Fred van Amstel - SoundSage

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Together with Gamze Dane, Gabriela Marcu, and Rico Herzog, I am chairing the paper track of the International Conference on Communities & Technologies (C&T) to be held at TU Delft in April 2027. The conference is affiliated with the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies, bringing people from fields like Participatory Design, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Human-Computer Interaction, ICT4D, and many others.

This edition’s theme is Communities of Hope.

From the call:

Hope prompts us to imagine new possibilities for the future: our collective utopias that keep us moving forward, as Eduardo Galeano puts it. It is hope that keeps those utopian horizons in view, grounding imagination in action and allowing us to build more just and plural worlds together. Hope is therefore not abstract or naive. Rooted in lived experiences, it grows out of struggle and everyday life. As Paulo Freire writes, hope is a “human necessity” that pushes us to question injustice and work toward change. Without hope, struggle cannot continue; without action, hope loses its meaning.

We are expecting contributions that engage with themes such as:

Critical, feminist, queer, and Black visions of hope in people and their ambivalent communities and technologies
De/anti/post-colonial perspectives on communities and technologies
De-centering anthropocentrism, multispecies communities, and including more-than-humans in and through technologies
Community-driven counter‑mapping practices around/through/against technologies
Speculative design, futuring, transition design, systemic design, artistic research and other approaches that envision technology development as part of larger sociotechnical systems
Participatory design, infrastructuring, design justice, public interest technology, civic labs, grassroots innovation, appropriate technology, participatory action research, living labs, transdisciplinary research, constructive technology assessment, and other community-based technology design approaches
Advances and challenges of human–computer interaction in community settings, including novel approaches in intelligence augmentation and artificial intelligence
Digital sovereignty, platform cooperativism, data trusts, community networks, collaborative services, common pool resources, open source, and other technologies for sharing digital commons and community assets
Open-source communities, including their organisational aspects, technologies, funding schemes, institutional embeddings and challenges
The role of technology in the (re)production and transformation of spaces across urban and rural settings
Emerging debates in communities of practice for socially embedded technologies
Collective organising and activism around/through/against technologies
Turning citizen science, popular education, grassroots sensing, data feminism, critical making, hacklabs, and makerspaces into action through technology (i.e. interactive interfaces, data visualisation and analytic tools)
Co- and participatory multi-modelling practices for urban development
New pedagogies and didactics for critical and transformative learning at the intersection of technologies and education

Got something along those lines? Please join us in Delft, The Netherlands, in April 2027!

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Luis Garcia’s doctoral research emerged from a simple but consequential observation: the ambitious promises of Carnegie Mellon University’s transition design and European Public Design did not account for the institutional realities of the Global South. As an Ecuadorian designer who has worked across Latin America and North America, Dr. Garcia questioned how long-term societal transitions could be pursued within public institutions marked by political instability, resource constraints, and enduring colonial power relations.

Working with public designers across Latin America and the Caribbean, and through a ten-month collaboration with the Municipality of Quito, Ecuador, Dr. Garcia documented how transition-oriented work is sustained through relationships of trust, situated judgment, and everyday acts of institutional care. His research reveals that public-sector transitions rarely follow linear roadmaps. Instead, it unfolds through continuous negotiation between structural constraints and the creative capacities of designers working from within them.

The dissertation develops concepts such as designing from handiness, ecologies of relational practices, and institutional affect, culminating in the Unfinished Design Model—a framework that reimagines public transitions as ongoing, relational, and politically situated processes. By bringing Ecuadorian and broader Latin American experiences to the center of transition design scholarship, Dr. Luis Garcia demonstrates that the most valuable design knowledge often emerges not despite institutional fragility, but through the inventive ways designers learn to navigate it.

Download the thesis from the university repository

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Mazzarotto, M., van Amstel, F. M. C., Oliveira Serpa, B., Marques, P., Gonzatto, R. F., & Carvalho, R. A. P. (2026, June). The Pasts and Futures of Latin American Participatory Design: Thinking and Making Participation from Where Our Feet Stand. In Proceedings of the 19th Participatory Design Conference 2026, Vol. 3: Workshops, Situated Actions, and PDC Places (pp. 178-180). https://doi.org/10.1145/3789493.3797342

Abstract: The contributions of Latin American peoples, culture, science, research, and practice to Participatory Design urge recognition, summary, documentation, and sharing in Latin America by Latin Americans. Brazil is a significant place for affirming this identity, given its historical lack of self-identification as Latin American, in contrast to the inevitable other-identification as Latin American. This proposal stems from the research and practice of Rede Design & Opressão (Design & Oppression Network) conducted in Latin America and its diaspora. The proposed PDC Place seeks to reflect on and expand participatory design in Latin America, emphasizing design as a political, pedagogical, and aesthetic practice of freedom. Organized simultaneously as a hybrid event in Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba, and connected online to other regions, the event will include conversation circles, collective meals, and a collaborative workshop culminating in a visual collage that answers this question: What does Latin American participatory design mean? Rooted in care, listening, and consent, this event aims to strengthen ties between universities and social movements, decolonize participatory design, and make visible Southern perspectives by exhibiting the collage at PDC 2026 in Milan, Italy.

Download the paper from its publisher (open access)

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Murray, M., Barry, M., Halperin, B. A., O’Keefe, H., Duval, J., Vigil-Hayes, M., … & Robinson, S. (2026, June). Designing for Dissensus: Arts-Based Methods for Generative Friction in Design. In Companion Publication of the 2026 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 27-31). https://doi.org/10.1145/3802974.3808004

Abstract: We need more critical collaborative design practices in a world fraught with meta-crisis, both exacerbated and alleviated by design and technology. This one-day workshop explores how arts-based methods can support this criticality through challenging harmful consensus that contribute to meta-crisis and encouraging a generative conflict within community-based collaborative design. Central to this is the configuring of an equitable positionality that recognises difference. We look towards Freirean praxis, centering making and reflection, to challenge assumptions inherent in computing and collaboration that contribute to social injustices. We foreground concepts from arts-based participation which disrupt social norms and reveal hidden experiences through generative friction. Workshop participants will gain insights on how positionalities are configured and negotiated, ideas for how conflict and “equality in difference” might be evoked in collaborative practices and how making activities can interrogate harmful norms, advance diverse standpoints, build mutual understanding and support more open and critical participatory processes.

Download the paper from its publisher (open access)

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Abstract: Reality is so hard to change these days and, at the same time, so easy to deny, that design research is increasingly about virtual, augmented, mixed, and speculated realities. Prospective design is a research program born at UTFPR, Brazil, Global South, that speculates on reality as part of a larger move of transforming reality. Building upon critical pedagogy, Theater of the Oppressed, and other radical approaches, prospective design aims at changing reality by intervening in the critical infra and metastructures of society. By articulating the spectacular with the banal at multiple levels of reality, prospective design opens up a new design space for engaging with social movements, government, companies, and other collective bodies interested in changing reality.

Recorded during a visit to the ArcK research group, Hasselt University.

Video

Full transcript

I’m a Dutch-Brazilian researcher currently living in Curitiba, in the southern part of Brazil, where I lead the recently created graduate program in Prospective Design. Since the program has existed for less than a year, this presentation is one of the first public opportunities to discuss its overall vision and its engagement with participatory design and related fields that inform our work.

Before discussing Prospective Design itself, I want to contextualize the contradictions that brought us here. The beginning will be philosophical and dense, but gradually we will move toward a more specifically design-oriented approach to dealing with these contradictions.

It is not new in philosophy to argue that a significant part of reality is invisible to the naked eye. Nor is it new to say that reality is untouchable or inaccessible through touch and other senses. The reachable reality conceals the unreachable in order to prevent the emergence of alternative realities. This concealment is intentional. It is designed. Some call this ontological design.

I prefer to invoke figures from the political arena who expressed this more directly, such as Margaret Thatcher. In many speeches, Thatcher insisted that there was no alternative to what we now call the neoliberal approach to government and society. In many ways, she became a trailblazer for what unfolded from the 1980s onward. Many of her strategies, suggestions, and predictions became unavoidable for some people—though not for those, like myself, who insist on seeking alternatives.

Looking critically at the history of reality production, we find that capitalist reality has indeed been socially produced, politically organized, and economically exploited as if there were no alternatives. This absence of alternatives is not a recent feature of neoliberal capitalism. Capitalism has always operated as a world system with a totalizing tendency, incorporating everything as a potential source of revenue. Whatever is not yet incorporated must eventually be absorbed, whether through trade, war, conquest, colonization, or other forms of coercion. Capitalism seeks to capitalize on everything possible; therefore, nothing can remain outside of it. There is nothing outside the reach of capitalism; hence, no alternative is left to think and make a world otherwise.

Critics of capitalism have captured this condition through concepts such as capitalist realism and the well-known phrase “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. This framing is deeply fatalistic. Although it resonates with everyday political discourse, it offers little hope. Public debate increasingly revolves around different versions of capitalism rather than possibilities beyond it. One might hear proposals for a more conscious or ethical capitalism, but discussions extending beyond capitalism remain rare in economics, politics, and culture. Capitalism is not merely an economic regime; it is a total regime in which cultural production, cultural goods, and even our own bodies become capitalized.

Mark Fisher advanced this critique and searched for possibilities of hope before his death. Yet I increasingly struggle to find hope in his critique. I prefer to return to the 1960s, when critics of capitalism were directly engaged with social movements and willing to place themselves at risk within those struggles. One important figure from that period is Guy Debord, a member of the Situationist International and the Situationist artistic movement. In The Society of the Spectacle, he theorized the veil that conceals reality in a particularly relevant way for design. Debord described the spectacle as a project imposed upon reality—a distributed, participatory design process in which everyone, through everyday life, contributes to the continual production of the spectacle.

For example, when someone attends a 3D movie screening, they participate in designing or reproducing the spectacle just as much as the film’s designers or the 3D glasses designers. The spectacle is collectively maintained.

At the same historical moment in which Debord developed this critique in Europe, another process was unfolding in Latin America, where revolution appeared as a more immediate possibility. The Cuban Revolution generated considerable hope across the continent, and Paulo Freire emerged from this context. Freire pioneered a participatory approach to literacy that would later inspire Scandinavian designers to work with users in what later became known as participatory design.

During the 1960s, Freire worked with illiterate populations and developed what he called a Pedagogy of the Oppressed. While Debord’s writing often leads toward pessimism and deadlock, Freire offers hope for transforming reality. However, he insisted that there is no direct road to revolution. Revolutionary transformation requires the gradual creation of material conditions through education. Without education, even revolutionary movements risk reproducing the same oppressive structures they initially opposed.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that many leftist revolutions failed to resolve the societal contradictions they confronted. For Freire, the task was therefore not simply to denounce oppression but to transform reality while unveiling it. Critical pedagogy removes the veil from reality through collective action aimed at producing alternatives.

Inspired by Freire and by other thinkers associated with critical pedagogy—such as bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, and Augusto Boal—we created the Design & Oppression Network during the COVID pandemic. Around 2020, many Brazilian researchers began organizing more systematically in response to the Bolsonaro government’s attacks on public universities, research funding, and academic autonomy. The network was one among many initiatives formed during that period. Bolsonaro has since faced imprisonment after a failed coup attempt, yet the far-right movement remains active. For this reason, we did not dissolve the network. Instead, we expanded it to other places facing similar conditions.

Our central research question became: Can design become part of a critical pedagogy that fights oppression on multiple fronts?

This is not an easy task because design is historically entangled with modernity. Design operates as an affirmative pedagogy of the modern world. In many ways, design functions as a spokesperson for modernity, continuously selling modernity to consumers and users, often through material forms rather than explicit discourse. For example, the colorful chairs in this room express a particular modern aesthetic while coexisting with an older architectural environment. This tension between the old and the new reproduces one of modern design’s recurring narratives: that the new is necessarily better. Capitalism presents itself through this same logic of novelty and progress.

Of course, historians of design have analyzed modern discourse more rigorously than I can do here. Guy Debord himself offered an important critique of modern design and its relationship to the spectacle. In his film adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle, modern design is portrayed as deeply complicit with capitalism. Fashion, interior, and product design are all presented as mechanisms for reproducing the spectacle. Debord ultimately suggests that modern design may be inseparable from capitalism itself.

At the same time, Debord did not fully engage with developments in the Global South, particularly in critical pedagogy and revolutionary movements in Latin America. Today, however, those historical separations are being challenged. Researchers from the Global South are increasingly showing up (invited or not) in discussions previously dominated by European and North American perspectives. This connection is necessary because capitalism itself is global and totalizing.

I nevertheless agree with Debord on one important point: despite claiming mastery over visual form, modern design often produces more invisibility than visibility. Contemporary discussions about virtual, mixed, and augmented reality rarely concern alternatives to capitalism. Instead, they reinforce existing structures under new technological forms.

This became particularly visible when Mark Zuckerberg announced the Metaverse initiative. The widely circulated promotional image resembled the cover of The Society of the Spectacle: rows of people immersed in mediated realities while a single smiling figure oversees the system. The image unintentionally revealed the asymmetry of control embedded in these technological infrastructures.

Not all designers, however, reproduce these dynamics uncritically. Critical designers—often emerging at the intersection of art and design—attempt to challenge dominant structures. Industrial design, in particular, has produced important critical interventions, while also raising difficult questions such as: Who can afford to remain critical?

This question was powerfully articulated by Afonso de Matos, a former student at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Some interpret this dilemma as justification for simply conforming to the market and pursuing conventional industry careers. Yet critical practice can also emerge through volunteer work, collective organization, social movements, nonprofit initiatives, or alternative forms of entrepreneurship. This is the type of work we have been developing in Brazil.

Critical designers essentially place design against design itself. They use the familiar language of design to challenge design’s historical alignment with capitalist goals and agendas.

Earlier, before this lecture began, I projected a looping video to frame the discussion. The intention was to expand the notion of design beyond industrial products or visible interfaces. Design also includes the invisible infrastructures that organize everyday life: pipelines, electrical systems, scheduling systems, logistical networks, and temporal rhythms. Water infrastructures, for example, depend on predictive models of collective behavior. Utility companies must anticipate when water consumption will peak according to daily, weekly, or seasonal routines. These infrastructures are interconnected across national and transnational scales. What occurs in one world often depends upon extraction, labor, or deprivation occurring elsewhere.

This is a 2002 work by the French collective H5. The piece presents an apparently soothing, optimistic narrative while revealing how thoroughly human life is orchestrated by designed systems. Beneath its polished surface, the work asks whether we are willing to accept a reality in which nearly every aspect of life has been predesigned by others. Many viewers interpreted the work merely as an informative celebration of technological infrastructure. Yet hidden within the video is a split-second image of someone committing suicide as a response to extreme work exploitation (3’20” at the top right part of the canvas). This fleeting moment functions as a critical message inside an otherwise seamless depiction of modern life. It reveals how critical design messages can infiltrate popular culture without becoming immediately legible. I only noticed it after learning about karoshi and watching the movie again.

Critical designers also place futures against futures. At times, this produces deeply pessimistic scenarios. The work of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby often confronts audiences with catastrophic possibilities such as nuclear annihilation. Their project, Huggable Atomic Mushrooms, satirically imagines children becoming emotionally accustomed to nuclear war.

Revisiting this project today feels darker than it did twenty years ago. Nuclear conflict no longer appears as distant speculation. During the Cold War, anti-nuclear movements intersected with many other social struggles, including literacy movements inspired by Freire. Even illiterate rural populations in Brazil discussed the possibility of nuclear extinction. Today, critical consciousness around such issues often appears diminished.

Designers, therefore, need to consider not only how their projects function in the present, but also how they will be interpreted in future historical conditions. After many years of engaging with critical and speculative design, especially in Brazil, I concluded that these approaches often remain limited to denouncing the spectacle. They help reveal contradictions to broader audiences, but they rarely move beyond critique toward structural transformation.

I also participated in these practices myself. One example was The Church of Divine Design, a project I developed with Rodrigo Gonzatto in 2013 to critique the growing influence of Protestant ethics and evangelical conservatism within Brazilian politics. The project connected the ideological authority of modern design—particularly imported European design traditions—with broader colonial and religious structures shaping Brazilian society. The project provoked strong reactions, especially from defenders of industrial modernism. Yet despite its critical force, it ultimately failed to generate a meaningful decolonial movement in Brazilian design. We realized that we were reproducing a model of critical design developed primarily in Britain and Europe rather than responding directly to Brazilian realities.

This dissatisfaction led us to move beyond critical and speculative design altogether. Over more than a decade, we gradually developed a different approach. That approach eventually became what we now call Prospective Design. This approach builds upon Latin American traditions of praxis and reality transformation rooted in the work of Paulo Freire, the Cuban and Chilean revolutionaries, and many other political movements across Latin America. At the same time, it engages with more recent developments in North American design discourse, particularly transition design.

When we encountered the limitations of speculative and critical design, transition design emerged as an important reference, seeking to expand design for social change through a systemic, community-based perspective. Unlike early speculative design practices associated with Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, transition design was not primarily concerned with isolated speculative objects or exhibitions. Instead, it focused on sociotechnical systems and the broader conditions that sustain life.

Transition design also integrated sustainable design and ecological thinking, particularly through systems theory and biomimicry. It sought to reconnect the human world with the natural world by treating human systems as embedded within ecological systems rather than separate from them. This was not entirely new. Figures such as Tomás Maldonado had already proposed similar ideas in the 1960s. Nevertheless, transition design remained one of the few contemporary approaches attempting to preserve this broad systemic vision within design education.

Again, we could not simply import or apply transition design to Brazil. The first obstacle was linguistic and cultural. In Europe and the United States, the word “transition” is strongly associated with ecological transformation and political change. In Brazil, however, the term transição is far more closely associated with transgender identity and LGBTQ+ agendas. It does not immediately evoke ecological discourse in the public sphere like, for example, indigenous cosmologies do. At first, we considered prospective design merely a translation equivalent, but eventually we decided to redesign the entire design philosophy behind transition design. If we were already creating a different name, we might as well rethink the philosophical foundations themselves.

This led us toward a critique of systemic thinking, which plays a foundational role in transition design. We revisited Brazilian and Latin American philosophical traditions to rethink the relationship among design, society, and transformation. The result was the development of a new design philosophy, which we are now sharing abroad. One of the central principles of this philosophy is that human beings are collective beings and that reality itself is collectively produced. If reality is collectively produced, then the educational program discussing it must also be collectively designed. Our graduate program therefore operates through participatory structures in which faculty members and students collectively shape the curriculum, concepts, and methodologies of the program itself.

The foundational concept of prospective design is the notion of existential structures. We deliberately avoid the term “sociotechnical systems” because systemic thinking can easily slip into formalism. Debord already demonstrated how systems reproduce themselves through self-correcting mechanisms and representations that absorb resistance and continuously expand their own reach. If everything is framed as a system, it becomes difficult to imagine exits from it.

Existential structures provide a different framing. Rather than emphasizing abstract systems, the concept foregrounds lived existence. Existential structures are structures built to sustain existence. They concern living beings and embodied realities rather than abstract machinic totalities.

We also resist dissolving all distinctions into generalized notions of the “nonhuman.” While we recognize the importance of ecological interdependence, we remain cautious about speaking on behalf of entities that cannot participate directly in human political discourse. Our emphasis, therefore, remains grounded in embodied human existence while remaining attentive to broader relational ecologies.

A central concern of prospective design is that only a small range of relationships is socially recognized as possible. Society continuously narrows the field of imaginable possibilities. This is particularly visible in discussions surrounding ecological collapse or the oil crisis. We are repeatedly told that rapid transitions beyond carbon dependency are impossible. Speculative design often responds to this limitation by imagining alternatives and expanding the cone of possibilities. Yet imagination alone is insufficient. We are interested not only in speculation, but in transformation. The key question becomes: where can intervention generate the greatest expansion of possibilities with the least resistance to transformation?

We found that infrastructures and metastructures function as powerful leverage points for expanding what is socially possible. Infrastructures and metastructures make invisible dimensions of reality visible. What usually remains in the background can emerge into the foreground, enabling designers to work across invisibility itself.

Infrastructure tends toward transcendence. It abstracts reality from specific contexts and universalizes it across many situations. Metastructure, on the other hand, deepens engagement with contextual and relational dimensions of existence. It reveals the contexts behind contexts. These concepts are difficult to summarize briefly, and their full meaning requires engagement with our published work. Still, they orient our efforts toward developing what we call a social sensibility for relational qualities.

For example, some experiences become perceptible only through particular embodied positions. In one classroom discussion about oppression during the Bolsonaro government, several female students suddenly realized that they were the only participants consistently present in those conversations, while male students were largely absent. This recognition sparked a powerful moment of collective solidarity. Such experiences reveal relational qualities that cannot easily be reduced to abstract systemic categories.

From this perspective, Prospective Design becomes a form of structuralist design aesthetics grounded in relational experience. We are deliberately returning to structuralism after its revision by post-structuralist theory. While systems thinking and post-structuralism remain valuable, we believe many contemporary approaches based on these lines of reasoning underestimate the material persistence of structures. Social structures are not easily transformed through isolated acts of individual choice. They involve collective formations operating across societies, nations, and worlds.

The prospective design framework, therefore, operates across three axes.

