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DD Update: Publications and Projects, February 2022

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Hello!
It’s been another long while since our last update but we wanted to provide our audience with a recap of our various publications and projects since 2018.

A major collective work that we wanted to promote is the
Decolonization and Design Lesson Plan that we developed for the Bloomsbury Design Library. The plan is designed to help students and instructors familiarise themselves with some concepts and issues relating to decolonization, including ideas for how this can be done via studio practice methods.

Looking back on the plan, and in light of the increasing popularity of discourses relating to decolonization, particularly following events such as the 2020 movement for Black lives uprising, we would emphasise a long running theme of our work: decolonization is not something that can be addressed simply by adding it as a theme to your curriculum or as a concept in your research and design projects.

These can of course be important and valuable steps, but the concept of decolonization is not supposed to fit easily into a university curriculum, let alone in the marketing or PR of design firms. Decolonization is a project of revolutionary social transformation, the kind that aims at upending institutions such as the university, not reforming them. While we do the best that we can to emphasise this point within the deeply compromised context of design education, we try to insist on the fact that the impetus for change in both thinking and action comes from social struggle and movement.

Taking decolonization seriously therefore implies the need to be ‘in but not of’ institutions such as the university, to see the inclusion of decolonial ideas as valuable only to the extent that people understand inclusion is nowhere near sufficient, and to understand that the end goal is not a more politically correct workplace experience but the abolition of things such as workplaces themselves, along with prisons, police, settler-colonial states etc. These are the institutions of colonization that benefit from the watering down of revolutionary ideas.

In addition to the Bloomsbury lesson plan, we have all been involved in producing a number of publications and design projects which have been listed below by year of publication.

2022 and forthcoming:

  • Prado de O. Martins, Luiza “Coloniality, Reproduction, and the Climate Crisis, or: How Do We Survive When the Land Is Crumbling under Our Feet?” Interactions 29, no. 1 (January 6, 2022): 99–101. https://doi.org/10.1145/3505687.
  • Vieira de Oliveira, P.J.S., Miyazaki, S., forthcoming. Maschinelle-Intelligenz?! Stimm-Bio-Metrie als hörend-bestimmende Medien-Techno-Logie, in: Schürmer, A., Haberer, M., Brautschek, T. (Eds.), ACOUSTIC INTELLIGENCE: hören und gehorchen. Düsseldorf University Press, Düsseldorf.

2021:

2020:

2019:

2018:

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