Conference Agenda

Across many universities in Australia, design schools are exploring new ways to integrate Indigenous knowledges, from specific course curricula to institution-wide policies. This paper examines the developmental stages of a small-scale pro-ject to support Indigenous students already enrolled across creative programs, who may be interested in learning design skills, tools, and career pathways. Spe-cifically, we explore how a cultural and relational internship model might sup-port student learning, through partnering with an Indigenous-led design agency, to develop expertise in commercial illustration. We draw on decolonising and pluriversal design literature, while learning from Australian Indigenous design scholars who offer a counternarrative to universal design education and model ways for different knowledge systems to come together. Here, we reimagine the ‘work’ in work-integrated learning, to develop a more relational and culturally integrated experience. Our aim is to develop an internship model that can move design education outside of the institution, to enable culturally-led and commu-nity-based learning.

The work presented here interrogates the future of design education by presenting the early development of a new curriculum in a small rural university in the P´urhepécha region, Mexico. The new undergraduate program is created drawing from the literature on decoloniality and transmodernity to reimagine design education. The interplay between this early work and a systematic inquiry of coloniality leads to new ways of thinking about design education and design at large in this context. This work contributes to a South-South dialogue seeking to undo coloniality in creative pedagogical practices and to reimagine what it means to design and to learn beyond the hegemony of modernity.

Traditional and currently-prevalent pedagogies of design perpetuate ableist and exclusionary notions of what it means to be a designer. In this paper, we trace such historically exclusionary norms of design education, and highlight modern-day instances from our own experiences as design educators in such epistemologies. Towards imagining a more inclusive and sustainable future of design education, we present three case studies from our own experience as design educators in redesigning course experiences for blind and low-vision (BLV), deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students, and students with other disabilities. In documenting successful and unsuccessful practices, we imagine what a pedagogy of care in design education would look like.

This paper recounts the delivering of the course Design and Latin America: delinking and decolonizing, at University of Brasília. Such experience is in tune with the recent emergence of academic research on the imperativeness of addressing coloniality, and the need to sulear design practice in Latin America. Starting from a brief introduction to Latin American history and social thought, and from an understanding of design as the production of life, discussions were held on the potential of unconventional creativity for nurturing critical consciousness in the field, while acknowledging concrete and subjective power relations. For the development of virtual practical activities, literature was the main tool adopted (specifically short stories related to the Latin American context). Through this methodological framework, it was possible to identify that for reality to decolonize it is essential to know other sides of history, and to bring to light the coloniality of thought and collective imagination.

Design educators often utilize methods to teach students the practices of design. Yet, these popularized methods often wash away mess and inadvertently cultivate aesthetic hygiene among designers. In response, this research explores the following question: How can we instill critical aesthetic reflexivity among designers about the ways that design methods cultivate aesthetic hygiene? In two workshops with design students and practicing designers, we worked with soaps as tangible metaphors to explore the mess that popular methods erase. Exhibited together with prompting questions, these soaps were then used to spark conversations among design educators. Through our analysis of this process, we highlight four material expressions of how design methods repress mess and critical pedagogical questions for cultivating aesthetic reflexivity.

This co-authored visual essay explores our process of making space for ourselves online within the complexity of our intersectional identities. Individually, we’ve appropriated mainstream social media posts to share marginalized experiences, generate meaningful connections, and merge our personal and research identities. On Facebook, Griffin shares her experiences as a cis-female, invisibly disabled, neurodivergent design educator. On Instagram, Hull shares their experiences as fat, queer, trans non-binary design student. Together, using tools with low barriers to entry, we document how design educational praxis affords our marginalized voices access, or not, within physical and virtual design education spaces. As white authors, we reflect on how our experiences have been invisibly and inequitably racialized. This essay includes captured social media posts, data visualizations both poetic and pragmatic, and captions providing thick descriptions.