The first axis concerns trajectories and what we call projectories. Projectories refer to the historical repetition of projects within broader social tendencies. Design projects are never isolated; they participate in larger historical movements and patterns. This means Prospective Design also engages with design history, not by abandoning it, but by reinterpreting it prospectively. The second axis concerns the relationship between metastructures and infrastructures. The third axis concerns layers of possibility, ranging from the possible to the unthinkable. Prospective Design attempts to articulate these three dimensions simultaneously while intervening critically in society. In this sense, Prospective Design also functions as a critical pedagogy of trajectories and projectories.

In Paulo Freire’s literacy method, education expanded from text to context. Illiterate people could already interpret signs and meanings within the world around them before learning an alphabetic language. Freire helped them move from reading the world to reading the word. He used what he called generative images—a remarkably contemporary term given his engagement with linguistic and cybernetic theories emerging during the 1960s.

We reinterpret this idea through generative codesign tools. These tools are generative not merely because they produce ideas, but because they enable the creation of further tools, relations, and forms of participation. This also leads us to rethink codesign itself. If all design emerges from contextual relations, then every design process is already a form of codesign, even when power relations remain unequal or oppressive.

From this perspective, becoming a critical designer first requires becoming a critical user. Critical design practice cannot emerge from an uncritical relationship with technological infrastructures. It is contradictory to produce critical work while remaining fully dependent on proprietary software, extractive labor platforms, or fascist AI. For this reason, we have been developing generative models capable of representing complex relationships between metastructures and infrastructures.

One example involved a collective exercise conducted by faculty members and students to map the energy structures sustaining contemporary technofascism. The exercise traced connections between energy extraction, electronic devices, internet infrastructures, mass surveillance, and exploitative digital labor. The point was to demonstrate that techno-fascism does not emerge spontaneously as fateful accident. It depends upon material infrastructures and metastructures that sustain and normalize it. At the same time, we realized that regulation alone is insufficient as a response. Expanding legal control over technologies may mitigate certain harms, but it does not fundamentally transform the structures that produce them.

When neoliberalism insists that there is no alternative, we must instead search for what we call alternatives. I am not using the same term in the same sense. Alter/natives refers to concepts and actions emerging from the Global South that seek to create worlds grounded in their own realities rather than reproducing metropolitan or colonial models.

The cybernetic model for decolonizing design research as seen in Van Amstel (2023).An alter/native universal is not simply a local identity or isolated worldview. It is a universality constructed through interconnected localities. I do not fully align with some versions of pluriversal theory that oppose universality altogether. Local realities are crucial, but isolated localisms cannot effectively confront transnational phenomena such as technofascism. Reactionary forces already operate globally. They adapt their appearance to different countries while reproducing the same patriarchal, colonial, extractivist, and fundamentalist logics.

This discussion can be illustrated through the indigenous myth of the Ipupiara monster from Pindorama, the territory now known as Brazil. During colonization, indigenous peoples spread stories of terrifying creatures to frighten Portuguese colonizers. These stories functioned strategically, much like what today might be called counter-information. The aspect that most frightened the Portuguese was not the creature’s size or its big claws, but the fact that it possessed two sexes within the same body. From the perspective of the colonizers’ conservative worldview, this ambiguity itself became monstrous.

Today we revisit the Ipupiara myth as inspiration for collective and queer design practices. At the Federal University of Technology – Paraná, where I currently work, our Laboratory of Design Against Oppression and its associated Muvuca Studio organized a large public event called the Gender Disturbance Catwalk.

This was the first major LGBTQ+ public demonstration held at the university. Students created garments combining elements traditionally associated with masculinity and femininity, deliberately destabilizing normative gender expectations. The event culminated in a collective composition formed from donated sewing machines and participants’ bodies, producing a kind of contemporary Ipupiara figure: collective, hybrid, and scary to the oppressors.

An important aspect of this project was that it emerged almost entirely through student self-management. Students occupied an abandoned room previously filled with unused computers and transformed it into the university’s first fashion design laboratory, despite the absence of a formal fashion design program. They effectively pressured the institution from below, demonstrating how collective action can create new educational structures before official recognition exists.

Looking toward the future of prospective design, I increasingly believe that we need models of society beyond the modern state itself. Much of contemporary political organization still operates according to the logic formulated by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. The state justifies its monopoly on violence by claiming that without centralized control, individuals would descend into mutual oppression and chaos. As a result, the state legitimizes its own oppressive capacity as a necessary mechanism for preventing greater disorder. This logic continues to shape contemporary geopolitics. The inability of states to collectively confront atrocities such as the genocide in Palestine reflects the persistence of this framework, where violence remains acceptable when aligned with perceived state interests.

Oppression ultimately acts most directly upon the human body, which is why embodiment occupies such a central place within our philosophy. Unlike approaches centered primarily on sociotechnical systems, Prospective Design insists that existential structures are embodied realities. This perspective draws heavily from Augusto Boal and the tradition of the Theatre of the Oppressed. In The Rainbow of Desire, Boal writes that “human beings are first and foremost bodies”. We should never lose sight of embodiment beneath abstract discussions of systems or technologies.

Theatre of the Oppressed is powerful because it transforms the spectacle into a forum. Traditional theater positions audiences as passive spectators. Boal instead created forms in which spectators become “spect-actors,” actively intervening in the performance itself. One example from our own work involved a Theater of the Techno-Oppressed session focused on Uber’s “ride in silence” feature in Brazil. The feature allowed passengers to pay extra to avoid conversation with drivers.

We considered this ethically problematic, especially in Brazilian culture, where conversation and cordiality are central to social interaction. The feature imported a model of social behavior associated with North American platform culture while subtly restructuring local relationships. During the forum portion of the performance, audience members entered the stage and attempted to transform the interaction between driver and passenger into something more reciprocal and solidaristic. These interventions often failed, but failure itself revealed the strength and complexity of the existential structures involved.

The forum, therefore, transforms the spectacle of oppression into a space where oppression can be collectively scrutinized and experimentally modified. Boal once wrote: “In theater, everything is true, even lies.” This idea deeply resonates with the work of René Magritte, especially The Treachery of Images. The image insists that it is not what it appears to be. Rather than accepting surface appearances, we are pushed to reflect on how images structure perception and social reality.

The Treachery of Images, René Magritte (1929).Boal extends this logic further, describing theater as a mirror we can penetrate and modify. This recalls Magritte’s The False Mirror, in which the eye becomes a portal to deeper layers of consciousness and reality. The point is not to recognize oneself at the surface level, but to move beyond appearances into the hidden structures shaping experience.

The False Mirror, René Magritte (1928).Prospective design draws upon these traditions—critical pedagogy, surrealism, situationism, and the Theatre of the Oppressed—to produce critical mirrors of society. The goal is to create spectacles within the spectacle: spaces where we can collectively perceive, question, and transform oppressive realities. We claim that the alter/native reality is already present, though often rendered invisible. Our task is not passive waiting, but active hope: the collective work of making these realities increasingly visible and materially possible.

References

Fisher, M. (2022). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. Simon and Schuster.

Debord, G. ([1967] 2021). The society of the spectacle. Unredacted Word.

Freire, P. ([1968] 1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). New York: Continuum, 356, 357-358.

Van Amstel, F., Sâmia, B., Serpa, B.O., Marco, M., Carvalho, R.A.,and Gonzatto, R.F.(2021) Insurgent Design Coalitions: The history of the Design & Oppression network, in Leitão, R.M., Men, I., Noel, L-A., Lima, J., Meninato, T. (eds.), Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling, 22-23 July, Toronto, Canada. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0018

Matos, A. (Ed.). (2022). Who Can Afford to be Critical?: An Inquiry Into what We Can’t Do Alone, as Designers, and Into what We Might be Able to Do Together, as People. Set Margins’.

Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything, With a new preface by the authors: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT press.

Gonzatto, R. F., Van Amstel, F. M., Merkle, L. E., & Hartmann, T. (2013). The ideology of the future in design fictions. Digital creativity, 24(1), 36-45. https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2013.772524

Irwin, T. (2015). Transition design: A proposal for a new area of design practice, study, and research. Design and culture, 7(2), 229-246.

Tavares, Polyana Andrade, Gonzatto, Rodrigo Freese, Van Amstel, Frederick M. C. (forthcoming). Collective handiness in prospective design: a philosophical account of a serious play on articulation work. Proceedings of DRS 2026, Edinburgh. Design Research Society. https://fredvanamstel.com/publications/collective-handiness-in-prospective-design-a-philosophical-account-of-a-serious-play-on-articulation-work

Botter, F., M. C. van Amstel, F., André Mazzarotto Filho, M., and Guimarães, C. (2024) Prospective design: A structuralist design aesthetic founded on relational qualities, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.883

Angelon, R., & van Amstel, F. (2021). Monster aesthetics as an expression of decolonizing the design body. Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 20(1), 83-102. https://doi.org/10.1386/adch_00031_1

Van Amstel, F. M. C. (2023). Decolonizing design research. In: Rodgers, Paul A. and Yee, Joyce (Eds). The Routledge Companion to Design Research (pp. 64-74). Routledge. https://www.doi.org/10.4324/9781003182443-7

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Abstract: Digital interfaces have replaced so many face-to-face interactions that we almost forget what we are missing. As users, we take action, send orders, and sometimes hurt other people without even knowing whose faces are on the other side of the “inter-face”. This habit is extending to analog interfaces as offline actions increasingly follow online patterns. People are losing their ability to make eye contact, share full presence, and mutually recognize each other. This is not a spontaneous habit. Most contemporary interfaces have a specific design that habituates users to adopt dress codes, roles, avatars, algorithms, and other kinds of social masks. In that way, systemic user oppression, or users oppressing other users, effectively hides or distracts from the injustices that sustain large-scale inequality systems. Within these systems, however, it is still possible to design otherwise.

Lecture recorded at the Symbiotic Hospitality program hosted by Timelab, Genth, Belgium. The full recording includes audience interaction in the end.

Full transcription

I came from Brazil a few days ago and wanted to share some reflections on an experience that connects with and intertwines with what’s going on here in Belgium. This visit is really an important historical moment, not only for me, as you can see from my excitement now, but also for everyone. And we might not realize it today. So let’s keep in touch and see how this unfolds.

Well, first of all, a little bit about my current work conditions and hopes. Brazil is a country that now spearheads democratic conflict resolution. And particularly, we fixed the far right problem by imprisoning our former president after a failed coup attempt. Yes. I’m really proud of that. And I wish that the United States would follow suit one day, maybe.

Anyways, we have a public university that is also founded on democratic systems. And it’s an everyday culture. As you can see in this picture, our students are learning design through a democratic process. They form groups and work together. They elect representatives. And they also create things together. In this case, they are creating a tactile musical experiment. They have to share an interpretation of a song they like with another person, using the tactile interface as a medium. For that, they need to synchronize their movements so that the other’s body would feel what it’s like the song to them.

It’s a big challenge in terms of multi-sensorial design. It is an experiential challenge of learning what it is to be another person, feeling that same touch differently. It’s also an intercultural dialogue. Even in Brazil, there are differences in touch codes. Can you touch this part of the body? There are gender codes regarding these interactions. All of that is learned by talking, trying, making, and reflecting, all of which are important aspects of any democracy.

My priority as a design educator is to let our students become more conscious of their relationships with others, so they can design experiences as if they were designing human-to-human relationships and craft those relationships through their designs. Some people call this service design. As you can see on the right side, the most known examples are smartphone apps. Someone may conclude, “Oh, you are designing apps.” Yes, this is, let’s say, the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it, there is a lot of thought about what is behind those interfaces.

Industrial Design vs. Service DesignI want to draw you into this conversation that has been ongoing for almost 60 years, from industrial design focused on the object as an interface to service design focused on the interface as part of an object or an expanding object that goes beyond products, that sometimes reaches out to the point of product-service systems or even entire social structures.

Please follow my journey.

What is an interface? There are complex definitions coming out of fields like physics or ecological science (ecology). In computer science, this is reduced to the idea of a computer on one side and a user on the other. With this definition, we miss the fact that interfaces are interfaces to another interface, another interface, and so on, until you reach a person on the other end.

Sometimes in computer science or in common-sense discourses about computers, people might say that artificial intelligence is a new form of life. That’s not true. Artificial intelligence is just a computer talking to someone else’s computer. It’s a distributed network of computers communicating with each other. ChatGPT is thus strictly speaking not an AI but an interface. It’s not a new form of life. It’s not a self-sustaining or self-developing intelligence. It’s just a human language processing interface.

You type something, it responds back, and then you feel like you can go somewhere sometimes. Interfaces are typically conceptualized in human-computer interaction as manipulable representations of computers in its working. It’s almost like translating what’s going on inside to laypeople who don’t know what the computer is about. This is a naive model of what an interface is like. A person, a human being on the one side, the digital code on the right side, the inner workings of the computer, and the interface are mediating, translating, and incorporating actions or information from both sides.

The human-computer interaction canonic concept of interfaceThe problem with this conceptualization is that it misses the fact that there is another face on the other side of the interface. Sometimes you need to dig, and dig until you find that face, because it’s hidden. It is hidden due to a macroeconomic and ideological process that conceals the other human being on the other side.

ChatGPT, for instance, relies heavily on manual labor from data trainers, data sorters, and moderators who work in faraway countries and are lowly paid. In this particular case, I’m featuring Kenyan workers who work for $2 an hour to make ChatGPT look autonomous and intelligent. Some of your prompts were not responded to directly by these workers; they responded indirectly, not at the same time.

The concealed interface at the other side of the interfaceWe are often unaware of the social impact of such interfaces. Even if people now that every prompt requires, let’s say, 10 liters of water, the equivalent of flushing a toilet, this is not enough. The transational impact of AI work exploitation is as important as the environmental impact. In any case, both of them are hidden, concealed, behind that interface. And worker interfaces are completely different than user interfaces. Easy-to-use interfaces on the privileged side are built at the cost of hard-to-use interfaces on the infrastructure side, where the workers are.

I’m pushing forth with this talk, the foundation idea that interfaces are “inter-faces”, really, trying to bring back the human into this equation. A person on one side, a person on the other side: interfaces mediating their relationships in many different ways, with biases, advantages, disadvantages, formalities, informalities, and many other ways designed by humans on both sides. Some humans have more power than others over that design.

The interface as human-human interactionWe’re going to get there in a minute. First, let’s discuss the differences between digital and analog interfaces. Despite all the hype, digital interfaces did not make face-to-face interactions outdated. That’s why I’m here at Timelab in person, and you as well. By the way, thank you very much for being here in person today, not just relying on the recordings. I’m also glad people will take a look at the recordings later, because it expands the local reach of this conversation.

In-person exchange is and will remain to be the original interface. If there weren’t Timelab, this event wouldn’t have happened. If I were just recording this in Brazil from my office, it would not mean the same. Being here in person with my flesh in this place is a public statement. Timelab is making that statement together with me because we want to have a conversation about these topics. That’s what it means to be here.

An artificial intelligence can never do what we are doing now. An AI cannot state anything. An AI may be intelligent to some degree, but it cannot stand politically for its views. We cannot have a true dialogue with an AI because it cannot talk to us face-to-face. An avatar that looks like a face is no more than a deceitful interface that gets in the way of how we relate to other people.

Digital interfaces, including AI chatbots, disrupted the evolutionary relationship we developed with other faces. We learn how to recognize faces almost immediately because our species has been trained in this for thousands and thousands of years. And then, suddenly, we’ve got these digital interfaces put in front of our faces, concealing everything else that is on the other side, just a few years ago. We felt the loss of human touch during the pandemic, not just individually, but also culturally.

We now accept mass surveillance in a way that we wouldn’t have 30 years ago. There were so many sci-fi movies that scared us like hell in the past that, nowadays, it just looks like the present. It’s no longer sci-fi. We already live in a surveillance dystopia. Back in those days, we were pushing against those policies, technologies, or smart city projects. Now no longer. We are losing opportunities to meet strangers and different people, to protest, to organize, or to do things that cannot coexist with mass surveillance. We are baited into trading privacy, self-care, and belonging for securitized access. We no longer believe that community is based on, let’s say, sharing a life. Instead, we believe community is built merely on shared safety. That’s probably going to lead us into situations where we might want to revise what we mean by living in a community.

Now moving to our children and the future of our own kind. Kids are now interacting with digital interfaces so heavily and without oversight. And even if someone is watching, persuasive messages may still go through because parents can no longer understand what they mean when they target kids. From a distance, they looks fine. If you pay close attention, you might see a lot of strange messages reaching kids that don’t have yet a critical filter.

That’s just what is going on in an ideological level. On the physical level, these kids are developing myopia much more than other generations. These kids are having trouble developing language. They are taking longer to speak because they don’t speak to those screens. What is going to be the future of our species if we keep educating children like this?

Let’s think about something that can alter our species even more deeply than this: genome editing and the possibility of industrial eugenics, or the selection of advanced human features, as its supporters call it. Designer babies depend on this basic technology, digital interfaces, which are so overlooked in this regard. Gene editing only became possible because of digital interfaces. A digital interface translates what DNA code means in easy to read, easy to interact language. It is not hard to imagine eugenist designers tweaking those interfaces to visually feature (in green and red) bad genes and good genes. This is a lot of power over future generations. We currently lack democratic governance for digital interfaces because they look transparent or even invisible. We don’t view interfaces as something to be debated at the policy level, let alone at the political level.

Well, such disruptions were not caused by technical limitations. Improving the technology, making it faster, making it, let’s say, less visible, making it seamless, integrated, won’t fix it. After researching this topic for so long, I found that the human recognition model behind it needs to be publicly debated.

Interfaces are designed based on how humans relate to each other. Hence, power relationships that appear elsewhere in society also manifest in interfaces. This is the interface model I found with other researchers: the coerced recognition model. I demand that you recognize me, or I demand that you let me recognize you, but never both, and never fully. It’s a unilateral recognition. One recognizes the other, but not both at the same time, and never fully. To recognize fully means that both recognize simultaneously. This fraught, deficient model for recognition induces us to treat other people as things, as taken-for-granted aspects of our lives, as if they were just the inner workings of a giant infrastructure.

However, when the person on the other side of the interface wants you to recognize them, they throw you a popup screen with no back button. Think about a terms and consent screens that ask us to accept those terms. We learn that, by recognizing the designers or companies behind them, or whatever kind of organization is there, we must interact in an obedient way. We have to follow the instructions. Otherwise, we might break something. We get careful where we click. We seek help and follow the interface metalanguage, its own usage instructions. We don’t stop to think who put these instructions in place and why. It’s almost like natural, unavoidable. We, users, are supposed to be served by design, as long as we remain users and only users, as long as we remain passive, as long as we don’t claim to redesign or change anything, as long as we follow the rules.

This deficient recognition model is fleshed out in design through many different methods, technologies, approaches, and theories. I’m going to feature one here. It’s called personas. Personas include imagined, fake, or research-based profiles of what a user of this future interface might look like. The profile typically includes a person’s age, nationality, preferences, likes and dislikes, context, and stories. Users who don’t fit the service’s personas are not well served. Even if you try using it, you might face disadvantages, or the system might tell you that you are no longer their target users, clients, or so on. For example, if you’re from another country and try using it, you may be blocked at some point because the service decided it’s not strategically or economically valuable to have your country’s access to this service. That happens so many times here, there in Brazil, when trying to access services provided by the Global North.

Youtube personalized home screenHere’s what YouTube looks like if I open it on a private tab of my browser app. YouTube is still targeting me in some way, even when I am not logged in. How in the hell do they still hold my data if I haven’t entered the login? You can imagine that they collect a lot of collateral data, data that is not attached to your consent, data that is attached probably to your location, to whatever they can mine and speculate about me as an anonymous user based on that data. This is the ideal home page where they control everything; I control nothing.

Think about that. I didn’t choose any of this personalization, right? If I’m logged in, I’m choosing, at least for the people who are conscious of how this works. For instance, I’m never clicking on some random clickbait videos because I don’t want more clickbait. Yet they show me a bunch of random clickbait because keeping me hooked is what they want from me.

Sometimes, users organize, revolt, protest publicly, and demand design changes. An interesting movement is underway now in Brazil: the Delivery Worker Movement. They work for a big platform labor service called iFood, which uses a gamified interface with all kinds of nasty, persuasive economic management systems, where couriers get the least amount of money from each transaction and are ready to risk their lives for almost nothing in return. Couriers originally didn’t get any services for working there. Then, they protested heavily in Brazil. With that, they demanded that the company provide them with public bathrooms, a place to warm our food, and a few seconds’ rest.

This is a kind of reverse service design, driven by users rather than designers. Usually, service design begins with the company and moves towards the users. But in this case, it’s the user designing the service from the ground up. To enable them to continue providing those services, not dying without having enough rest or without having enough food, and so on and so forth. They still have a lot to gain from this fight. But this is already an interesting example: users who usually don’t recognize themselves as designers of a system or an interface can become aware of their role in designing a service and demand designer rights or access to the service as a codesigner.

The personalization of my YouTube interface is equivalent to the micro-scale interface design work I do as a user. The Delivery Worker Movement is the macro level where collective design achievements are clearly visible. Users are always designing interfaces as much as designers, however, users are often unrecognized for that. That is why we say users are oppressed.

