Reorienting Design Towards a Decolonial Ethos : Exploring Directions for Decolonial Design
Keywords:
Contemporary Industrial Design, as professional and academic practice, exists intertwined with the global hegemonic power structures of coloniality (Buckley 1986; Escobar 2018a; Mareis and Paim 2020). Problematizing this situatedness, the effort of Decolonizing Design emerges as a twofold effort: first to unlink it from this structure, opening up for diverse understandings of Design and, second, to remove oppressive behaviors from Design. In this paper we present a decolonial intervention in an Industrial Design education in the Global North as an exploration of how to shift Design towards decolonial emancipation. From this project, we suggest the categories of listening, learning, and loving as guidelines for decolonizing Design. We conclude arguing that the work necessary to dismantle Design as we know it and explore decolonial directions demands that we continually work to break and counterbalance the allegiance to its Eurocentrism and oppressive ways of working.