionist perspective that does not challenge the structures themselves.

As Cheryl Buckley tells us, a feminist approach challenges the canon that focuses on the “centrality of individuals as agents of history and the focus on professional structures and modes of activity”.[6] Therefore, design histories should shift their scope; away from individual lone genius designers and styles and away from centering what constitutes “good” design. Canons are historical choices made by groups in power who set the standard, which is then delivered as a common culture belonging to everyone, even though not everyone had a right to add to or take from or critique or become part of it equally.[7] Feminist perspectives of design histories acknowledge that design is a collective process involving multiple groups of people and practices. The current focus is on re-telling “neutral” stories without shifting power relations, rather than questioning the stories we are told, who tells these stories, whose experience is considered valid, and challenging the Western historiographies assumed to be applicable universally.

“Good” design

One way of transforming practices and terms is by challenging the term “good design” and who dictates what this means. The West makes good design while the rest do crafts. But to speak of “good” design, as Norman Potter says, is to speak of, and from, the conditions of our own time, and our response to these conditions.[8] Design education can no longer dismiss other traditions, looking only to Europe and North America as frames of reference for histories and theories. These frames often exclude the histories of colonialism, imperialism, migration, slavery, and wars, in spite of the fact that designers have always been involved in these activities (although not explicitly being called designers). Moreover, design education centred on the individual lone genius, that encourages students to work alone and not collectively, is not one that prepares them for the current industry sectors nor twenty-first century problems more broadly. A student-led, critical approach to pedagogy brings forth different frames of reference that relate to the experiences of both students and faculty.

What does it actually mean to decolonise the curriculum? Decolonisation is the subversion and transformation of that which exists. Decoloniality shatters the familiar; it makes people question, and calls for creating something new, rather than an additive inclusion into a certain field. It is not about erasing every trace of colonial culture: people often inhabit the language of those that colonised them. So it is not to be thought of as an erasing of the knowledges we currently have but “to end the systems of exploitation that produce” imperial wealth and the progress it affords.[9] It calls for a pluriversal world—a world in which many worlds fit. To decolonise the curriculum is to re-envision design and designing to become a space where conventional ways of thinking are challenged and dismantled.

The contemporary university, however, cannot enact decolonisation; but it can cultivate an intellectual environment in which to discuss the ongoing pervasiveness of colonialism. Decolonisation, as Mai Abu Moghli and Laila Kadiwal argue, “cannot happen in a vacuum, or as an aim disconnected from the rest of the structure of the university, which leads to diluting a wider movement and turns into a box-ticking exercise.”[10] Faculty and students ought to undertake a relentless critique of the contemporary university apparatus. Moving towards a curriculum framed by these ideas and principles allows us to begin to think otherwise—where different narratives are brought into contact with each other, allowing the marginalised to reveal their own interpretations, and opens space for accommodation, contradiction, and resistance.
The curriculum must be understood as a social process. An effective definition of “curriculum” considers that it is an ongoing social activity shaped by various contextual influences, within and beyond the classroom, and is accomplished interactively. It is about the interactions of educators, students, knowledges, and the milieu, and cannot be removed from its context. To decolonise the curriculum is to explicitly consider critical philosophical, social, and political questions about what is taught, how, and to—and by—whom. Therefore, any attempt at decolonisation should be attentive to its setting and context, open to critical scrutiny, and translatable into effective practice.

The world is in an ongoing state of crisis, the norm now being worsening economic depression; climate emergency; and domination by illegitimate and racist policing, criminalisation, war, border enforcement systems, and militaries. Put simply, “the state of the world we are living through today is the very same one our recent forebears ordered for us”.[11] It is clear that we need new forms of design and designing. This moment is an opportunity to build the skills and capacities we need for an entirely new way of living at a time when we must either drastically transform our society or face intensive, uneven suffering followed by species extinction.

I am interested in a design education that asks and addresses the hard questions, because serious stakes demand intellectual seriousness. A design that crosses disciplinary boundaries, that is internationalist in scope, that develops a keen sense of social responsibility, with informed notions of civic engagement. A design that connects teaching with important social problems and the operation of power in society, enabling students and faculty to view themselves as self-reflective and autonomous critical agents.

Out of the margins…

In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky write that “the beauty of the system, however, is that dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.”[12] What does it mean to direct design towards social engagement, devoted to real political education, an education that has a commitment to and grounding in reshaping the world we have helped make unsustainable? Design, at present, operates in a way where it cannot and will not see an alternative to the discipline being anything other than the handmaiden of capitalism, anything but a service provider. Design cannot decolonise by only changing its content. Disrupting design education confronts the systems of economic impoverishment that shape design, and brings these conversations—which many identify as unrealistic and interfering with the real world and industry—out of the margins and into the centre. It moves design away from problem solving and into a space of possibilities.

Creating change relies on developing new ways of working. For this, we require tools that move us from critique to creation, and that encourage collaboration in real-life settings. Decolonial feminist perspectives inform and make us question what, how, and why we design. To quote Sara Ahmed, "to build feminist and decolonial dwellings, we need to dismantle what has already been assembled; we need to ask what it is we are against, what it is we are for, knowing full well that this we is not a foundation but what we are working toward."[13]

References:

Abu Moghli, M. and Kadiwal, L., 2021. Decolonising the curriculum beyond the surge: Conceptualisation, positionality and conduct. London Review of Education, [online] 19(1). https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.19.1.23.

Ahmed, S., 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Buckley, C., 1986. Made in Patriarchy: Toward a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design. Design Issues, 3(2), pp.3–14. https://doi.org/10.2307/1511480

Drucker, P.S., 2015. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Routledge classics. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Escobar, A., 2018. Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Herman, E.S. and Chomsky, N., 1988. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books.

Keshavarz, M., 2016. Design-Politics. PhD. Malmö University.

Krenak, A., 2020. Ideas to postpone the end of the world. Translated by A. Doyle Toronto: Anansi International.

Lindgren, J., 2020. Graphic Design’s Factory Settings. Walker Art Center. Available at: https://walkerart.org/magazine/jacob-lindgren-graphic-designs-factory-settings [Accessed 8 May 2021].

Mayorga, E., Leidecker, L. and Orr de Gutierrez, D., 2019. Burn it Down: The Incommensurability of the University and Decolonization. Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 8(1), pp.87–106.

Potter, N., 2002. What is a designer?. 4th ed. London: Hyphen Press.

Shor, I., 1992. Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Willis, A.-M., 2006. Ontological Designing – laying the ground. Design Philosophy Papers, 4(2), pp.69–92.

-