Yet, designers designing labor platform interfaces may also be oppressed, thus in a different way. The same Brazilian designer who designed an iFood interface using, let’s say, Adobe software might, in a few days or a few years, become heavily oppressed by restrictions imposed on Adobe Cloud, for example, as happened to Venezuelan designers in 2019. They weren’t able to open their files in Adobe Cloud. Imagine not being able to open anything in Google Drive or Dropbox. That’s what happened to them, just because the United States government blocked all access from that particular country. Designers are also users of design tools. That’s why becoming a critical designer begins by becoming a critical user of designed interfaces.

The coercitive interfaceIn this recognition model, designers look at users and vice versa as if they were like or unlike themselves. Designers compare themselves to imagined users or user data and assume users will behave exactly the same way they do, for the same reasons. Similarly, users believe that designers are like them. None of them can see the other side because the coercive interface works like a narcissistic mirror. The reflection only reinforces what is already stabilized.

Designers, as much as users, look at themselves in the mirror. But that mirror does not tell the truth. It is just a partial view. Every time you look at the mirror, you look at your face, but not your back. Hence, that image in the mirror is half the truth of who you are, which includes also how others see you in ways you cannot see. Because designers and users only see themselves in part, they fall in love with that image. From that point on, they prefer to engage with people who look like themselves. That’s the nastiest thing about this whole thing. The coercive interface model disables democracy, or accepting the other who poses a difference.

As feminists Bell Hooks and Simone de Beauvoir have shown, coercive love is not real love. Even if designers feel they have a lot of passion for their work, for crafting things, that’s not necessarily real love.

These insights are not just mine. I need to give credit now to the great people of this collaborative research network, Design & Oppression. I’m going to feature just three of my colleagues who are working on this topic. First, Rodrigo Gonzatto, the researcher behind the concept of user oppression. We’ve been looking at the history of human-computer interaction and found strong evidence that users are oppressed. Disenfranchised groups already oppressed in terms of race, gender, class, and/or body capacity are included in human-computer interaction, or service design, if you wish, as users. You hardly can find anything about black designers, women designers, people with disabilities that also design something. The reason is that there is an oppression going on, which is very specific to this current situation, the current world we live in, where everything has to go through these digital interfaces: userism.

After Gonzatto and I worked on this, I’ve got Mateus J. J. Filho looking at the philosophical roots of all this. He’s this marvelous genius researcher who’s able to read Frantz Fanon and Georg Hegel, and get something practical out of it. He’s amazing. He basically discovered this mutual recognition model we didn’t know about, because we were like, “all right, users are oppressed. We are heavy users of foreign technologies. We are screwed.” What is the way out? We didn’t have a clue until Mateus joined our group and said, “Fanon and Hegel have something relevant to say about that”. He got an award for his initial research project. A few years later, Fernando Secomandi and I collaborated to define this in great detail. We published a paper on the coercive recognition model in the Journal of Human Technologies Relationships, and we plan to continue this work in the coming years.

This network is also concerned and feels responsible for showing alternatives to this. We are not just denouncing oppression. We also want to announce liberation. How do we, users and designers, collaborate to liberate ourselves from coerced recognition?

This is still very sketchy, but the mutual recognition model is something like this. I recognize you freely recognizing me. Thus, I become a we. I’m no longer speaking only as an individual, but I’m also speaking as a collective. I’m going to share a few examples of my own practice that also relate to Timelab practice. I hope you’ll remember going through similar dilemmas at different points in your trajectories.

This was 2011. And we were thinking about how to scale up the experience of the Faber-Ludens Interaction Design Institute in Brazil. Faber-Ludens was a moment of inspiration when we wanted to do something similar to what was done in Ivrea and in Copenhagen. We tried to combine this with our Brazilian culture, and we ended up doing some crazy stuff with digital technology. This was the first time designers were getting interested in coding or robotics. And we wanted to share this experience with people who weren’t into design or weren’t into IT.

We had been running for almost four years at that time. We had a local impact, not a national one, which is hard in Brazil, as it is a continental territory. People were traveling from all parts of the country to visit us and wanted to bring interaction design back to their home communities. That is why we designed the Corais Platform. This was probably the first project that I went most deeply into mutual recognition.

Corais was designed after researching biomimicry, being inspired by natural ecosystem relationships, and treating human systems as ecosystems. “Corais” is how we call coral reefs in Portuguese. Coral reefs have mutualistic relationships in which one organism feeds on another’s remains. The process enriches both species. In the picture, clownfish are interacting positively with an anemone. Otherwise, if it weren’t a clownfish, it would be eaten by the anemone. The anemone benefits from having the clownfish around to provide nutritious waste, clean up debris, and protect it from anemone predators. As for the clownfish, the anemone tentacles protect them from predators.

We were inspired by mutualism in nature, and we thought that tools that existed for supporting collaborative work, like Basecamp, Google Drive, and OpenIDEO, and similar tools of those times, did not enable that kind of mutualistic interaction. Usually, they had a centralized interface where one person with more privileges controlled most things unidirectionally.

We thought it could compete using open-source software. So we built Corais out of the Drupal framework. It was quite an interesting hack. More than 200 modules are combined in a very strange way. We built with very few resources available. That was the power of free software at that time. We could compete with Google. Yes, those times were precious. We indeed had a lot of users migrating from Google Drive to our platform because we were all public. Everything that was posted on this platform had to be public and licensed through Creative Commons. You could not choose any other license. And that was the way how we expected—actually, we demanded—that users would also give back something to the community. Every project they would bring to the community would be available for other community members. In a similar way, coral reefs work.

At Faber-Ludens, we designed many different cards and frameworks for co-designing other things. And we started designing work processes. We had this UX cards deck that helped people co-design a methodology. That was a novelty in Brazil back then. Some people call it design thinking. In any case, that had a limited reach. Because companies would need to hire Faber-Luden’s to actually get the whole process going, we thought this was not a scalable approach. Consultancy based on in-person gatherings is very limited.

Corais made our consultancy knowledge open source. On this screen, you can see all the knowledge I accumulated on that platform and can share with others. So the cards that you would see on the table, they were there digitally represented. We wrote a book. It’s called “Design Livre.” And that’s a reflection about open design in Europe. We didn’t want to follow the same path. We attended some initial discussions and we thought that we had to be more closely connected to the free software movement as it was called in Brazil that was not aligned neatly with open source movement. We were really following, let’s say, Richard Stallman distinction between open design and free software. We thought that design should have an alternative to open design. We called it “Design Livre.” We didn’t translate into English on purpose because we wanted to emphasize this political choice.

In any case, this book was published in 2012. Faber-Luden closed its door that same year. It sounded almost like a closing manifesto, yet Corais lived forward. Corais wasn’t shut down because the users took over the process of designing it in a gradual way. Here’s how it worked. One day, I had this idea of opening a live chat box with users visiting the platform. Users could talk directly with the sysop or admin, as if they were an organizational insider. A lot of people started to flock in that chat. Of course, that wasn’t very well organized. We had to turn that into a forum so that we would have some more structured conversations. But at that point, a door was opened and the users understood that they could take over the platform and develop that from that point on. They started to propose new features for that platform. And then something really, really interesting happened there. We populated the metadesign forum. The whole platform had all kinds of projects, but this was the project of the platform itself. It was open publicly. Anyone could see what features we were working on at that time.

This particular feature was really interesting to develop in that way. One of the hosted projects was already running a mutual credit system in the platform. In their interaction design, one person defined the kind of community tasks that must be done. Someone would come and execute the task. A third person evaluated whether the task was actually done or not. A fourth person, who sometimes is the same as the first, made a credit transfer from the community bank to the user account.

The bank transfer was initially organized using spreadsheets in a very clumsy way. And then they asked me, can we automate these spreadsheets? Of course. Then they checked if there was already a Drupal model that could support us. Indeed, there was a mutual credit system module. We tweaked it. And the result is a very interesting social—let’s put it that way—solidarity economy system for communities who wanted to run cultural projects without relying on state money.

This was the time when no one was talking about blockchain. In any case, they started to exchange a lot of activities using that model where people have to recognize each other. It’s not just about the money. It’s much more about exchanging recognitions. Enabling that recognition through a digital interface, meant a lot. However, at the beginning, this worked best through analog interfaces. Platform members run many workshops around Brazil, particularly in the Northeast region where they were mostly active. In these workshops—I was never present—they taught each other how to use the system in a way that it made sense to them, not in the way I, as a designer, wanted them to know. I did not design any user manual. They wrote it themselves.

Finally, last but not least, this human recognition model is not just about individuals recognizing other individuals, but also collectives recognizing individuals. It’s the bank, the community bank, paying people for individual tasks. But also one community recognizing another community. Many of these projects have shared individuals who operate as a broker or a bridge between those projects. They would suggest mutual gatherings between those two different crowds, or at least some kind of synergies so that both projects will be strengthening their ties to their ecological systems.

Now coming back to the model that we proposed. Mutual recognition is almost like a critical mirror, a mirror which is reflection, challenge us to change. The mirror does not show who we are, but what we can become. We look at someone who is different from us, either as a designer or a user. We think, maybe I could change and become more like or unlike the other. If I’m too similar, I might become more different. If I’m already different, I might become even more different, just because I have a frame of reference. Just because I and the other have freedom to become who we are together, we are free from the user oppression.

The mutualistic interfaceThis is great, right? However, mutualistic interfaces must go beyond recognition. I don’t have ideas about that at this time. How about generating steady income? What about work safety? What about working conditions? What about so many other concrete things that work relies on? I have no exact answers to this. And it’s definitely a big challenge for solidarity economies. I

It also a challenge, how do we relate to non-humans or more-than-humans, or as I rather prefer to call them, other-than-human beings. Plants, animals, and microbes who are all around us, who are exchanging a lot of things with us, are not able to recognize us in the same way how we recognize them. We can see microbes, but microbes won’t be able to see us, unless we build a reverse microscope. That doesn’t make any sense, right? We must accept that recognition is not necessary for us to coexist in a mutualistic way with microbes. Coming back to coral reefs, there’s no proof that, let’s say, clownfish know what being an anemone looks like, and vice versa, but they still mutually exist. Mutualism is an existential project, not a technical gimmick. Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about building more precise mirrors that reveal who we authentically are.

I take inspiration from René Magritte, the local artist, who actually has devoted a lot of thought about this. I’m happy to be in this particular locality now, where he’s been around 100 years ago or so. Magritte pushed forth in this work that the mirror being false or fake or the image being something which is not just the image, but a message about images, that these images, they lie to us. We have to be always quite critical about them, not just in this discursive or speech way, but also in a sensorial way. All his works invite us to challenge our senses and what we are getting from their perception, because it may be already trained to perceive in such a way that is not of our best interests.

The False Mirror, René Magritte (1929) Magritte is also giving us hope that we don’t need to be perfect. We don’t need to reboot ourselves and get rid of everything we’ve learned so far on how to behave. For example, masks. We rely a lot on masks for social interaction, like saying things we wouldn’t say otherwise, just because we are in certain situations. For example, if you’re in the United States and someone asks you, how are you, you’re not supposed to respond authentically. You should not say like a Dutch person, “I’m feeling terrible, I’m tired”. No, you should say, “OK” or answer back with a “How are you?” You can answer back with the same question, because it’s just about wearing social masks at that moment.

The Lovers, René Magritte (1928)Afterwards, maybe they might engage into a true dialogue. It’s fine that we wear masks as long as everyone agrees that we wear masks. That is what I get from Magritte’s “The Lovers.” It’s ok to wear masks as long as we made them publicly and acknowledged them and then we can redesign those masks.

We become the masks we wear as much as we become the computers we use, and the ecosystems we nurture. I’m not separating being and knowing now, which is a very interesting insight from Hegel. When we are what we know and we know what we are, then we have achieved a higher consciousness, because we take responsibility for what we are. Interface is what we are as human beings. We are always in between other humans. Taking responsibility for what we are, well, that’s what I believe to be the ultimate ethical challenge of any kind of design.

I gave you here a brief perspective from service design. But I do believe that the implications of this research, of this activist design activity, of this, let’s say, personal and collective trajectory, goes beyond the design of computer applications or digital interfaces. We can also think about mutuality in terms how do we relate to the environment? How do we relate to other worlds? How do we relate to the history and the future as part of history?

With those words, I just want to stimulate more dialogue. Because it’s very hard to wrap up this talk and feel like this is done, and feel like I know what it takes for us to have a mutualistic interface if I’m not being mutual with my audience, if I would just end up here and go away and wait for, I don’t know, some kind of late talk that wouldn’t work. I really want to engage now in a conversation. So thank you very much so far. And let’s have a conversation.

Note: The full recording includes audience interaction in the end.

References

OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour, Time Magazine https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

Paulo Filho, Mateus, J.J., Van Amstel, F. (2022). Design para o reconhecimento mútuo do trabalho em organizações autogestionárias. Anais do XXVII Seminário de Iniciação Científica e Tecnológica da UTFPR.

Secomandi, F., & Van Amstel, F. M. C. (2025). Coerced Recognition at the Service Interface: A Design Ethics Framework for Unveiling the User Oppression. Journal of Human-Technology Relations, 3, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.59490/jhtr.2025.3.7745

de Siqueira, I. L. M., & van Amstel, F. M. (2023). Service design as a practice of freedom in collaborative cultural producers. In Proceedings of the Service Design and Innovation Conference (ServDes 2023), Rio de Janeiro. pp. 315-325. https://doi.org/10.3384/ecp203016

Gonzatto, R.F., van Amstel, F.,and Jatobá, P.H. (2021) Redesigning money as a tool for self-management in cultural production, in Leitão, R.M., Men, I., Noel, L-A., Lima, J., Meninato, T. (eds.), Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling, 22-23 July, Toronto, Canada. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0003

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A talk delivered by Frederick van Amstel and Hien Phan at the Futures of Design Education series promoted by the DRS Education SIG.

ScreenshotAbstract: Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator who defied dictatorships, developed a literacy method that integrated the acquisition of graphic language with political education. With some adjustments, generative themes, images, words, and tools, along with the culture circle dynamics in which they are decoded, can be employed in a design studio to find an appropriate pedagogical orientation in the face of contemporary oppressive systems. This conversation shares the expansive commitment of two design educators working in Brazil and the USA to adapt the Paulo Freire Method to design education, aiming for a critical design literacy that reads the designed world while redesigning it.

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My published academic work is now cited 1000 times in Google Scholar. Thank you to everyone who recognized its value. Thank you, 89 coauthors.

It is hard to break this mark when you are working from the Global South. Open access fees are a total rip-off, conferences are happening far away from us, subscription fees are prohibitive due to exchange rates, nobody invites you to join funded projects, and the worst thing of all: the Global South authors and their contributions, which you know much better than the Northern counterparts, aren’t known, appreciated, or welcome in the academic game.

I dedicate this achievement to everyone fighting citation injustice! I wouldn’t be crossing this mark were it not for you people, including those working in the Global North. Let’s keep citing the citedless.

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Andrade Tavares, P., Freese Gonzatto, R., and van Amstel, F.M. (2026) Collective handiness in prospective design: philosophical musings on a serious play workshop on articulation work, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2538

Abstract: Building on the German philosopher Heidegger, design philosophy has historically dealt with handiness (zuhandenheit/vorhandenheit) as an ontological relationship between an individual, a technology, and an artificial world. Such handiness conceptualization does not account for the social accumulation of work necessary to bring technology ready-to-specific-hands. Building on the work of Brazilian philosopher Vieira Pinto, this investigation foregrounds the collective aspect of handiness to account for the articulation work behind a new design philosophy program, prospective design. This program embraces philosophy through design; therefore, this investigation includes a description of a stakeholder mapping workshop in which serious play was used to develop the prospective design program’s collective handiness, both in theory and in practice. By mapping who is “at-hand” (and who is not) for this program’s ends, the collective body of researchers realized their fundamental relationship with their world.

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Hello, my Brazilian friends, Latin Americans, and everybody else from other parts of the world. I am Frederick van Amstel, speaking on behalf of my colleagues, Polyana Andrade Tavares and Rodrigo Freese Gonzatto. I speak from Curitiba, in the southern part of Brazil, in another hemisphere of the world. It is important to mention this because, since this track is about amplifying the unheard in Design Philosophy, by being part of it I am representing the philosophical work developed in Brazil and other places in the Global South. This hybrid conference format is very welcoming and inclusive for us. Otherwise, we would not be able to present this work due to funding restrictions and the fact that most of such conferences takes place in the Global North. This is also an invitation for you to come and have great conversations in the Global South in the future.

Let me now move into this presentation: Collective Handiness in Prospective Design. First of all, there are different ways of thinking and being in the Global South. One example is reframing the famous maxim “I think, therefore I am” in collective terms. Álvaro Vieira Pinto did this by reformulating cogito ergo sum as “We think, therefore we are.” In doing so, he resonates closely with African philosophies such as Ubuntu.

I do not want to discuss this broad ontological question. In this work, we were interested in the relationship between being in the world and the mediators we use to inhabit and transform it. It is unavoidable to discuss the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger when addressing this topic, because he wrote extensively about what became influential concepts in design philosophy: readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand. According to Vieira Pinto, these can be understood as modes of handiness.

By handiness, I refer to a concept that connects these two notions, which in German are expressed through distinct terms. Heidegger coined neologisms for them, and Vieira Pinto later proposed a broader concept that unifies them: handiness. It concerns how human beings are present and interactive in the world. Following Heidegger, human beings are sometimes immersed in the world and experience it as ready-to-hand. Someone hammering a nail into a wall, for instance, is not thinking about the hammer itself. They are focused on what they are doing—perhaps hanging a portrait. However, when the hammer breaks, they enter another mode of handiness. The hammer becomes present-at-hand because it no longer functions as expected. They must now repair or redesign it, which generates symbolic reflection about alternative possibilities.

Heidegger’s two modes of handiness. Alexandre do Nascimento, 2015 (CC-BY)Vieira Pinto identified a third mode of handiness, which constitutes one of his contributions to existential philosophy. This third mode corresponds to the Marxist notion of work. He argues that all tools, artifacts, and environments that are ready-to-hand for certain bodies are socially produced through the labor of other bodies. Sometimes the people who produce what is ready-to-hand for others—for example, workers producing goods for employers or customers—cannot enjoy the same degree of readiness-to-hand themselves. They experience a different relationship to the world due to the inequalities that shape being-in-the-world through geopolitical relations, colonial histories, and other forms of domination.

Vieira Pinto’s three modes of handiness. Alexandre do Nascimento, 2015 (CC-BY)This is the most advanced philosophical discussion I will present today. Let us now return to design philosophy. Before showing some practical examples, I should mention the early work of Terry Winograd, Fernando Flores, and Gui Bonsiepe. They also built on Heidegger’s philosophy of handiness, although they did not engage with Vieira Pinto’s work. What we are proposing in design philosophy is a move away from individual handiness—one person interacting with one hammer and one nail in a particular setting—toward collective handiness, in which collective bodies interact with multiple artifacts and tools across multiple environments.

We are not the first to take this direction. Luis Garcia recently defended a PhD thesis advancing the concept of designing from handiness. He describes it as “a design practice that interacts with the world in ways that respect how the world is already interacting with the collective design body”. By this, he means an endogenous design practice that is not imposed individually upon the world but emerges collectively from what a collective body is already doing in that world.

Let me provide an example of how we experienced and empirically studied collective handiness within the new Prospective Design Philosophy Program we are developing at Federal University of Technology – Paraná (UTFPR). We conducted a workshop in which participants first created a conceptual mirror of our program using Lego Serious Play. We first asked: “What is this program about?” for me and, then, in the second stage, for us. In the third stage, we mapped all stakeholders involved with the program, as well as those who should become involved in the future. We distinguished stakeholders who were at hand—those already engaged with the program—from stakeholders who were farther away and not yet closely engaged. These were still considered at hand in the sense that they remained reachable, but with a lower degree of handiness.

We then discussed their perspectives and interests, documented the process through photographs, and finally mapped the entire network of interests surrounding the program. Through this exercise, we sought to understand what new relationships with the world might become possible through engagement with these stakeholders.

From the perspective of design philosophy, this workshop led us to advance four concepts. The first is prospective design itself as a design-philosophy program. The second is the notion of existential structures, understood as collective bodies interacting within collectively shared worlds. The third is a dialectical existential philosophy, a philosophical tradition developed in Brazil through thinkers such as Vieira Pinto and Paulo Freire. The fourth is the concept of collective handiness, extending the work initiated by Luis Garcia.

We relate collective handiness to the prospective-design concept of infrastructures, which is also discussed in infrastructure studies and participatory design literature. The shift from readiness-to-hand to presence-at-hand often occurs when infrastructures break down. It can also occur when metastructures—ideologies, concepts, and theories—are questioned, as I am doing here with Heideggerian approaches to design philosophy, which remain highly influential as an ideology of design.

Our conclusion is that, although individuals may acquire the capacity to act and reshape existential structures through social interaction, it is only by coalescing into a collective body and recognizing their collective handiness—their collective relationship to the world and their collective capacity to reach beyond individual action—that they can reshape existential structures from the ground up. Doing so requires us to move beyond hammers, nails, and walls. If you feel drawn to this existential project, please take your time to read our paper. Thank you very much.

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Souza, E.A., Saito, C., van Amstel, F., and Freese Gonzatto, R. (2026) Who designs the designer? An anticolonial response to the world that design us back, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2410

Abstract: The ontological aspect of designing is commonly defined as a feedforward loop between the world and the designer, as if the world designed us as much as we design it. In this definition, derived from the “everyone is a designer” motto, “everyone” means “we,” but also “no one”. Thus, design philosophy avoids scrutinizing worldly agents interested in designing the designer, understanding the world as a homogeneous force reacting to the designer. A world where many worlds fit isn’t a homogeneous one; therefore, answering “who designs the designer?” from an anticolonial stance requires considering the social production of design(ed) bodies and their historical inequalities in world-making. This paper builds upon Vieira Pinto’s question “who produces the producer”, and recent research on userism that asks “who gets to design/to be designed”. Thus, this research unveils the worldly dispute for sustaining and dismantling the coloniality of making, including the production of design philosophy.

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Research and Practice is a 45-hour course at the University of Florida that immerses Design and Visual Communications (MXD) graduate students in the practice of doing design research.

The Spring 2025 cohort experienced a full-blown self-managed studio, meaning students managed their studio learning experience with instructor guidance. The instructor played the facilitator and, eventually, the complicator role. Instructor assisted students in gathering, envisioning possibilities, problematizing the taken-for-granted, making decisions, and executing their plans together. Students were encouraged to take the lead in defining what to learn and what to design, following a participatory governance model.

As a proposal to organize the production of knowledge, the instructor suggested using the Rumsfeld/Zizek Matrix, a shared knowledge visualization technique. The matrix is laid on a board where post-it notes summarizing specific knowledge can be attached. Using this matrix, students identified generative themes at the end’s of Fall 2024 Research and Practice’s class. These themes will be approached in the first weeks and the remaining ones will be designed with student participation following the self-managed studio approach.

The board will be updated every class as a moment of reflection on what has been collectively achieved. After updating the board, a negotiation on what to do next will follow. Students can learn and design anything that suits the studio’s historical trajectory.

AssignmentsThere were two assignments for this class: the mid-term and the end-term reflection text. The midterm reflection serves as a critical analysis of the researchers’ progress in learning and designing during the initial phase of the course. It involves documenting the knowledge gained, uncovering hidden or overlooked skills, and reflecting on the designs created as a way to produce new knowledge.
The reflection addresses four primary areas: the categorization of knowledge using the Rumsfeld/Zizek Matrix, strategies developed to enhance the learning process, the impact of created designs in generating knowledge, and evolving perspectives on the design process. Insights from course activities, readings, and experiments form the basis of the reflection.

The end-term reflection provides a comprehensive evaluation of the researchers’ learning and designing journey throughout the course. It examines the evolution of their understanding of design research, focusing on key moments, strategies, and outcomes that defined their experience. The reflection emphasizes the relationship between created designs and the production of new knowledge, while contrasting this approach with traditional design practices. Key areas of focus include the progress made since the midterm, significant learning moments that shaped the journey, the refinement of metacognitive and design skills, and the contribution of designs to knowledge production. Additionally, the reflection considers how these insights can inform future research or projects.

Semester outlineWeek 1 – Self-management in design education

Lecture: The Self-Managed Studio https://fredvanamstel.com/talks/the-self-managed-studio

Suggested reading:

Bizotto dos Santos, W.B., Mazzarotto, M.,and Van Amstel, F.(2023) Learning design as a human right: the beginnings of a design lab founded on critical pedagogy, in Derek Jones, Naz Borekci, Violeta Clemente, James Corazzo, Nicole Lotz, Liv Merete Nielsen, Lesley-Ann Noel (eds.), The 7th International Conference for Design Education Researchers, 29 November – 1 December 2023, London, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2023.104

Bonus link: https://pt.crimethinc.com/posters/capitalism-is-a-pyramid-scheme

Week 2 – Self-management in social movements

Lecture: Designing as a user https://fredvanamstel.com/talks/designing-as-a-user

Suggested reading:

Bonus links:
https://fredvanamstel.com/portfolio/corais-ecosystem

Week 3 – Self-management in entrepreneurship

Lecture by MFA student Narayan Ghiotti
Movie: Lord of the Flies (1963)

Suggested reading:

Brendel, W., Hankerson, S., Byun, S., & Cunningham, B. (2016). Cultivating leadership Dharma: Measuring the impact of regular mindfulness practice on creativity, resilience, tolerance for ambiguity, anxiety and stress. Journal of Management Development, 35(8), 1056-1078. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMD-09-2015-0127

Week 4 – Self-management in public life

Lecture: Knowledge self-management in design research https://fredvanamstel.com/talks/knowledge-self-management-in-design-research

Movie: The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology (2012)

Videos:
Donald Rumsfeld Unknown Unknowns ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiPe1OiKQuk
Slavoj Žižek – ‘Los conocimientos desconocidos’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8diRggDUic
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek on the re-election of Donald Trump & his fears for Western values https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8m13m1PS6M&t=573s

Suggested reading:

Žižek, S. Philosophy, the “unknown knowns,” and the public use of reason. Topoi 25, 137–142 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-006-0021-2

Week 5 – Self-management in culture circles

Movies:
Peru: Literacy for Social Change (1978) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSgBkbJbzRs
Absolute Majority (1964) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egzl9AW4dFo

Suggested readings:

Souto-Manning, M. (2010). Chapter Culture Circles and Critical Pedagogy In: Freire, teaching, and learning: Culture circles across contexts (Vol. 350). Peter Lang.

Fonseca Braga, M., M. C. van Amstel, F., and Perez, D. (2024) Social Design at the Brink: Hopes and Fears., in Gray, C., Hekkert, P ., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P . (eds.),DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1538

Week 6 – Critical analysis of media representations

Movie: bell hooks On Cultural Criticism (1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3hY6p6kyAM

Suggested readings:

Madison, Roberts (student). Who Gets the Spotlight? Unpublished draft.

Mannion, K. A. (2016). Play like a girl: An analysis of media representation of female athletes. Proceedings of GREAT Day, 2015(1), 17. https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/proceedings-of-great-day/vol2015/iss1/17/

Week 7 – Encoding and decoding representations of diversity

Movie: Stuart Hall: Representation & the Media (1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84depWskwu0

Videos:
Everything is Awesome Lego Movie song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cQgQIMlwWw
LEGO Designer Interview | LEGO Everyone is Awesome (Matthew Ashton) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC6H15Z8d6w

Suggested readings:

Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Paper for the Council of Europe Colloquy on “Training in the Critical Reading of Televisual Language” (CCCS Stencilled Paper 7), Organized by the Council and the Centre for Mass Communication Research, University of Leicester. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham. http://epapers.bham.ac.uk/2962/

Hall, S. (1981). Encoding/Decodings. In: Culture, Media, Language, Routledge, London.

Week 8 – Self-evaluation in design education

Movie: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take one (1968) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN1tjjJyazA

Suggested readings:

Coorey, J. (2012) Reflective Methods in Design Pedagogy, in Israsena, P., Tangsantikul, J. and Durling, D. (eds.), Research: Uncertainty Contradiction Value – DRS International Conference 2012, 1-4 July, Bangkok, Thailand. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2012/researchpapers/27

Week 9 – Interaction analysis lab of week 5’s culture circle

Task: For this class, students select a 1-2 minutes video segment from the culture circle recordings found in the Dropbox folders bellow. There is no need to edit the video file, just bring the timestamp or an edited excel transcript. The segment must show the student in action as we will self-reflect about that student’s presence in the culture circle.

Suggested readings:

Freire, P. (1974). Chapter Education and Conscientização and Appendix I. In: Education for Critical Consciousness. Continuum.

Boal, A. (1995). Chapter 1. The rainbow of desire: The Boal method of theatre and therapy. Routledge.

Week 10 – Spring break
Week 11 – Self-management in Government

Suggested reading:

Blomkamp, E. (2018). The promise of co-design for public policy 1. In Routledge handbook of policy design (pp. 59-73). Routledge.

Week 11 – Self-management in the Arts

Suggested readings:

Santos, Barbara. The Art of the Kuringa (English). http://kuringa-barbarasantos.blogspot.com/2010/08/art-of-kuringa.html

Phan, Hien; Van Amstel, F. M. C. (under review). Mapping migration paths.

Week 13 – Forum Theater experiment

Suggested reading:

Van Amstel, F. M. C., & Secomandi, F. (upcoming). Collective embodiment in service interfaces. In D. Sangiorgi, L. Penin, & A. Prendiville (Eds), Handbook of Service Design:

Plural perspectives and a critical contemporary agenda. Bloomsbury.

Bonus links:
Forum Theater https://fredvanamstel.com/tools/remote-forum-theater

Week 14 – Design Theater experiment

Lecture by Cassie Urbenz (student): Privatization of Public Higher Education and Graduate Labor

Suggested reading:

Van Amstel, Frederick M. C., Serpa, Bibibiana, Secomandi, Fernando. (2025). Systemic oppression in service design. In: Suoheimo, M., Jones, P., Lee, S., Sevaldson, B (Eds). Systemic service design. Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003501039-7

Bonus links:

https://fredvanamstel.com/portfolio/design-and-precarious-work-in-digital-platforms-2021

Week 15 – Speculative Object Theater experiment

Videos:
To have or not to have https://tamtamtheater.nl/en/voorstellingen/to-have-or-not-to-have-en/

Suggested reading:

Van Amstel, Frederick M. C. and Gonzatto, Rodrigo Freese. (2022). Existential time and historicity in interaction design. Human-Computer Interaction, 37(1), pp.29-68. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2021.1912607

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Last summer, while attending and presenting two papers at the Design Research Society conference in Boston, I joined Design As podcast host Lee Moreau for a conversation on the most important thing I saw. I right away said: “The pluriverse.” I am glad he included me in the conversation with two of the most important design researchers in bringing this concept to design research: Dr. Renata Leitão and Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel.

I began by sharing why I had moved to the United States in 2023:

I previously were at Brazil’s Federal University of Technology Paraná, publicly funded university that had a lot of student quota for low income students, Black students, and people that were, as we say, oppressed. I was trying to make sense of how design can be useful for these people. They usually don’t take courses in design because they believe this is just producing luxurious services and products that they will never be able to afford. Then we founded this laboratory of design against oppression, LADO. We started to develop project design projects with communities of oppressed people that were nothing like luxurious service or products. Students started to pour in and become interested on the social responsibility of design. How can design actually be part of this uplifting process that Brazil as a developing nation, is going through? […] The University of Florida gave me the opportunity to try these things here and check whether design can be part of this process of uplifting, of developing further and having more equality or equity and other qualities that we lack in this unequal societies where things are separated from each other, in a word, fragmented. We see design—actually, we practice not just see design—as a means to connect people and have hard conversations while we make something, and that making leans towards the point that it can be manufactured or be reproduced on a larger scale like a service that has been designed. (Excerpt from Design As Pluriverse)

Moving on, I described how I see the current challenge of US multiculturalism:

This new role is about, first of all, to make sense of this multicultural formation of the United States and the ways how this has kept people apart from each other. So, basically, I’m still learning about it, but it seems like the U.S. tries to create spaces and positions and roles for people that come from different cultures so that everyone feels included, but at the same time everyone feels excluded from other groups. Especially through hierarchies, because some groups, some spaces have better resources, more accumulated things at hand. I started to question that through design. Can we create situations where we speculate about futures, where we actually create transitional strategies or services that can help us move towards a society where these resources are more distributed? (Excerpt from Design As Pluriverse)

The word distributed is precious here. The US is not merely a matter of concern for me; it is also a source of inspiration. An American, or should I say, a Californian ideology, inspired me when I began practicing interaction design in the 2000s:

… that always brings me back to how I started this, because U.S. has been very influential on my own upbringing through this concept of free software or open source software, as you prefer to call it here. I know that there’s a difference because I learned from countercultural people from California, but also other places, New York. They were always inspiring me at the beginning of my career to study design as a means to overcome oppression. They would say design or, in that case, free software should support people in their fight for freedom. People should use technology in the way they need, especially to help someone else. At some point, I started to think about, well: Can we design for freedom? (Excerpt from Design As Pluriverse)

When writing Design Livre, we stumble upon this question: if we are going to share design code like computer programmers do, what is the code of design? That is undoubtedly not computer-readable code like programming languages. Now I realize that design code is not restricted to a language. Back to Lee, I said:

You could say that design has some language. But I believe there’s a lot of materiality that goes beyond language. For example, all these tactile properties of stuff around us. These are all design features that we copy and we adapt and we change over and over through our culture. And that’s why U.S. is really a very important place to be, I want to learn and develop further design. Because of this multicultural formation, we can see so many traditions of materiality and shaping worlds. However, some worlds are not very respectful to other worlds, and they use that materiality against other worlds to coexist. (Excerpt from Design As Pluriverse)

The first example that comes to my mind is hostile architecture.

Many other oppressive designs have this purpose of keeping worlds apart.

Pluriverse is one of the answers the design research community has focused on. They didn’t invent the term. They are drawing from other areas. But what is unique from the pluriversal design approach emerging now is that we are not just not reducing language and discourses and public speeches but also making the stuff that these worlds are made of. And while we make this, we also remake ourselves. We understand that people are never totally made, people are never done, and they can also be considered design projects in themself. […] And and it’s not just about individual being, but collective beings. What kind of being do we need to make out of ourselves to collectively exist? (Excerpt from Design As Pluriverse)

Here, I am shifting the conversation from the design of things to the design of collective bodies, or who we are as a group, an organization, a city, or a nation. This is not a common way of framing design, an activity that typically frames subjectivity as an input, not an output. Objectivity is not disregarded in this view. In fact, it becomes a mediation for intersubjectivity. When objectivity is interwoven with subjectivity, we can speak of a world. The pluriverse is thus, first and foremost, about designing worlds within worlds.

MidJourney prompt: a giant bubble with many bubbles inside lying in infinite space, each bubble is a planet with colorful creatures inside. The sun is shining through all these bubbles. Latin-American indigenous painting style.Designing worlds expands the discussion on cross-cultural design, designing culture, or design culture. The basic premise of perspectivism, relativism, and culturalism (one world with multiple worldviews) is dialectically confronted by the dialectical inclusion of universalism, objectivism, and environmentalism (there is only one world and it is limited). That is the fundamental contradiction of the pluriverse:

Frederick van Amstel: In the United States, where there are ghettos and segregation, the pluriverse is not like that: each world is separate. Pluriverse is not the same as multiple worlds. It’s one world. One world that can fit many worlds. You may say: How one can fit many? That’s the contradiction that animates this democratic endeavor. And it’s a new kind of democracy, because in this democracy, we can never refer to some kind of fixed, one-size fits all universal set of values. We cannot say, well, that American culture is this, and any kind of conflict should be solved by American values.

Lee Moreau :So it eliminates that conversation entirely.

Frederick van Amstel: Yeah, because America is supposed to be the pluriverse in this concept.

Lee Moreau :In principle.

Frederick van Amstel: In principle, America should be the pluriverse where many worlds can fit. Therefore, America should be able to mediate between worlds. That’s also a design challenge, I would say, between those different disputing, even competing, but also complementing worldviews, practices, and materiality. (Excerpt from Design As Pluriverse)

It is not a coincidence the concept of the pluriverse is taking steam in the US right now when the combined ideas of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) are being challenged and outlawed. The backlash against DEI often pairs up with aspirations (and actual plans) for a one-world, one-perspective America: White, Christian, heterosexual, English-speaking, Western, and capitalist-driven. The flip side of this (fascist) plan is that every other world should be Americanized, whitened, homogenized, standardized, cured, and purified from cultural differences.

Finally, we reached a very concrete description of this contradiction. It is worth mentioning that back then, in July 2024, this contradiction was not so obvious as now in March 2025.

Frederick van Amstel: I think the biggest challenge right now is to think about the difference between a pluriverse where everything is welcomed and a pluriverse where certain things that are detrimental to the pluriverse should not be allowed. How do we create mechanisms or tools, services, or whatever you want to call data processing, whatever AI… Could they help with this problem of people using democratic grounds to destroy democracy?

Lee Moreau: So you’re suggesting there must be rules of the pluriverse the same way there are traffic rules that you talked about earlier.

Frederick van Amstel :Maybe they are not rules. In design, we also have other ways of guiding people and steering people, especially like in persuasive design, behavior-steering designs for sustainability. Why not steer people towards more democratic ways of conviviality? How can we be good neighbors living with different people on the internet? That’s the the next challenge: how do we make those utopias an actual reality? As the greatest Brazilian musician, Gilberto Gil, once said, we should not have a utopia; we should have an “usopia,” where we use those ideas.

Lee Moreau: Usopia?

Frederick van Amstel: Yes, usopia.

Lee Moreau: That you engage. That is material.

Frederick van Amstel: That is, yes.

Lee Moreau: Lived.

Frederick van Amstel: It’s lived. And I think the pluriverse is a usopia that we are living right now. Every dialog in this interculture exchange that produces an object tool result, which is this podcast episode, which is a product. (Excerpt from Design As Pluriverse)

In addition to being an accomplished musician, Gilberto Gil was Brazilian Ministry of Culture (2003-2008). One of his main acts was establishing a distributed network of cultural producers to explore the possibilities of digital media to support Brazilian cultural production. This act sparked a grassroots movement called Digital Culture that continues even after Gil stepped down in 2008. The movement contends free software, remixing, hacking, and Creative Commons. I am still part of this movement to this day, having contributed to many initiatives through the Corais Platform.

Gil spoke about usopia first in an interview about the Brazilian Digital Culture movement conducted by Rodrigo Savazoni. Here is the excerpt:

Gil: Everyone understands that the only pot we have to spill into is the pot of knowledge, of great general knowledge. It is the pot of knowledge, of great general knowledge. That’s what culture is. These are very interesting things, which give us an idea of a new form of human human society is taking shape, beyond utopia. Because it’s no longer utopia, this is “usopia”…

Savazoni: Digital “usopia” is such an acceleration that other utopias are left behind…

Gil: They are becoming uses. Ideas are very close now. Technology brings the virtual closer to the actual, hence, what used to be virtual is now actual. We need to catch up with virtuality, as gets updated faster than we do, faster than our desire to want. That’s why production has understood that its great product is knowledge. It is no longer material wealth that matters; it’s immaterial wealth… (Excerpt from Cultura Digital.br)

Rereading Gil’s words made me consider that the conservative backlash taking over the US can also be understood as a new attempt to control the primary wealth in late capitalism: objectified human subjectivity. In a word: data, information, knowledge, and affects. The pluriverse is the courageous attempt of a design research community (and many other communities, particularly Indigenous ones) to resist such objectification and design our world as if it were a world of many worlds, not a future utopia but a present usopia. That is why, together with my peers at the Pluriversal Futures of Design Education, I claimed that the pluriverse was already here.

Different than a utopia, a utopia is not meant to be perfect. At the dawn of the Internet in Brazil, Gil expressed this ambivalence in the first Brazilian song performed live through the Internet:

Eu quero entrar na rede [I want to connect]
Promover o debate [promote debate]
Juntar via Internet [gather via the Internet]
Um grupo de tietes de Connecticut [a group of Connecticut fans] (Excerpt from Pela Internet, 1997).

As excited as he was to connect with people in the US (represented by the Connecticut state), he was concerned about being misunderstood and excluded by these same people:

You, you misunderstood me
You misunderstood me!
I’m trying to connect, Connecticut
But you cut my connection
I tried to connect, Connecticut
But you cut my connection
You misunderstood me!

Every time I connect, you cut
I connect again, you cut
Once again
I connect, you cut
Please, you misunderstood me
I’m trying to connect, Connecticut
Don’t cut my connection
Don’t cut my connection
Don’t cut my connection, please!

Get no
Connection
Get no
Connection
I can’t get no
Connection
I can’t get no
Connection (Excerpt from Pela Internet, 1997)

The pluriverse is a lived usopia that goes beyond the virtuality of digital worlds, the connectivity of the Internet, the distributivity of free software, and the multiculturalism of the United States of America. It is not a fashionable design research concept, but a runaway object that connects many social movements with the task of designing worlds within worlds.

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Abstract: Decolonizing design confronts the deep-rooted structures of colonialism that still shape international aesthetics, production, and trade relationships. The coloniality of making divides “thinking” in developed nations and “making” in underdeveloped ones, generating a nostalgic feeling for colonial styles thought and made for others. By fostering autonomous development and critical consciousness, decolonizing design encourages innovative solutions like open-source modular systems that emphasize thinking and making for self. This process aims at an equitable relationship between nations, where creativity and collaboration thrive, redefining design as a part of national liberation projects and international prosperity.

Pre-recorded talk for the ADA Awards Seminar, hosted by the Beaconhouse National University, Pakistan.

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Hello, people from Pakistan; here is Frederick van Amstel. I am speaking from Florida.
As you can see, I cannot be there in person to join this grand celebration you are hosting, but I hope to make a small contribution to your seminar through this pre-recorded video.

My topic is decolonizing design. Before I go to that, I need to state my positionality within this topic. I am a Brazilian person. I grew up in that country, and I am also a big soccer fan—well, not that big—but I support my nation in soccer because it is one of the biggest soccer teams in the world. And Pakistani people also know this—you have the best soccer fans, at least in the Lyari neighborhood in Karachi. I was curious to know more about this village and why they supported Brazil so much in the last World Cup. Well, I know very little about Pakistan. I hope the next time I can be there and learn more about your country.

Besides Lyari’s Brazilian soccer fans, the second thing I know about Pakistan is that it shares a history of colonialism with Brazil. Pakistan was colonized by the British, whereas Brazil was colonized by the Portuguese. They have very different colonization styles, goals, purposes, outcomes, results, consequences, and so on. However, we can generalize some of the fundamental structures of colonial relationships.

Here is a structural diagram of how the colonialism relationship unfolds through time. There is the metropolis that concentrates all the power and the thinking and the possibility of devising or directing what a colony should do. In return, the colony will give back something to the metropolis. In general, the metropolis imposes government, manufactures goods, ideals of beauty, thinking, and many other things, whereas the colony gives back submission, raw materials, ideals of ugliness, and making.

For design, what matters the most is this divide between thinking at the metropolis and making at the colony. Even when traditional or historic colonization has been overcome through independence and liberation wars, the structural relationship between those two worlds remains.

It’s now sometimes called underdevelopment or developing nations or whatever people call it. It doesn’t change fundamentally their relationship—it is still two different worlds. So, the metropolis is now the developed nation or the developed world, whereas the colonies are now underdeveloped nations or developing nations.

There’s no longer an imposed government on the developed world, no longer submission. However, there is still unequal trade in manufactured goods for raw materials, ideas of beauty, ideals of ugliness, and thinking and making, which are still pretty much concentrated. There is a little bit more distribution, but inequality remains.

The impact of this on design is that we see these very nostalgic styles in the former colonies that are still very difficult to overcome. Even if this furniture system has been designed and built in Brazil, it still embodies the Portuguese colonial style, which I sometimes call the coloniality of making. Even though we overcame historical colonialism, we could not get rid of this coloniality of making.

The result is something that looks beautiful for someone who thinks with the colonial framework of what is beautiful, what is good, and what is nice to have at home. But it looks ugly for someone looking to overcome this nostalgic feeling.

Decolonizing is when we start in the underdeveloped world to become more conscious of the coloniality of making and working to design and develop autonomously. Through this process, we realize we don’t need to rely that much on the developed nations. Nevertheless, we don’t cut ties totally—that would be very radical, and maybe it wouldn’t work or last for long, especially in a world that depends significantly on globalization, trade, and exchanges.

Instead of cutting ties totally, decolonizing is a process that may take a lot of time, but it depends mostly on what the underdeveloped world does for itself. In comparison to the situation of underdevelopment, there is an extra loop of development where the former colony develops for itself. That’s what the decolonizing process is at the beginning, in the first phase.

Here is an example of how decolonizing impacts design. I’ve got these marvelous creative students, Conrado Dembinski and João Taran Araújo, who designed SURU, a decolonial modular furniture system that contrasts very much with the traditional Portuguese colonial style.

As you can see on the left side, this style is still alive in many old institutions like the UTFPR, where these students studied. On the right side, you see the decolonial furniture system—based on open source, ready-to-make, and multi-modular. This pretty flexible furniture system breaks with the traditional colonial styles’ aesthetics and function.

But there’s a second phase in the decolonizing process that must be held in developed countries, developed nations, which is precisely what I’m doing here at the University of Florida. I’m helping to consolidate this decolonization process by building a critical consciousness of what’s happening in our worlds.

The fact that underdeveloped nations are developing by themselves and growing much faster than developed nations and displaying this sheer flourishing of creativity and originality is not something to be envied, destroyed, curtailed, or blocked. That’s the future for the developed nations. We need to establish a relationship between many worlds that is equal and thriving for all.

In this stage, I envision a future where developed nations will invest, transfer technology, and share styles with the underdeveloped. The developed will generate profit from these investments and appropriate technologies, change them for their purposes, and deliver great designs—not just for themselves, not just for the underdeveloped world, but even designs for the developed world.

Here, you can see how I realize this vision with my students in our graduate program called MXD. We have students from many different nations worldwide, including the Middle East, Asia, and South America. These students obviously have various backgrounds and are curious to know how the United States sees itself and their worlds in the local news. Hien Phan, one of my current MFA students, hosted this workshop on mapping the immigration patterns of our different students and how they felt impacted by the local news.

The challenge is to develop critical consciousness of the prejudice that sometimes United Staters have against themselves. They may believe that just because you come from a certain country, you are a terrorist, or you are a potential spy, or you are someone who is going to steal their jobs. Understanding how this is part of this larger framework of the decolonizing process is key for these students to develop autonomously and design from critical consciousness.

So, in a nutshell, decolonizing design for me means designing from critical consciousness and for autonomous development. We have some academic references you can check to learn more about my work as a design scholarship. Thank you.

References

Mazzarotto. M., Van Amstel. F. M. C., Serpa, B. O., Silva, S. B. (2023). Prospecting anti-colonial qualities in Design Education. V!RUS Journal, 26, 135-143. Translated from Portuguese by Giovana Blitzkow Scucato dos Santos. Available at: http://vnomads.eastus.cloudapp.azure.com/ojs/index.php/virus/article/view/833

Noel, L.-A., Ruiz, A., van Amstel, F. M. C., Udoewa, V., Verma, N., Botchway, N. K., Lodaya, A., & Agrawal, S. (2023). Pluriversal Futures for Design Education. In She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation (Vol. 9, Issue 2, pp. 179–196). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2023.04.002

Dembinski, João Conrado Santana de Lima; ARAÚJO, João Victor Tarran. SURU’BA: Sistema Utilitário Recombinante Utópico-Universal Baseado na Autonomia. 2022. Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso (Bacharelado em Design) – Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, 2022. http://repositorio.utfpr.edu.br/jspui/handle/1/35099

Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Smith, R. C., Amstel, F. V., & Botero, A. (2025). Decolonisation and Participatory Design. In Smith, R. C., Loi, D., Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Huybrechts, L. & Simonsen, J. (Eds.). Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Participatory Design. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003334330

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Abstract: What is the difference between knowledge and consciousness, and why does it matter for design? This lecture examines knowledge as a product of consciousness, emphasizing that while knowledge organizes what is already known, consciousness enables the creation of the new. Using examples like ChatGPT—an entity rich in knowledge but devoid of consciousness—it critiques traditional design methodologies that separate designers as “knowers” from users as “objects of design.” Tools like Lego Serious Play and The Blind Side are presented as ways to bridge this divide, fostering hybrid identities that blend user and designer perspectives. By advocating for self-managed design studios, it highlights how shared subjectivities can redefine design as a collaborative, socio-political act of liberation.

This lecture was recorded in the Spring 2025 Research and Practice MXD MFA course at the University of Florida.

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If you don’t know what knowledge management is, I’m not going to explain it precisely because I’m going to say it’s good that you don’t know what it is. It’s best not to know what it is because the kind of design research we do here—based on codesign and participatory design—is not exactly the most productive, nor does it lead to the best results, if you rely on knowledge management or, as soon I am going to state, knowledge of hetero-management. What works for us is knowledge self-management, which I try to explain here what I mean by that.

I will remind you about some things you’ve seen in past lectures and our discussions and workshops. We must ground this discussion in practice, not just philosophical or prescriptive logical speculation. When I talk about knowledge as a goal for design research—producing new design knowledge—I also remind you that knowledge comes from somewhere, and that is consciousness.

When we are doing design research, we are expanding the boundaries of what we consider to be design, designable things, and design partners. We go beyond exchanging money and objects (like you design an object, and you get your money). Some designers have this very restricted mindset of naïve consciousness, as Paulo Freire and Álvaro Vieira Pinto called it. But as soon as they start reading or talking to other experienced professionals, they will see that there is, at least in the workplace, a point where these relationships become complicated. You don’t just deliver an object. You have to discuss with many people what the requirements of that object are—the briefing. Once you have some initial visions of that object, you will need to collect feedback and make changes. Sometimes your project might even be canceled halfway through, and you don’t get paid. You might get angry at people, but it’s just part of the job, part of the workplace culture. Facing contradictions is inevitable.

As soon as you go a little deeper into questioning where these contradictions come from, you start to unfold capitalism, environmental degradation, and any other kinds of contradictions that pervade and shape the world we live in. Expanding consciousness is one fundamental aspect of design research. It’s often neglected because we still focus too much on products in design research, inheriting traditions from industrial design. But in the reality we live in today, shaped by post-industrialism, we need to focus a lot on process and be mindful. The concept that helps us bring this forth is consciousness, not just knowledge.

Make no mistake—knowledge does not come from knowledge. Here’s a book about sketchbooks. It’s almost like a meta book, right? If I read this book, it doesn’t mean I will get new knowledge. I have to work out what is in this book, relate it to other books, and do something with it. There is some mediation necessary to transform knowledge into new knowledge. So, if I want to write another book, I probably need to read many other books. I can’t just read one book and, from that one book, generate an entirely new book. That would probably be a copy of this book if I only read this book.

Knowledge does not come from knowledge. Knowledge comes from consciousness. However, there’s a difference in the agency of knowledge and consciousness. Knowledge doesn’t expand without consciousness. However, consciousness can expand without knowledge or with very little knowledge. Two examples here: ChatGPT represents knowledge without consciousness, and as such, it cannot create new knowledge. That’s the reason why ChatGPT cannot create new knowledge. It can combine, mix, or hybridize at most—but it’s not creation; it’s just combination and recombination.

One of my first questions when I started interacting with ChatGPT a few years ago was: “Do you have knowledge? Do you have consciousness? Can you create new consciousness or only combine?”) It provided a transparent account of its lack of consciousness. As for knowledge, well, ChatGPT sometimes says, “I only have information, not knowledge.” I do believe that information is also knowledge to a certain extent, but that’s a debate. Some people don’t believe it. In the past, I believed differently. I thought that information could exist in systems or in the world but not as knowledge. Knowledge could only exist in the heads of people. Then I started reading Hegel, and he changed my mind.

Because if we don’t consider space to have any knowledge in itself, why would we need space? I mean, we could meet online and have this entire three-year MFA program on our Miro boards, doing virtual conferencing. The reason why it’s so important to be in this studio is that this studio embodies materialized knowledge. It’s also materialized knowledge in a stage when it’s not so, let’s say, consolidated.

A few weeks ago, we had this economic trading game in which we had to play with basic trading strategies without knowing much about their consequences in the overall financial system. That was fine because we could create new knowledge even with little knowledge. We had a surprising discussion about how our previous experiences with real-world economic systems unconsciously shaped our behaviors and strategies while playing this game.

That’s an incredible aspect of being human. We make a difference not through knowledge—although that’s important—but mainly through consciousness.

There are many theories about what knowledge is. I can’t go into much detail here, but I agree with the basic premises of the connectionist theory of knowledge. It’s often visually represented using a meme: data is the opposite of knowledge, or basically, knowledge is the richest form of data, connected and meaningful. That’s what knowledge is—enriched information, which is, in turn, enriched data.

That’s one way to see it. It’s very influential in the information design field, and many information designers, with their graphic diagrams like this one, try to connect the dots. It’s not that simple, but I won’t discuss this.

What I want to draw attention to, and help you see, is the difference between knowledge and consciousness—not between knowledge and information—because here, the difference is much, much, much, much bigger. We are talking about something completely different when we say “consciousness,” although in simple language, in common sense, people might use those words as synonyms. Even in English, there is a lack of nuanced vocabulary for talking about consciousness, and people might say, “I know,” when they mean, “I am conscious about it.” They don’t use the nuance of the language, so this word is not very popular, but it exists, and it helps. See how it changes with this example of anti-userist design research.

As much as I used ChatGPT as an example of knowledge, here I am using anti-userist design research as a kind of consciousness. Here’s the progression: In the most alienated state, you think users are customers. You don’t need to consider your product or service in your project if they don’t purchase your product or service. They are not hiring you. Remember the first stage of design consciousness I showed before: I design objects, I get my money back. If the person is not paying my paycheck, I should not attend to that person.

However, if you expand your consciousness a little, you will see that users are an important design factor—a factor of your design—not a person with personal history, contradictions, and challenges. If you go a bit deeper or wider, you see that users are different people than you, and you cannot rely on your knowledge about yourself to understand what’s going on with the user.

The breakthrough in your consciousness is when you cross the chasm between framing users as users and seeing yourself as a user. Seeing that users are people like you—that you are also in the same condition in relation to other people—is key. Consider the designers of design tools, for example. If you are not designing your Photoshop, so you are a Photoshop user. Although you think that when you sit in front of Photoshop you’re acting like a designer, that’s not true. You’re mostly acting as a user, and your designs are going to be narrowed down by the Photoshop designer. You won’t be able to design everything you want unless you design your own Photoshop or something similar.

That’s precisely what we do here in this program. We design a lot of design tools. We do metadesign. They’re not as technologically advanced yet but have more critical consciousness. They enable critical consciousness so you can develop new knowledge.

Consciousness produces new knowledge from experiencing the world. When the knowledge product is known beforehand, when it has already been experienced, consciousness becomes less productive because consciousness exists to produce knowledge in the first place. But if you are not creating new knowledge, consciousness becomes less active, and then, at some point, you become subconscious. You become less conscious and automated because you’re not producing anything new. You’re just acting like a robot. Consciousness becomes less awake.

That’s why sketches, scroll keys, and design models are deliberately vague. They mediate the back-and-forth movement between what is known and unknown and aesthetically stimulate our consciousness to produce new knowledge. That’s a characteristic of design thinking. Having all of this mass in our studio also means we welcome the unknown and want to connect the unknown with the known to develop new knowledge.

If you’re feeling confused—and I’ve said this sentence many times—if you come to me and say, “I’m confused, Fred,” I would say, “Great!” (laughs) But here’s the reason why: because there’s a good chance you are exploring something unknown. Conversely, if you are too sure about something, chances are you’re not producing, just reproducing knowledge. So, if you are overly confident, it’s also not a good sign. That’s the thing you should not strive for—to become so sure that you know everything about design. Because then you probably won’t understand anything about design. You will know only how to give form to a pre-defined ideology you don’t know you know.

Design research methods typically stimulate you to become mindful and conscious about what you are doing so you remain open to the world. You must have an open conscience, an open mind, to things that will pop up in the future that you cannot anticipate. That was the case for the design of the Sydney Opera House. The sketches I showed before were part of the design process that led to this marvelous, incredible design—this absolute piece of knowledge that stands in that city. The building itself embodies the accumulated design knowledge of generations of architects, engineers, and graphic designers. But before knowledge gets closed into things, it lives in this open state throughout the design process.

The crucial knowledge production challenge is understanding an experience you’ve never had and will probably never have—the experience of the other. Remember, I said that consciousness produces knowledge from experience. But can you produce knowledge from an experience you haven’t had? Of course, you can. However, it’s risky. You may end up making up an experience of someone else. That’s where ideology starts to play a role.

Here are two methodologies of design that are more than just methodologies—they are also ideologies of design because they are based on very naturalized, accepted ways of grouping people. In system-centered design, there is a group of people who believe themselves to be the experts, who think they know how to design a system better than anyone. They have experience; they have designer experiences. And their design is forced on another group of people who don’t have that expertise: laypeople. These people are historically excluded from design. They don’t participate much—at most, they display or exhibit their user experience in a public space, or they agree to share their data so that the designers can incorporate some user experience while promoting their own view. Their interpretation is always predominant in system-centered design. The designer’s experience predominates over the user’s experience. That’s the ideological aspect of this methodology, which is typically not discussed much.

The second ideology/methodology, called user-centered design, is almost the same. The only difference is that the user experience is prioritized over the designer experience. So there’s more space for the user to voice their problems, their challenges when interacting, their motivations, behaviors, body qualities, and so on—relevant things so designers can adapt the system, shape the system, to better fit user needs, so to speak. However, the ones who ultimately make the decisions are not the users themselves—they are the designers.

That’s why I’m using this more general distinction here between two social groups: the “self,” who is acting, who is the subject of the activity or the subject of design—the subject supposed to design—and the “other,” who is supposed to be designed, who is supposed to be the object of design. User-centered design is, technically, a methodology that rests on the ideology of userism that justifies such a divide between social groups.

For the production of knowledge, this implies that design knowledge is mostly about the other, not knowledge of the other. The “other” embodies the unknown as an exotic stranger that may be known by design but never by itself. So, the “other” doesn’t have knowledge—or at least doesn’t have any design knowledge. The other is not a source of knowledge. That’s the basic premise of the two ideologies/methodologies I just showed before. Nevertheless, this is not something exclusive to design. It’s also part of a modern, colonial, and Western way of dealing with knowledge—separating two social groups and recognizing that some groups produce knowledge, while other groups don’t produce any knowledge.

Here’s an example. I already mentioned this before in a past lecture on self-management. Donald Rumsfeld, as the US Secretary of Defense, justified invading Iraq around 2002–2003 by saying that Iraq was an “unknown unknown.” There were possible weapons of mass destruction that the US hadn’t even heard about, so that’s why, according to him, they should invade Iraq. But that was a fallacy, because how can you justify doing something so horrible as waging a war with so many unknowns? It can go really bad, and it did go really bad, much worse than the US anticipated at that time, without having any real evidence. That’s what he was essentially saying: we should conquer something just because we don’t know that thing.

It’s very paranoid, and a lot of people criticized that discourse and speech. Unfortunately, we still have contemporary politicians who may be even more paranoid, and people are just accepting this as normal. Luckily, we do have critical thinkers like Slavoj Žižek, who observed that specific speech critically when Donald Rumsfeld talked about the “unknown unknowns” and, in some way, bamboozled the public. A lot of people thought it was a clever way of avoiding the truth, which was that they were invading Iraq to maintain geopolitical hegemony over the Middle East. That was the truth—or, to put it more bluntly, to keep the hold of the American empire over that region.

Nowadays, I feel comfortable saying that after Bloomberg, Economist, and right-wing media are using this term openly. There’s no problem in saying “American” or “US imperialism” any longer. Even the president himself is almost saying it. Unfortunately, when Rumsfeld bamboozled the media, if someone raised such a concern, it would sound very offensive because America was supposed to be a democratic country at that time. That was the image America wanted to show the world, which is no longer the case.

As Slavoj Žižek wrote in 2006, there is a third quadrant that Rumsfeld didn’t talk about: the “unknown knowns.” An example is ideology, a topic Žižek humorously explores in his movie The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012). The critical aspect is that Žižek helped us create an opposition here—the dialectics between knowledge and consciousness.

If you look at this map here, which you’ll see in the literature on knowledge management, they won’t tell you this. This is something that only a Hegelian like Žižek can see—the difference between knowledge and consciousness. The first “known” here does not refer to knowledge; it’s about consciousness. And the second one is about knowledge. So, “known knowns” refers to the consciousness of that knowledge.

You can also define consciousness in simple terms. What is consciousness? It’s a hard question to answer. But even harder is: what is knowledge, right? But you can say that consciousness is “knowledge of knowledge.” That makes sense, right? It’s a simple way of framing it. The simple definition helps you because you can build a graph like this with four quadrants, and you can operate it and see what it means for something to move from one place to another.

You can also design things based on it. Any knowledge starts as less conscious and less knowledge, right? And then it grows into something sure—assumptions that you are sure about, the “known knowns.” But along the way, it can travel and go back. That’s the advantage of using this kind of visualization.

Okay, so Žižek’s philosophical analysis concluded that Rumsfeld’s discourse wasn’t about knowledge management but ultimately about managing the other. In a word, hetero-management. So here’s how it connects to my past presentations about self-management. Indeed, this kind of knowledge management matches hetero-management. It dovetails and is a cornerstone because the “other” is supposed to be known.

You need to protect yourself from the threats of the unknowns, so you have to transform the unknowns into knowns and the knowns into “known knowns.” But you don’t want to accept that the “other” has its knowledge. The “other” is an object because it is a historically excluded person, an oppressed person. This ideology behind knowledge management—or knowledge hetero-management—uncritically is reproduced in design literature.

For example, The Blind Side game, which we draw on a lot to implement this matrix in our studio, comes from the Gamestorming book written by Dave Gray and colleagues. It does not acknowledge this ideology. Instead, it reproduces it, saying, “Okay, the Rumsfeld Matrix is about things that we know we don’t know.” And there’s even a figure—a stereotypical male figure—talking about knowledge in the head. So, it obscures this rich discussion and even the foolishness of Rumsfeld’s speech. That’s why I need to provide this critical contextualization so you don’t reproduce this mindlessly.

Think about what role that tool could play in a situation where you are trying to overcome hetero-management. In hetero-management, designers and users are separated by interfaces. You design an interface to control users, following a similar hierarchical lack of power as between managers and workers. Participatory design emerged to alleviate the contradictions of hetero-management in Scandinavia, which was not a communist or socialist region in the 1970s but suffered a lot of pressure from socialist countries. Participatory design was influenced, in a way, by socialism, and some of its elements were incorporated into its majority capitalist framework, resulting in what is known as the Scandinavian welfare state—one of the most enduring examples of what we now call social democracy, or something like that.

To alleviate that contradiction, participatory design diversifies the knowledge produced at the interface. Instead of having one designer experience and one user experience, you have multiple user experiences and multiple designer experiences. They exchange experiences through participatory design, and as a result, consciousness expands on both sides. One of the significant outcomes of participatory design is mutual learning. Designers learn from users, and users learn from designers. That’s cool.

However, that’s not all that we can do here. We can do more than that. How does participatory design do this? To diversify knowledge, participatory design represents shared objects—also known as boundary objects—at the designer-user interface. If you look closely at the overlap between these two different kinds of consciousness, you will see things emerging that populate this studio.

Lego Serious Play, one of my favorite materials, is something I learned to use at that interface from my PhD supervisor, Masha van der Voort, and one of my PhD colleagues who also worked with her, Julia Garde. I also co-wrote a paper with Julia Garde too on service design games. Back in those days, Julia was very interested in using Lego Serious Play as a codesign material without transforming it so much that it would lose its original features, like the metaphorical model. Most of the time, when designers build objects, they build them literally. They don’t use metaphor much. For instance, if they’re going to design a cup, they will draw a cup. They won’t think about, “Okay, if I’m going to design a cup, let’s first think about a metaphor for drinking,” and then, for example, draw a mountain where the water comes to think about other ways of delivering water to a thirsty user. The “mountain” is what we do here. We use Lego Serious Play, and we do that because we want to explore concepts more deeply. I learned all of this from them, and I started to apply it in my own classes and in my own participatory design practice.

One thing that I learned to be very useful is to ask people to represent their research objects. “What would you like to know more about?” This enables people to express their research object, even if they know little about it. Further, if you ask them to write down what they already know about this object and what they don’t, the shared object—represented as a Lego Serious Play metaphorical model—helps people keep their attention focused on their knowledge. It’s almost like a reflection, like a mirror. When you look at a Lego Serious Play model, it’s like looking into a mirror.

After they write down everything they know or don’t know, they can map it into a Blind Side game—this Gamestorming activity: “I don’t know that I know,” “I know that I know,” “I know that I don’t know,” and so on. They can use this visual to plan and become more aware of their research project. You can use this too. I highly recommend it, especially for second-year MFA students and researchers. Create your own research object using LEGO Serious Play and later create your own Rumsfeld/Žižek matrix. Ask yourself: What do I already know about it? What do I want to know? These are the fundamental questions.

You’ll see that the quadrants of the matrix closely match a research project. You’ll essentially be sketching your research project—a research project proposal that you need to deliver by the end of this semester. In the quadrant where we ask about things that you know that you know, these are assumptions—also called premises. Things that you know that you don’t know are gaps. Things that you have an answer for but are not so sure about are hypotheses. And things that you don’t know that you don’t know? Use research questions to get there. If you write a research question and already know its possible answer, it’s not a research question—it’s a hypothesis, and you’re using the wrong format. Remember this, okay? A lot of people make this mistake.

To answer the earlier question: I recommend you do this on your own first and as soon as possible share it with someone else to get feedback on your knowledge and your production process. Sharing your model, talking about it, and sharing what you know with another person enriches your consciousness. It also creates confrontation, so you may rethink the way you look at your research object. But the best way, even better than that, is to do this as part of a big group where everyone is modeling a shared object. This can be done using Lego Serious Play in the landscape phase. We rarely get to this phase here because it takes time. Before you build individual models, you have to connect them, and then you can create the landscape model.

At this point, self-management goes beyond participatory design because it’s not just about producing shared objects—”we have”. It’s about producing shared subjects—”we are.” That’s more fundamental and difficult. Here at MXD Studio, I think this is our contribution to the history of participatory design. What we are trying to do here is not so much to produce diverse shared objects but, first and foremost, to produce diverse shared subjects. I’ve also used the term “collective design body” in other papers to discuss this shared subject.

Here’s a visual representation of this. Participatory design, even in user-centered design, already considers and welcomes diverse users—listening to others and seeing them as people, not just objects. But what we do at MXD Studio is so unique because we emphasize that diversity should also exist on the designer’s side.

That’s why we co-design so much—because we are diverse people in this studio, and that’s one of our strengths. However, I’m proposing that our next steps should not lose the opportunity to embrace the fact that we are also diverse users. Instead of the traditional divide between designers and users, I envision blending those social groups.

In my tenure as Director of Graduate Studies for this program, I am introducing the self-managed studio approach to not only diversify knowledge but also the knowers in design research. That means producing knowledge about the self, for the self, and by the self. In fewer words: knowing who we really are. That’s what knowledge self-management means. It has nothing to do with improving profitability or efficiency, as traditional knowledge management often focuses on. Knowledge self-management is about knowing who we really are. But then, who are we, really, if we are so different? That’s an interesting question.

We have so many different nationalities, genders, races, and mental and physical conditions here. Here’s one idea: if diverse users and diverse designers collaborate more and more, producing self-knowledge in the process, you might eventually realize that you’re not that different. So I’m proposing that we see ourselves as a hybrid between a designer and a user—a usigner.

I’m drawing this term from Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. He created the term “spect-actor” to define the role of people in his theater. I think it’s similar to what we are doing here with this hybrid concept of usigner. In a self-managed design studio, the shared subject we produce, this collective design body, is the usigner. It’s a transitional identity in the process of liberation from userism, also known as user oppression.

If you think user oppression only affects other people, you’re thinking in a very userist way. Because as a designer, you’re also a user of design tools and you’re also treated as a user. If you’re a designer from the Global South, most of the time, you’ll be treated as a user. You come all the way from your home country to study design at the US, you go through so many immigration hassles, just to become addicted to US design tools like Adobe tools. Then, when you go back to your home country and try to use those tools, and you can’t afford them—or they’re not even allowed in your country. Then you’re forced to become a criminal by pirating the software. As a designer, you’re trapped because you don’t know any other design tools like free software alter/natives.

That’s not the case in this studio, right? We already have enough people with critical consciousness here to tell you, “Don’t do that.” And we are in the U.S., which still has some democracy. Adobe hasn’t lobbied enough to force me to tell you otherwise. Hence we can still have a debate about free software and design design tools. Let’s keep using the freedom we have here otherwise we might lose it.

References

Norman, D. A., & Draper, S. W. (1986). User centered system design; new perspectives on human-computer interaction. L. Erlbaum Associates Inc..

Gray, D. Brown, S. and Macanufo, J. (2011). Gamestorming. O’Reilly Media.

Rumsfeld, D. (2011). Known and Unknown: A Memoir. Sentinel.

Žižek, S. (2006). Philosophy, the “unknown knowns,” and the public use of reason. Topoi, 25, 137-142.

Garde, J., and van der Voort, M. (2016) Could LEGO® Serious Play® be a useful technique for product co – design?, in Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Future Focused Thinking – DRS International Conference 2016, 27 – 30 June, Brighton, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2016.24

Gonzatto, R.F. and Van Amstel, F.M.C. (2022), “User oppression in human-computer interaction: a dialectical-existential perspective”, Aslib Journal of Information Management, Vol. 74 No. 5, pp. 758-781. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-08-2021-0233

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Abstract: Designing from the positionality of a user instead of the designer’s is a must for designing against oppression. By acknowledging oneself as both a user and a worker, this approach dismantles patriarchal, capitalist, and colonialists paradigms that separates managers from workers, and designers from users. Born out of self-management, this approach thrives on collaboration, open-source tools, and community-driven economies, creating solutions rooted in transparency, mutual accountability, and cultural authenticity. Designing as a user is a step forward in overcoming the trap of user-centered design beyond what participatory design has already done.

This lecture was recorded in the Spring 2025 Research and Practice MXD MFA course at the University of Florida.

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Today’s topic is designing as a user, and it’s the second part of my last lecture on self-management and the self-managed studio. At the very end, I provoked you to think about your role in self-management. You cannot approach self-management as a boss, nor can you come to self-management as the expert designer who designs for others.

In this presentation, I’ll share some insights from my own experience of joining self-managed collectives, beyond the self-managed studio, as a user. You can also design as a user and step away a little from the role of the designer—the one who knows how to design things in relation to others who don’t.

Before we get into that specific content, I want to recall and connect back to other streams of thought that are gaining prominence in design research. The concept of positionality is closely related to this. When we talk about positionality, we draw from feminist cultural studies. In those writings, authors argue that if you’re going to do qualitative research, you must evaluate whether your biases are contaminating or distorting your data. One way to approach this is to disclose your bias through the concept of positionality.

Positionality is essentially a resource for researchers to disclose and reflect on the social and historical positions of their human body, including ancestry, gender, race, class, ethnicity, body condition, and handiness. I’ll talk about handiness later, as it’s typically neglected in discussions of positionality, particularly in social sciences and, even more so, in design research. This neglect creates a gap that prevents us from seeing ourselves as users and recognizing that being a user is, in itself, a position too.

The person most prominently advancing this concept in design research is Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel. Dr. Noel has been vocal about the importance of knowing yourself while designing for other people and when designing with other people. She developed a tool called the positionality wheel to discuss, analyze, and compare different positionalities.

You can print it out and work on a sheet of paper with Lego pieces on top, as we typically do here in the MXD studio, but she devised it during the pandemic for online, Miro-based co-design workshops. In this example, you answer questions that reveal shared positionalities. If people respond similarly, they share positionalities; if they respond differently, their positionalities differ. Questions range from gender or sexual orientation to age and upbringing, and they can be customized based on the positions you want to explore, share, and compare.

Lesley-Ann Noel explains this approach in her book Design Social Change, published last year as part of the Stanford D.School Guide series. I highly recommend this book—it’s a short introduction to the kind of work we do here. She’s also a scholar who builds on the work of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and other critical pedagogy authors.

In that book, she introduces a new concept that complements positionality: oppositionality. Noel emphasizes that once we realize our position in the world and our relationships with others, we will inevitably recognize that we are against something that threatens or undermines one of these positions. For example, if you are a Black person, your positionality implies being against racism—that’s your oppositionality. However, there are instances where people don’t adopt the expected oppositionality. For example, a Black person who isn’t opposed to racism or even perpetuates it. Similarly, there are sexist women, ableist individuals with disabilities, or anti-Indigenous natives. This often happens when people are confused about their positionalities—they’re unsure of who they are.

Lesley-Ann Noel seeks to help us reflect on this so we don’t end up in counterproductive positionalities. A productive positionality means knowing what you are against. It involves an explicit reading of the world from an oppressed positionality and positioning yourself against oppressive features of the world that must change. Design Social Change is fundamentally a book about designing against oppressive structures in the world.

As much as I appreciate Noel’s work, I approach positionality differently. For instance, last year, we created self-portraits using trash as a way to discuss positionality instead of using the wheel or any other classificatory system. I also use constructive tools for exploring oppositionality, one of which I adapted from the Theater of the Oppressed. It’s called What Am I, What Do I Want? It’s a dramatic game where participants state out loud, “What am I? What do I want?” I added a third question: “What prevents me from becoming or doing what I want?” Participants write their answers on post-its and attach them to their bodies where it feels most relevant.

For example, one participant wrote their answer to “What am I?” and placed it on their forehead, probably because they work in a brain-intensive profession like programming. These reflections allow participants to recognize both what they oppose and what they support. There’s always a positionality implied in oppositionality and vice versa. Being aware of both is crucial. By becoming aware of positionality and oppositionality, you develop what Paulo Freire, Álvaro Vieira Pinto, and Lesley-Ann Noel call critical consciousness—knowing yourself, identifying what to oppose, and acting in your best interests.

It sounds great and fair, but we live in a society that cultivates naive consciousness—a concept developed by Álvaro Vieira Pinto. This lesser-known concept is essentially the opposite of critical consciousness. While many are familiar with critical consciousness, few understand naive consciousness, which Vieira Pinto examines in his 700-page book Consciência e Realidade Nacional. This book offers a detailed analysis of how naive consciousness manifested in Brazilian society in the 1960s. In 2022, I taught a course on this book in Brazil, where my students and I analyzed how many characteristics of 1960s naive consciousness persisted in 2022. We found these traits alive and well, particularly among supporters of Brazil’s far-right movement, which attempted to maintain control but failed when Bolsonaro, their far-right candidate, lost the election that year.

It was interesting to understand why they were supporting—why former far-right voters or naive voters, put in that way, were supporting Bolsonaro. Vieira Pinto explains it well. I cannot go into the details of that now, but you should just know that this relates directly to the discussions we were having last week. I was explaining that hetero-management has these interfaces that block or create a buffer zone between managers and workers. This allows managers to control workers, and workers, in turn, believe they need to be controlled.

Designers and users occupy ambiguous positionalities in this process. Sometimes designers identify with managers and control users just as much as they control workers. Or, designers might try to make workers feel like they are users. Another possibility is that designers identify with workers and actually help to empower users. If they do so, the structure of this diagram would change completely, and designers would essentially become users. But we’ll get to that point later on.

Iust to remind you of the terms we used last week: hetero-management nurtures naive consciousness. Why? Because naive consciousness helps to maintain unequal structures. If people are not critical, they don’t want to change things. Extending naive consciousness to design, when designers are naive, they don’t realize they are workers, just as they don’t realize they are users.

Let me give you two examples of how this impacts designers’ lives.

Over the past four years, particularly in the United States, designers in the tech sector experienced a boom. There were 600% more job openings in UX research and UX design, with 265% more new jobs being created. However, since 2023, the number of jobs available has declined significantly. In other words, job opportunities are being eliminated. And that’s what companies call layoffs. Essentially, people are being kicked out of their jobs because the industry doesn’t need as many UX designers. Now, 30% of UX designers are unemployed.

This is not the same for UX researchers. As you can see here, the demand for UX research is still higher than before. It’s still a growing profession. And by the way, here’s a tip: if you’re thinking about going into the industry, the MXD research program can help you transition into becoming more like a UX researcher than a UX designer. UX researchers also get better salaries. If you want to study this topic on your own, go for it. I am not going to approach this directly here because what we are doing in this program is something more substantial than UX research. What we do here is probably more interesting for the general public than just supporting capitalist companies in their exploitation processes. However, it’s worth noting that many of the techniques we use are also naively employed by UX researchers in capitalist industries.

To wrap up this point: many UX designers and UX researchers think they are not even workers. They believe they are becoming strategic; they think they are having “a seat at the table,” that they are becoming leaders. But as soon as companies don’t need them anymore, they are fired. This serves as a reminder that they are not owners—they are not capitalists.

On the other side, what’s less known and realized is the condition of being a user. For instance, if you are a user in a country outside the United States, and the U.S. ends up in a trade war with your country, your digital services or design tools could be jeopardized. This is what happened to Venezuelan designers in 2019. Many of them had files stored in the Adobe Creative Suite cloud, and they didn’t realize beforehand that this could happen. Then, all of a sudden, these services were shut down for these users, and they lost the files stored there. Designers, when they don’t think of themselves as users, don’t think about backing up their files. They don’t consider the possibility of something going wrong with their tools. They don’t even think about using free and open source software, which would always be available to them.

Instead, they believe they are part of this creative, rather privileged, class that’s going to transform the world for the better, as part of this big wave of good energy. That’s an illusion. It’s all capitalism, just fantasized—just deceiving people. We need to be clear: we are workers, and we are users. And once you start to realize that, you can design as a user—not just design for or design with users.

Designing from an authentic positionality is a great driver for design work. For example, Black designers organized themselves and produced this marvelous book, The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression, & Reflection. Women have also organized, producing books like Women Made: Great Women Designers. Queer people created Queer X Design, documenting 50 years of LGBTQ signs, symbols, banners, logos, and graphic art. There are also national positionalities. Brazilians, for example, are well represented by Brazilian Modern Design by Maria Cecília Loschiavo dos Santos. In a more complex positionality, Feminist Designer: On the Personal and the Political in Design book claims that even men can become feminist designers if they abide by these principles and join the social movement.

There are many other emerging identities for designing as someone from a specific group. However, these identities often overlap. You’re not just a queer person—you might also be a queer woman, queer man, queer trans, or queer non-binary person. And when you add class, race, and handiness to the mix, it becomes even harder to figure out which identity drives you in the fight against oppression.

What is handiness? I’ll get to that in a minute. Handiness is actually a particular contribution from Álvaro Vieira Pinto’s work that informs our design practice. Together with Rodrigo Gonzatto, a Brazilian researcher and collaborator, we’ve been unearthing and translating this concept from Vieira Pinto’s book. In that book, Vieira Pinto describes handiness as the relationship between what is available around your body for you to use and the historical labor involved in making it available. Nothing is gratuitous, for free, God’s gift, or natural in the human world. Someone worked to make those things available.

If your relationship with that labor is alienated—if you are unaware of the work behind it—you will have underdeveloped handiness. You won’t know how to use things because you don’t understand how they were designed or under what conditions. Considering handiness in discussions of positionality and oppositionality means designing as workers and users. Unfortunately, class is often neglected in discussions of design because we live in a capitalist society that profits from maintaining class oppression. For example, before Trump’s return to power, the U.S. had more liberal policies toward gay and trans rights. Now, these rights are under threat. But in both cases, capitalism profits—selling products and services tailored to queer people, including books like the ones I mentioned.

If we want to truly fight oppression, we must engage as users working with other users and as workers working with other workers. We need to design interfaces collaboratively. So, if you really want to fight oppression systems, this is the diagram. We need to engage as users working with other users and as workers working with other workers, designing interfaces collaboratively.

I already gave you this example—I’m just reminding you—but self-management is a tradition from the workers’ movement and has been explored in many different parts of the world. I’m showing Yugoslavia here because they were probably at the forefront of socialist self-management during the 1970s. We also do self-management in our design studios, as I explained last week. In that kind of studio, we practice self-conscious design, where designers design interfaces as designers by themselves, for themselves—like the Crisis Deck project. It’s about designers understanding what it means to be a designer.

But what does designing as a user—designing done by users for users—look like? That’s my question today.

For a quick overview, here are some examples of designs made by users. At first glance, they might look quite crude. You might think, “Wow, this isn’t design. This is just a fix, or a kludge.” You might have different terms for this in your language. In Brazil, we call it gambiarra. In Colombia, they call it malicia indígena. In Mexico, it’s called rasquache. In India, it’s jugaad.

This is the best design out there, at least from my perspective. You know why? First of all, it reuses resources that have already been extracted from the environment. This is typically recycling or upcycling, meaning there’s a lower environmental impact. These materials could have ended up in a landfill, thrown into rivers, or even in the ocean, polluting the environment in so many ways and eventually coming back to us through food.

Instead, two things are saved: the material doesn’t go to the landfill, and people don’t buy new products. If people don’t purchase new produces, no new material extractions are needed. So, you save twice when you use a design like this. Another important aspect is that such designs are not protected by intellectual property rights. Anyone can copy these solutions. They typically spread—you see it, you copy it, you transform it, and maybe even improve it. It’s very open source. Even before the concept of open source and free design was invented, people were already doing this. There’s more to say about this, but I’m not focusing on these examples today.

What is the implication of recognizing these designs for modern design and its foundational definition of good design? These designs are deliberately against modern design. They are saying through other means: “We don’t care about modern design or we don’t want to look modern.” Why? Because modern design is often too expensive, inaccessible, and less authentic. It lacks a connection to local culture and fails to express local values. So, designing as a user means opposing modern design and its definition of humanity, which is something much more substantial.

Behind every piece of modern design, there’s a specific view of humanity—a view of a white, male, able body that has been visually expressed by many artists. Perhaps the most famous example is Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. It’s not so much about this particular image but what it represents—that the standard, the default designer, creator, and user is this white male body. The main idea behind this picture is the supposedly perfection of that body proportions, proved by fitting it inside a square and, at the same time, inside a circle. This is just the geometric meaning, but there’s definitely a more sociological meaning. What it means is that the white male body is considered the perfect body, while non-white female bodies, for instance, are seen as less perfect. If we look at all of the aforementioned positionalities, this is the one that matters, and the rest is dismissed as irrelevant.

Fast forward 500 years, and you still see this overvaluation of the white male body behind modern design. Here’s Nicolas Negroponte, the director of the MIT Media Lab for a while. In this picture, he’s acting as an entrepreneur, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child startup, which aimed to bring laptops to underdeveloped countries like Brazil for $100 or even less.

As you can see, the difference between the Renaissance and modern times is that in the past, the white male body was shown alone. Now, it’s shown in contrast to people of color—non-white, Black, or brown bodies. You basically see this person saying, “Look, we are great people. We know what children need to know. But we also feel guilty for being superior, so we want to share some of our privileges by bringing cheaper laptops to these people. Please invest in our company, and we can help reduce white guilt or the white man’s burden.”

This project was unsuccessful, in part because of its racist undertones. MIT and the One Laptop Per Child project didn’t want to engage in dialogue; they just wanted to throw laptops into these communities. In fact, they literally had a plan to throw boxes of laptops into villages in Africa without any explanation—just leave the laptops and go away. This approach was also depicted by the controversial movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, where a Coke bottle is thrown from an airplane and changes life in an African village. They thought laptops would do the same, helping Africa out of what they called “a state of underdevelopment.”

Nowadays, Africa is often criticized for “not being capitalist enough.” This was even on the cover of one of the major economic magazines—The Economist. The critique forgets the real problem: centuries of colonialism. Africa is still recovering, with some countries still maintaining strong ties to their former colonial rulers.

This is part of the problem: they—the White bodies—believe they are superior and know what Black bodies should do. This burden of superiority is deeply embedded in modernist design. Designing as a user counters this narrative by shifting the designers’ positionality.

For me, this began in 2007 when I co-founded the Faber-Ludens Interaction Design Institute with like-minded colleagues. We started with a different idea of humanity. The term Faber-Ludens opposes Homo sapiens. It envisions a new kind of human who plays while making things and creates a world in an imaginative way, instead of relying solely on rational categorizations. One of our projects featured a woman sharing her creation—a robotic addition to her body that expanded her senses. I can’t recall the details, but the idea of a cybernetic body, of being a cyborg, was already part of the discussion about what it means to be human at that time.

We had a website where we shared all our projects freely so everyone could see what we were designing. We believed it was important to trailblaze the field and invite more people to participate. At one point, we had so many online services connected to the website that we called it a media ecology—or a mashup. Some tools were open-source software, like Moodle, which is similar to Canvas here at the University of Florida. Moodle is open-source and widely used by universities around the world, including my previous university. We also used platforms like YouTube, Ustream, and others. Many people engaged with us through these different channels. That was the first moment we realized we couldn’t design one single thing. Instead, we had to design things in relationship with each other, as part of an ecology.

At the time, we didn’t have any programmers on staff. We had to rely on open-source software and design using visual programming languages at a basic level. That’s when we started to realize we were users—designing as users of these foundational platforms that we were combining.

Looking back and contrasting what was being discussed in the design industry at that time, we saw Apple drawing a lot of attention. Everyone said Apple had the best design, but Apple had the most secretive design process. Nobody knew how they designed their products. They had this beautiful black box that hid everything about their design methods.

We didn’t want to follow that path. We also didn’t want to do what, in the opposite direction, was done under the label of design thinking. This approach, promoted by Stanford’s d.school, was partially based on the methods developed over many years by IDEO. That company has a major office close to Stanford, so they work closely together. They started developing various materials to share their design process, positioning themselves in opposition to what Apple was doing. They wanted to share their design methods. However, they still had strong commercial interests and, in some cases, adopted an even more explicit colonialist approach than Apple.

For example, many of IDEO’s open initiatives and the Human-Centered Design Toolkit materials were targeted at underdeveloped or third-world countries at the time. We observed this from Brazil and thought, “We don’t want to do that. But we still want to do something similar.” We wanted to draw ideas from Apple and IDEO, but create something more reasonable and sensitive to Brazil’s context.

At the same time, we were watching the rise of the Open Design concept, especially in Europe and later in the United States, with initiatives like fab labs—places where people could build anything, share source code, and see others further develop their projects. What we did at Faber-Ludens was eat open design through anthropophagy, a cultural appropriation strategy pioneered by indigenous people in Brazil. This idea was later developed by artists during Brazil’s modernist movement in the early 20th century and expanded during the Tropicália movement under the military dictatorship.

Closer to our time, in the 2000s, the digital culture movement led by Gilberto Gil—a famous Brazilian musician, politician, and pioneer in using Creative Commons for the arts—helped shape this approach. We drew from all these sources to develop Design Livre, our design approach. In Design Livre, we emphasized transparency. We used “transparent boxes” that you could look into and meet other people because the project was a collaborative, open-source effort with participatory channels. Anyone could join.

Once we established the ideology behind Design Livre, we wanted a platform to support it. We tried to integrate everything we were doing on different platforms at Faber-Ludens (remember the media ecology I mentioned?) into one unified system. This became the Corais Platform, which we created in 2011 as an alter/native to OpenIDEO.

Whenever you come to me excited talking about design thinking or the double-diamond model, remember that since at least 2011, I’ve been looking for anticolonial alter/natives to these design approaches. If you bring them to me, the first thing I’ll do is help you see its underlying biases.

Returning to the Corais platform: we developed it using Drupal 6.0 and more than 200 different open-source software tools, mashed together. We had a radical transparency policy—all project content was, and still is, accessible online without a login. You can check out projects there from over 10 years ago, as everything is mandatorily shared under Creative Commons licenses.

Here’s what one project looks like. For example, this is a card deck we were brainstorming. We were collaborating on the text that would be included in the deck. Each collaborative tool was an open-source software integrated into the platform. I designed and developed all of this using visual programming or high-level programming. I didn’t know how to program very well, but I still managed to create this complex platform. And you can do it too—it’s not as difficult as it seems, thanks to the generous open-source programmer community that shares their work freely. At one point, we were even surpassing Google Drive. Imagine that—we were better than Google Drive! Of course, we couldn’t sustain that for many years, but for a time, we outperformed them.

Beyond the Faber-Ludens website, Corais also connected to physical spaces. We envisioned Corais as a platform that would link fab labs and studios. It also featured our signature method cards, which became known as UX cards. After designing these cards on the platform, we tested them in organizations we collaborated with and later integrated them back into the platform.

Corais allowed us to create virtual cards that you could use just as you would with physical cards on a table. We even used the platform to collaboratively write a book about the Design Livre ideology. The writing took place over an entire week, using tools like Google Drive, which at the time wasn’t fast enough for what we needed. We also used virtual conferencing—these technologies were experimental back in 2012. Designing in a hybrid mode like this was pioneering.

The result was the book Design Livre. It was translated into Spanish, though not yet available in English. As we continued using the Corais platform, we shifted from designing it for others to designing it for ourselves. By 2014, we concluded that the open innovation strategy of Faber-Ludens didn’t work for many reasons. The dispute between capitalist and socialist ideologies within Faber-Ludens caused its closure. Essentially, the capitalists and socialists, who had worked democratically in the past, could no longer agree. But Corais outlived Faber-Ludens.

A lot of collaborative culture producers—people associated with the Brazilian digital culture movement sparked by Gilberto Gil in the early 2000s—were really excited about using Corais for their purposes. They wanted to organize popular or folk culture initiatives using digital technologies and explore the possibilities of free software. They wanted a national platform rooted in Brazilian culture, where they could contact the developers and keep capital within the country. They wanted self-management interfaces to enable self-management, and they wanted everything to be under Creative Commons with extensive data transparency.

Here’s one of the first digital culture movement projects: Movimento Conchativa. They managed a large concert hall owned by a university that wasn’t using it. The space was handed over to cultural producers and activists, who started organizing events, offering courses, and revitalizing the surrounding community. In 2012, after installing a chat feature on the platform, I connected with one of the most active entrepreneurs in that group, Pedro Jatobá. Pedro was part of several self-managed collectives that wanted to experiment with digitally mediated solidarity economies in cultural production.

They wanted to print and design their own money but didn’t know how to do it using digital technologies. They were inspired by Brazil’s workers’ movement, which had used solidarity economies for decades. It’s worth mentioning the Landless Workers’ Movement as one of the biggest promoters of solidarity economies in Brazil. They facilitate bartering among food producers and even print local currencies.

Jatobá proposed creating a digital social currency module as part of its metadesign project. Corais hosted many projects, but it also had a space for metadesign—projects that improved the platform itself. This was not just a buzzword for us; it was integral to how we worked. We developed the digital social currency module using open-source software. Here’s the result: at any time, you could see the health of the community currency. Each participant’s balance was visible, with most showing green, meaning they contributed more than they took. If there were many negative balances, it indicated the community was in debt—a sign that people were taking resources without giving back. It was a fascinating indicator of community health.

In physical spaces, the same dynamics played out. For instance, at a theater school that had faced budget cuts, participants used the system to keep things running. They fixed broken doors, maintained the space, and ensured courses continued.

Here’s how the system worked:

Someone posted a need or task, like fixing a door.
Another person fixed it and posted, “I fixed it.”
A third person checked the work and confirmed it was done.
A fourth person operated the “bank” and transferred funds from the community’s common resources (or “commonwealth”) to the person who completed the task.

The person who received the funds was required to spend the money within the community, often on courses offered by the school. To participate in the school, you had to pay by completing services for the school, earning money to pay back the school.

The cycle ensures accountability and recognition. If you simply ask people to volunteer without recording their efforts, they may not feel appreciated. What we discovered was key to the sustainability of this effort, which lasted three years: people felt recognized by the system, often more than if they were paid in regular money.

The system involved at least two people acknowledging the work, and it was all public. Others could see the transactions, reinforcing the radical transparency philosophy. At that time, in Brazil, there was this very cool initiative called the Hacker Bus. A group of hacker activists traveled around Brazil in this bus, conducting workshops on data transparency, hacking governmental accounts to extract public information, and publishing it to expose corruption. These activists eventually ended up working for the government to help implement policies that made transparency measures regular and systematic. Brazil has been doing a lot of work to shed its reputation as a corrupt country. Many politicians have been caught by these transparency measures—including Bolsonaro, who was caught in one of these systems as public scrutiny became more accessible.

We wanted to make this not just a governmental initiative but part of the culture. If everyone is accustomed to being held accountable to the public—not just the government or certain individuals—the whole culture would embrace transparency. On the other hand, corruption often stems from the feeling that your work is not adequately recognized or valued, which leads people to steal as a way to profit. If people were recognized for their work and had good career prospects, why would they resort to corruption?

There are cities in Brazil already experimenting with solidarity economies on a large scale, involving thousands of people. These experiments include providing a basic minimum income through local currencies and significantly reducing poverty. This is meant to increase the public’s trust in itself as a collective of citizens who can produce useful things to society just by being there.

In our case, the backing for the currency—the trust in it—was based on the collective capacity of the group to produce certain services each month. For example, everyone in that particular collective could commit to producing one visual identity project, one business card, one folder, and one poster per month. These services would cost a certain amount in their community currency for anyone who wanted to buy them.

The collaborative cultural producers knew for sure that they would be able to produce because if someone had the money and ordered a service, and the service wasn’t delivered, the trust in that currency would go down. That’s how they built a solid economy—by promising to produce a certain amount of goods and services within a specific period of time.

How do you come up with those numbers and services? They had a very detailed method for mapping the wide range of skills and expertise shared within the community. For example, in this particular group, many people knew how to produce audiovisual materials like recording, editing, and video production. That’s why they could produce a lot of movies. There were fewer people skilled in network management, but they could still produce those services if needed.

Pedro Jatobá engaged in a two-year Master of Science research project, during which he documented everything he learned using the Corais platform. All of this is explained in detail in his master’s dissertation, currently available only in Portuguese. We also wrote a more accessible, popular book called Coralizando—not just Pedro Jatobá but me and many others who were using Corais at the time. We wrote it as a manifesto to share what we had learned. That was in 2014. Now, 10 years later, Corais has hosted 700 projects with 7,000 members spread across Brazil.

The platform is less active now because the technology is outdated. However, a new platform emerged from this one: Rios. This one was designed by EITA, a cooperative for IT development that originated in the Landless Workers’ Movement but later became independent. They created this tool to help social movements better organize and share information. It’s similar to Corais but has a more modern look, designed to align with current ways of interacting through apps and mobile devices.

One of my former students worked with EITA, designing Rios’ metadesign channel. She was deeply interested in social movements and studied how collaborative culture producers appropriated Corais. She’s also the author of the second article you read this week. Isabella Siqueira did this for her final project while writing her paper on Service Design by the Oppressed.

What we are now realizing is that we are indeed designing as users with other users or as workers with other workers. We are designing interfaces that enable us to self-manage. Designing interfaces as users means being more attentive to past, present, and future handiness—this relationship between what is available and the work involved in making it available.

By joining workers in their process of liberation—such as learning how to overcome capitalist exploitation through solidarity economies—we also liberated ourselves. We freed ourselves from capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal modes of design thinking, like those promoted in the underdeveloped world by IDEO, the Stanford d.school, OLPC, and many other initiatives that suppressed solidarity and alternative ways of living that are cultivated by social movements.

Essentially, we were working against huge powers, and yet we thrived for so many years. I can’t say the current situation is entirely hopeful for the projects I showed you, but there are definitely other projects being developed by people who participated in Corais, Rios, or Faber-Ludens. And you’re part of this too. The MXD studio is a place where these ideas and practices are brought forward. You can build on top of them and liberate yourself through this process. Don’t be shy to design like a user.

References

Noel, L. A. (2023). Design Social Change: Take Action, Work Toward Equity, and Challenge the Status Quo. Ten Speed Press.

Boal, A. (2005). Games for actors and non-actors. Routledge.

Pinto, Á. V. (2020). Consciência e realidade nacional. Volume II: A Consciência Ingênua. Editora Contraponto.

JATOBÁ, Pedro Henrique Gomes. Desenvolvimento de ambientes virtuais de aprendizagem e gestão colaborativa: casos de cultura solidária na economia criativa. 2014. http://repositorio.ufba.br/ri/handle/ri/21715

GONZATTO, R.F., VAN AMSTEL, F.,and JATOBÁ, P.H.(2021) Redesigning money as a tool for self-management in cultural production, in Leitão, R.M., Men, I., Noel, L-A., Lima, J., Meninato, T. (eds.), Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling, 22-23 July, Toronto, Canada. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0003

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Abstract: Systemic oppression is the enduring dehumanization of certain social groups, thereby maintaining their political, social, and economic disadvantage. Service design, most notably in digital labor platforms, has become entangled in the reproduction of oppression through capitalist, patriarchal, and colonial systems. Collaborating with the social movements that challenge these systems is a possible way forward for systemic service design. Still, self-criticism is needed to avoid reproducing oppression while trying to overcome it. With this aim, this chapter scrutinizes service design’s role in the cascading effect of systemic oppression, taking digital labor platforms as a paradigmatic example. By mapping the oppressive cascade from metadesigners to designers and from users to infrausers, this research identifies the crucial role played by the theater model in oppressive service design. To furnish an alternative model for systemic service design, we draw from Theatre of the Oppressed and Black intersectional feminism.

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Abstract: Imagine a design studio where aspiring designers break free from traditional hierarchies and redefine what it means to be a designer. In the self-managed studio developed at UTFPR, design students learned that design can serve not just industries but social movements and the public. Inspired by critical pedagogy and radical practices like Theater of the Oppressed, students turned existential crises into creative fuel, crafting tools like a crisis card deck to navigate their role in a complex world. They didn’t just learn skills—they learned to design for themselves as a collective, harnessing self-knowledge to confront oppression and reimagine design’s purpose.

This lecture was recorded in the Spring 2025 Research and Practice MXD MFA course at the University of Florida.

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This presentation will provide an overview of my past experience trying to push forward this idea of self-management in design studios. I’m attempting to transplant these practices from Brazil to the United States, specifically here at the University of Florida. And you’re part of this experiment. I’m proposing this, and we’re going to try, but I don’t know if we’re going to succeed or to what extent we’ll be able to. We’ll probably need to adapt things. But here’s my attempt to share, in a few minutes, what it was like doing a self-managed studio in Brazil.

First of all, I want to talk a little bit about self-management in general, which is not a term that has been associated much with design. I became involved with self-management through social movements, particularly the workers’ movement, which is guided by ideologies and proposals like socialism and anarchism. Self-management is also practiced by other social movements. For example, the way women organize under the principle of sorority is somehow relatable to self-management.

So basically, in many of these social movements, self-management means managing the self. And that’s the opposite of managing the other, or hetero-management. And as you’re probably suspecting when I say hetero-management—am I really talking about heteronormativity here? Sort of. Hetero, the word, means “other”. If you are a heterosexual it is because you are attracted to the other gender—that’s the definition. But hetero does not only mean “other” in terms of sexuality. It also means “any other”. Here, we’re talking about managing the other rather than managing the self, which is an interesting aspect of this word hetero-management.

The concept of hetero-management was created by the workers’ movement to criticize the capitalist work structure or system. It has since been enriched by other social movements: the Black movement, the feminist movement, and the disability rights movement. They’ve added new characteristics to the understanding of hetero-management, describing it as straight, White, patriarchal, capitalist, ableist, and so on. The most oppressive sides of human relationships are all systematized in hetero-management.

Hetero-management is typically depicted as a pyramid where those at the top manage those at the bottom. But that means no one is managing those at the top. Think about it—people at the bottom don’t manage themselves, and no one manages those at the top. Essentially, no one manages themselves. That’s the biggest hurdle of hetero-management. If you focus too much on managing others, you may act against your best interests. Conversely, your actions may backfire on you in the long run.

For example, the simplest way to explain it is this: how far can capitalism go on a planet with limited boundaries for extracting natural resources? The planet, at some point—and it’s already happening—shows the effects of depletion, excessive pollution, overconsumption of resources, and excessive emissions that produce greenhouse effects, among other things. One possible explanation for this is the over-reliance on hetero-management. People at the top don’t think about themselves; they don’t, for example, consume less. By not consuming less, how can they set an example for those at the bottom? Without such examples, everyone wants to consume more than the planet can provide. And that’s what happens in general in the United States, which is a country deeply rooted in the capitalist structure.

This artwork you are seeing here is a rich depiction of the capitalist structure. Many of these examples come from the United States. I just want to mention that it was created by CrimethInc, an anarchist collective. It’s an interesting ironic name. An incorporated enterprise that produces crimes against capitalism, or, in other words, they produce fascinating, critical, punk, anarchist, and anti-capitalist work.

They have a beautifully illustrated book about work—a critique of alienated labor under capitalism—with very interesting design artworks that aim to provide a systemic view of the system. Later, you can explore it to understand why people are at the bottom, how they are being exploited, and through which mechanisms. Once you start to examine the ways they are being exploited, you will clearly see the role of design in it.

Design is essentially mediating all the social relationships you see in this picture. There are many interfaces here. Gui Bonsiepe (1999) once wrote that everything design produces is an interface, whether it’s graphics on printed paper or a product physically positioned in a room. These are all interfaces, and designers are the ones responsible for creating them. However, these interfaces often function to maintain the current structure, keeping it standing, although in a very precarious way.

Here’s a diagram to help you think about how design works in hetero-management. You have, of course, the hierarchy between managers and workers: managers at the top, workers at the bottom, and interfaces between them that play many roles. But most importantly, these interfaces act as buffers that alleviate the tension between these two collectives.

If managers are exploiting workers, workers sometimes get fed up. They might want to retaliate—history provides examples of this—or seek revenge in other ways. That’s why managers often keep themselves physically distant from workers. They will typically install their offices above factories, where they can watch over workers on the shop floor. This creates an interface that both produces and maintains inequality while alleviating tension.

Why are designers on the horizontal line? Why aren’t designers and users on this vertical line? Because designers and users hold somewhat ambiguous roles in society. If you say you’re a designer, you may be a real manager, however, in capitalism, most of the times, designers are workers who thinks to be managers. That is what Marx called false consciousness, not knowing in which class you are. Designers act as if they were trying to exploit workers. But in doing so, they end up enabling their real managers to exploit themselves even more.

This is also what happens when designers start to think they are entrepreneurs. They see themselves as creative professionals who can work out of bounds, developing their creativity and expressing their freedom to create. But, at the end of the day, they still need to pay their bills. And those bills will be paid by the money they receive from clients, who will impose restrictions and constraints on their projects. In this way, designers remain bound to the same structure.

Whereas for users, similarly, they may think they don’t have a connection or, for example, a work contract with an employer—the managers. But they are still being managed in a soft way. For example, as users of Microsoft or any other big tech company, we might think that their technologies have been designed for us in a neutral way. We might think we can do whatever we want with them, but the reality is that those big tech companies are managing crowds through these technologies—crowds of users who are now supposed to replace crowds of citizens. Nowadays, we see big tech coming so close to the government of the United States that they are even taking some high-level seats. This means that big tech and the government are working together. For what? To reduce citizens to the position of users so they don’t even think of reclaiming democratic participation and workers right.

Design is playing a major role in such historical reduction of democracy and workers rights by designing the interfaces that hide what is going on at the backstage. Nevertheless, as much as designers can serve the managers, they can also serve the workers. That’s basically what self-management made me figure out. Before we jump into what design can do in this context, let’s take another look at the history of self-management. I’m just going to show you two images about it. You can search later to get more information, and I know some designers with many different experiences—learning about, listening to, or even using socialist structures. You can reach out to them later if you will.

This movie is accessible to everyone: Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin. In 1936, he created one of the most significant pieces ever made for cinema, which already provides a fascinating critique of the capitalist work structure, hetero-management, and their interfaces. This picture from the movie looks like something you could see today, right? There’s a boss talking to a worker. The worker is half-naked, and the boss is fully dressed in a suit, talking through a television. In 1936, these technologies were fictional at the time but it was rather obvious that managers would use them once they become available. Chaplin anticipated something that would become widespread—especially after the COVID pandemic of 2020: Managers popping up on your screen, demanding work from you, or even surveilling your work—looking at you without letting you look back at them. This is all an interface.

Now let’s consider another possibility. Just as there are interfaces for hetero-management, there are also interfaces for self-management. I’m bringing here an example from Yugoslavia just because it was probably the socialist country with the most advanced self-managing practices in human history. This picture, taken in 1976, depicts an assembly of workers in a textile factory. As you can see, there are many women participating, and everyone has a say in the future directions of the factory—what they’re going to produce, how much they’ll produce within a given time, and the overall plans for the factory’s future.

These decisions were all discussed among the workers, and they could change the direction of the factory. That’s not something you typically see in a capitalist company. Many critics of hetero-management, like Ricardo Semler, are trying to update it and infuse it with socialist practices. Thanks to these critics, self-management is even being incorporated by tech companies, especially those with idealistic premises like wanting to change the world for the better. At some point in their history, many of these companies experiment with self-management to some degree. Of course, as they grew, they typically abandoned it.

In Yugoslavia, however, self-management persisted even in large organizations because it was supported by a socialist ideology. When capitalism is the dominant ideology, it’s challenging to maintain self-management. That’s why counter-ideologies are necessary to balance it out. Only in a democracy can these ideologies confront each other in a productive manner.

What I want to emphasize is that this, too, is an interface. Designers have a role in shaping how people can participate, have dialogues, make decisions, and work together in a democracy. Doesn’t this sound a lot like participatory design? Yes, you’re anticipating my point. Designers can indeed facilitate or complicate self-management.

The main question here is how can they learn to do this?

I learned self-management by engaging with social movements. I designed a platform with them, still online today, called Corais. Through it, we designed many things, including a digital social banking system where each community could design its own currency, so to speak. This platform has been applied in hundreds of projects in Brazil. We’re going to discuss this in more detail next week, so I won’t go further into it now. Today, I want to focus on LADO and my experience of trying to bring self-management to the Federal University of Technology – Paraná (UTFPR) before LADO was born, which ultimately led to its co-founding in 2021.

Back in 2019, when I had just started there, I had this idea: to learn designing self-management interfaces, design students first needed to experience self-management directly. They needed to manage their own studio. That’s not a trivial task, though. A studio is not like a factory as it draws from a much older organizational style—the master-apprentice relationship. In this model, every studio has a master—the person who best understands the techniques, tools, modes of expression, and aesthetics. Learners play the role of assistants, helping the master achieve their goals. While assisting, they learn to do what the master does and, eventually, may replace the master. But this only happens after many years of staying in a humble position. It’s not entirely self-management because most of the time, it’s hetero-management.

The Bauhaus introduced some changes to the design studio, reframing it as workshops. At the Bauhaus, there were no studios—there were workshops centered on technologies. For example, there was a wood workshop and a steel workshop. However, there were still masters of these workshops, and although they were occasionally replaced, the figure of a commanding individual remained. The Bauhaus also incorporated more hetero-management practices from industry, mimicking some of the divisions of labor found in factories.

This picture from the Bauhaus ceramics workshop in 1924 shows elements of mass production and assembly lines. It’s not fully developed, but you can see that it’s not the usual ceramics studio. Traditional ceramics studios are often messy, but this one is highly organized, with rationalized space usage typical of factories.

Here, we see a pushback against the partial studio self-management of before. The Bauhaus, as you know, was a reference for Hochschule für Gestaltung in Germany, which set the tone for most design education that followed. The basic curriculum of Ulm was replicated in many schools abroad, including in the United States and Brazil. In Brazil, it influenced Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI) in Rio de Janeiro, the city where I was born.

At ESDI, the professors were the masters, playing the role of those who “donated” knowledge to students. Students simply followed their rules. This hierarchical relationship in education ties back to colonization. In ESDI, the hierarchy was stronger than in Germany because Brazil wasn’t colonized by Germany but by Portugal. As a result, Brazil—and ESDI—still struggles with a strong appreciation for what comes from colonizing metropolitan centers like Portugal or Germany.

Coming back to my question: how do we overcome hetero-management in the design studio? From 2019 to 2022, I ran an elective course called Designing for People: Laboratory of Design and Social Innovation at UTFPR. I used this elective as a laboratory to experiment with self-management. In the first class, which I co-taught with my colleague André Lucca, we asked students: What do you want to study? We didn’t have a plan or syllabus. We wanted to construct it together.

We gave students sticky notes and asked them to write themes they wanted to study. We ended up with many post-its but weren’t sure how to organize them into a study plan. The students began discussing what they knew and what they didn’t know. They started making two different piles: “Oh, I already know this,” and “Oh, but I don’t know.” They started discussing these things, asking, “Onto which pile should I put this?”

Then, I remembered a game called The Blind Side, created by David Gray and his colleagues. It’s part of a book called Gamestorming. In this game, players sort sticky notes into four categories: the knowns, the don’t-know-knowns, the known-don’t-knows, and the unknown-unknowns. We adapted the labels to make them clearer. On our board, we added the pronoun “we”: “We know that we know,” or “We know that we don’t know.” This made the subject of the knowledge clearer. We weren’t talking about the knowledge of one individual; we were referring to the shared knowledge of the studio. Then a new question arose: if someone knows something, do the others also know it? Well, they could know—someone just needed to share it.

Coming back to self-management, in that approach, workers need to know the history of their tools. Otherwise, they may be hetero-managed through those tools. I know that Azadeh and Lucia have done a lot of work on studying the background of The Blind Side game, but not all of you are aware of it. That’s why I’ll share a bit of this information here.

The game was designed based on what we now call the Rumsfeld/Žižek matrix. Donald Rumsfeld, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense, became widely known in the history of knowledge management for his infamous explanation of why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. He explained it with the idea of “unknown unknowns”—a concept he used to justify the invasion. A lot of journalists believed he was bamboozling the media, and indeed he was. Here are his actual words:

Reports that say something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns—there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns—that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Now, back to my words. You can justify almost anything using that explanation, right? Why did you do something? You can just reproduce that same discourse for any reason. It doesn’t say much of substance, yet it sounds wise. Rumsfeld embraced the idea further, putting it in the title of his biographic book Known and Unknown: A Memoir. He basically acknowledge the bamboozling reputation he got. Yet, his reputation is far worse than that. This man has been accused of responsibility for the deaths of millions of people. Some even consider him a war criminal because the Iraq war was largely unfounded. All those claims about chemical and biological weapons—suggesting they might exist or even worse weapons that “they didn’t even know existed”—turned out to be baseless.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld takes a tour of the Abu Ghraib Detention Center in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, on May 13, 2004. Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard B. Myers are in Iraq to visit the troops in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib. DoD photo by Tech. Sgt. Jerry Morrison Jr., U.S. Air Force. (Released)Iraq had a dictator trying to hold the country together. After the U.S. invasion, the country never regained its previous level of economic activity or sovereignty. Even today, Iraq and much of the Middle East remain in a fragile political state, partly because of that war. Rumsfeld used this seemingly wise but ultimately empty tool to make things sound simple and true, even when they weren’t.

Some analysts believe Rumsfeld got the idea from the Johari window, which was being used by NASA and other government agencies at the time. He likely heard about or saw a presentation involving the Johari window. The Johari window already included the concept of knowledge in relation to the self and others. It helps people distinguish between what they know, what they don’t know, and what others know. It also highlights what nobody knows. That’s why the Johari window was created in the first place.

Looking at Rumsfeld’s discourse and actions, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek criticized him in an article, arguing that Rumsfeld was undoubtedly trying to bamboozle the public. However, Žižek also pointed out something even more powerful and neglected than the “unknown unknowns”—the “unknown knowns.” Unknown knowns are the things we don’t know that we know but act on every day. For example, ideology. Ideology has long been a central topic for Žižek. Beyond the article I mentioned, he explores this idea in his excellent documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. I highly recommend watching it—it’s fun, engaging, and deeply insightful. Watch it together if you can; it’s worth it.

He’s basically explaining or analyzing some very famous scenes in the history of cinema through a critique of ideology. He’s not saying that ideology is something we should get rid of, like some people believe when they assume ideology is always bad. Instead, he argues that ideology is fundamental to who we are. We are ideological beings, so it’s important to understand the ideologies we rely on when we speak or act. That’s essentially Žižek’s contribution to philosophy, communication science, and even design. He even wrote an article about ideology in design.

Coming back to our topic, the “unknown knowns” are particularly meaningful for design education because we often rely on tacit knowledge—or unarticulated knowledge. I can’t go too deep into this here, but let me give you a practical definition of tacit knowledge: if I can’t explain why I’ve done something, but I can still do it, I have tacit knowledge of that activity. Unarticulated knowledge means even I can’t put it into words, my knowledge still exists.

Tacit knowledge is even more critical for co-design. There’s an excellent book by Elizabeth Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers called Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design. It’s one of the most practical and insightful books on co-design. The book features a model on its cover that frames co-design as an approach to eliciting tacit knowledge. The authors argue that co-design can help tacit knowledge become explicit or facilitate the socialization of tacit knowledge—transmitting it to others through collaborative making, without it ever needing to become explicit.

For example, when we play games or build things using LEGO or other materials, as we do here in this studio, we’re engaging with tacit knowledge. That’s one of the reasons we use playful materials and approaches: to tap into knowledge that’s not easily articulated in words. Is it possible, then, to support self-management using a tool originally conceived for hetero-management, like the Rumsfeld-Žižek matrix? Of course—it’s possible, provided we appropriate it critically, adapting or hacking the tool when necessary.

Here’s how we implemented it in our elective. We had a board on the wall that we updated at the end of every class. As we progressed with this matrix, the students decided to add another quadrant. In one corner, they wrote down things they knew but didn’t want to know. They recognized: “We know that we don’t want to know these things.” For example, they didn’t want to know about marketing, app development, CNC and 3D printing, or the “right way” to frame or define what they were doing. These topics came from other sources in their studies, and they felt exhausted by them.

In this particular elective, they could avoid those topics because they had self-management processes in place. At some point, after filling out this board many times, we realized that we knew more as a collective than as individuals. Because each person may have put one sticky note here, but as a collective, we put many sticky notes together. And wow, we have so much that we know that we know. That’s a wealth. That’s abundance. That’s something we can tap into if we need it in the future.

So, we started to hinge on some critical pedagogy principles laid out by bell hooks in her book, Teaching to Transgress. In that book, she says that if someone in a learning community knows something, it doesn’t mean that everyone has to know it or that everyone has to have the same kind of knowledge. What if we think about the learning community as a resource that we can tap into? We can reach out to people in that learning community if we want to learn something new. In that way, everyone can learn and know something different.

It’s a very profound way of thinking about education. Most of the time, education—especially in the banking style denounced by Paulo Freire—tries to standardize knowledge so that everyone has the same minimum basic understanding. That is very violent because a lot of the knowledge that people already have is not recognized as knowledge at all. Students basically have to forget everything they learned before and replace it with the standard curricular knowledge.

What bell hooks and other critical pedagogy scholars like Paulo Freire devised was a way of learning together as a community. That doesn’t mean everyone should know the same things and lose individuality. Instead, the learning community acknowledge that people have different knowledge, and the goal is to reach a point where everyone knows differently. The goal is not to homogenize knowledge.

Here’s how we fostered a learning community. Students could take initiative to share their knowledge whenever someone was curious about it through many ways. The simplest was the student lecture. For example, an undergraduate student would say, “Oh, you want so badly to learn this? There’s a student here who knows something about infrastructure.” And then that student would give a lecture on infrastructure.

And, of course, for that student, it was also a teaching experience they were gaining, not in the same way as you’d gain experience if you were a teacher. The person could experience teaching in a lighter way. We often had workshops after those lectures and dialogues. When a professor like me is teaching, I cannot avoid being associated with the authority that this knowledge comes from. But when another student is teaching or giving a lecture, it creates more openings and possibilities for questioning and debating what is being brought to the table.

One of the workshops involved reading and writing a political manifesto about design. We decided to write this manifesto using cloth. We assembled and wove together a parangolé, an artistic fashion item created by Hélio Oiticica to emphasize the importance of peripheral participation in art. The parangolé was also one of the earliest examples of participatory art—not just in Brazil, but in general. Oiticica is very well known in that field. We brought this concept into design as a means to express the necessity of compiling very different political visions together.

When we wrote our political statements—the things we wanted to speak to the world—we noticed that some students were writing things very much aligned with Bolsonaro and his right-wing supporters. These students were also in the class and felt they had the space to speak up. We had, thus, left-wing and right-wing students writing completely opposite political statements. For example, some students wrote things like “Power to the oppressed,” while another wrote, “Doing things correctly,” “Following the rules,” and “Be a nice citizen.” We compiled all of these statements together, and the resulting work became strange as it represented very different ideologies put together. Still that’s what democracy is about. So, we celebrated it.

We even wrote a paper about this because the resulting aesthetics were monstrous—it was very strange. We decided this was intentional, and we liked it. We appreciated the fact that it didn’t resemble modern design at all. You’ve already spoken and discussed this with Rafaela Angelon, the author of that paper, so you know a bit about the background story. Now you’ll learn what happened after the events described in that paper.

After we had the manifesto experience, something noteworthy happened: the manifesto was stolen. The manifesto was placed on a statue at the center of the school, but the next day it was gone. We asked the institution where it was, spoke with security, and even asked the cleaning staff—nobody knew. It became clear to us that someone, guided by political motives, had censored our artwork. This wasn’t vandalism after all—we didn’t destroy the statue. We simply added a thoughtful touch to spark a debate at the campus.

Anyway, we decided what to do next—what kinds of other interventions we would create on campus—that would remain longer. The most important idea that came out of that was establishing a laboratory for new interventions like this one—a metadesign approach. Instead of designing one thing, we would design many things by creating a laboratory.

The students called it COISA, which means “things” in Portuguese, and it stands for Collaborative of Social Innovation and Autonomy. Here, you see a new word entering the vocabulary. It sits alongside social innovation, which was already part of the class title. The students began thinking about autonomy in terms of anarchy and self-management. Unfortunately, the pandemic in 2020 interrupted that process. However, the Design & Oppression network, which was founded in response to the pandemic, reframed—or let’s say drifted—the project in a new direction, focusing explicitly on fighting oppression.

Many students who joined the class in 2019 also participated in the online activities of the Design and Oppression network. Later, they contributed to the founding of the Laboratory of Design Against Oppression (LADO) as a local hub of the Design and Oppression Network. We had marvelous discussions online in our Discord server, and we wanted to bring those kinds of debates, dialogues, and critical making activities to the campus. That’s why we founded LADO. Initially, I worked with Marco Mazzarotto and Claudia Bordin, the other two co-founders of this initiative, to consolidate the laboratory. We shared a room with other activities, and the students who joined the studio critically reflected on how they learn how to learn and design how to design.

At LADO, instead of focusing on specific skills like 3D sketching or “thinking like a designer,” design students developed self-knowledge—knowledge of themselves—which is much more valuable. In self-knowledge, knowing and being are the same, which is an authentic existence: I am what I know, and I know what I am. Now think about the opposite of this: I don’t know who I am, or I know what I’m not. These are inauthentic existences, where you don’t feel comfortable—you don’t feel like you’re in the right place, the right time, the right body, or whatever it may be. Self-knowledge is that moment where you come to terms with your history, the history of your body, the history of people like you, the history of your family, and your people. All of this comes together to help you be yourself all the time.

Out of this reflection—tacitly at the time, because I can articulate it now but we couldn’t then—we ended up designing the Crisis Deck. Some of you have already used it here in our studio. It’s an exemplary project of harnessing self-knowledge in the studio, and it came directly from that elective. In 2022, when LADO was already up and running, this elective became associated with LADO. Every student who subscribed to the elective knew they could collaborate with LADO on their projects. Here, you see a variety of experiments we conducted to better understand and explore the dimension of alterity in design—the role of engaging with the “other” through design—and how the self becomes clearer to the designer when they engage with non-designers or with their own non-designer side.

In the first picture, you see games played with mirrors—specifically theatrical mirrors—using techniques from the Theater of the Oppressed. Then, we visited a social movement incubator and observed their work with the beekeeping movement. Later, when we reflected on Afro-Brazilian religious traditions, Rafaella introduced us to the practice of weaving a patua, a Yoruba amulet. She explained that patua is a way of connecting to one’s ancestry, honoring one’s ancestors, and creating something that ties back to the community and place. We also played a board game about colonization. It was fascinating because it showed how mindsets change when someone has too much power in their hands.

This reminds me of the Squid Game serial and the way people’s behavior becomes mean and selfish due to the rules of the game. It is another example of the impact of design, right? We design those rules. And once again, we’re talking about interfaces. By the end of the course, we started using Lego Serious Play and other materials to explore how we could design something to support critical self-knowledge.

The following slides advances further into what we were modeling. The students discovered that the university does not encourage interaction with “the other.” On one hand, the university acts like a gatekeeper, distinguishing between what is true and false knowledge. All other knowledge traditions outside the university are labeled “non-academic” or invalid. As a result, designers trained at the university begin to see themselves as gods—or deus in Latin. They started playing with this concept and coined the term deusigner, which means a “god-like designer.” It refers to a person who thinks of themselves as an enlightened creative but remains staring at a wall, unable to truly see anything.

You can see the model from the other side—how the penguin humorously expresses this contradiction. The penguin is trying to look out the window, but the university won’t let it read the world. The penguin expresses that contradiction in a lively and humorous way. It’s trying to look out the window, but the university is essentially preventing it by elevating its ego above the eyesight.

The problem with this particular design education program is that while it could entertain the students, those who were critically minded—who understood what was going on and wanted to do something different—were limited to studying design history. They could only analyze what past designers had done against oppression or to create a more just society.

But what happens when you want to go beyond studying history and actually make history now? There was a clear gap. The university was primarily focused on training designers to fulfill roles in industry, meeting the demand for new designers. However, students noticed another demand coming from social movements. The university could show students that they could work with social movements. In fact, there are people earning wages paid by social movements and NGOs. It’s rare, but these positions do exist in Brazil.

The issue isn’t a shortage of positions—it’s that most designers don’t even try to engage with social movements. As part of the democratic process of self-management, social movements need to recognize the importance of having a designer on their team and institutionalize that role. This means they need to hire designers to support their activities. If designers don’t join social movements and advocate for this role, those positions will never exist. Someone has to take the first step.

Students wanted to create a tool to raise critical consciousness about these possibilities. They decided on a card deck, possibly inspired by my own card deck collection and the simplicity of the format. A card deck could be designed within the timeframe available in the course. We started by analyzing the existing card decks in my collection back in Brazil. Today, my collection here in the U.S. is even larger, and I recently bought a new case for it. The meta-toolkit—a toolkit of toolkits—is growing, and there’s room for more additions.

One particular card deck that became especially inspirational for us was a traditional tarot deck. The students were captivated by the images: “Wow, these pictures are so ambiguous and meaningful. They offer so many possibilities for interpretation”. We decided to go for it. If we want to support students in this existential crisis of not knowing what to do—whether to go into industry, join a social movement, start a new company, or something else—they could use this card deck during their senior year.

The students began by interviewing their colleagues and peers. They organized the interview data using the sympathy map, which is an altered version of the empathy map—one of the most famous Gamestorming activities. Empathy maps are commonly used in design research, design thinking, UX design, and similar fields. They focus on designing for the other. However, in this case, the students were designing for themselves. That’s why empathy wasn’t the best framing. They reframed it as sympathy, focusing on what they had in common instead of emphasizing differences.

Afterward, the students modeled the most common crises they identified in the sticky notes using Lego Serious Play. Although I had the Duplo system available, I preferred to use traditional small bricks because we needed detailed expressions for this activity. The students were essentially prototyping images. The goal was to create images that, just by looking at them, would convey a sense of the crisis—giving viewers an ambiguous yet meaningful feeling, similar to the effect of tarot cards. We prototyped and photographed these images in a single session that lasted almost three hours, which is incredibly fast for a co-design project. By the end, we had a prototype that we tested the following week.

An important feature of this card deck is that it has two sides. Each side represents one aspect of the crisis, and you’re supposed to flip through the cards, explore the oppositions between the two sides, and figure out what they mean for you. Once the card deck was complete, the students began testing it with other peers—senior students who weren’t enrolled in the class. I also started using it in my supervision activities. Whenever a new student started a project at LADO—particularly their final work—I would use these cards. The cards helped students think about an existential crisis they were experiencing at the time and encouraged them to design a project that would either fulfill or help them overcome that crisis.

The goal wasn’t just to address their own crises but to connect with and help others who were experiencing similar challenges. This allowed students to identify with like-minded peers or those in similar contexts. This process is somewhat akin to asking questions about positionality, but in this case, the focus was on a specific shared contradiction. Two students who participated in the tests as subjects later asked about the project. They said, “Hey, Fred, is this project still going on? Who’s going to finalize the prototype?” I told them, “Well, the students who started it are gone. The semester is over. Would you like to pick up the project and continue?” They were excited: “Wow, great idea, let’s do it.” Since it’s an open-source project under Creative Commons, they could actually continue the design.

They began sketching many alternatives—forms and shapes to convey the same messages—instead of relying on the Lego pictures, which were cumbersome. Slowly but surely, they developed a visual language. They drew heavily from icon design and principles of information design. Then, they went back to other students who hadn’t participated before. They organized a workshop where they discussed the cards and created a kind of pedagogical approach to reflect on shared existential crises.

They didn’t assign names or labels to the cards but were interested in the kinds of labels students came up with for the images. These labels changed after they watched the session recordings. As you can see, the research became more rigorous when they took over. In 2024, last year, they published a paper about this crisis deck. The paper detailed the history behind the project, including its roots in critical pedagogy and the Theater of the Oppressed. This card deck is now part of our meta-toolkit here at the MXD studio. Some of you have already used these cards.

I encourage you to try them out. In a minute, I’ll show you where they’re stored. It’s not a finalized project—there’s still work to be done. For example, the deck currently includes only 10 crises, but more could be added with additional research. It could also have a better finish. This is an open-source project, so you’re welcome to continue developing it if you’d like.

I also took these cards to the DRS 2024 Boston Doctoral Consortium, where I gave a keynote on existential crises as a doctoral researcher. At the end of my talk, I presented the card deck as an example of a tool researchers could use to find a fulfilling topic—one that leads to self-knowledge, not just academic knowledge. I explained that this wasn’t about producing knowledge that ends up in a library without impact—it’s about knowledge that changes your life in some way. Interestingly, I asked the audience, “While looking at these cards, please stand up if you feel like you’re undergoing such an existential crisis.” It turned out that one card, in particular, was very popular.

To wrap up: the self-managed studio produced self-knowledge. Students realized they weren’t just individuals; they were also part of a collective design body. When I say self-management, I’m not talking about individual management. I’m talking about the self as us. This is the foundation of practice behind self-conscious design—or designing the self in and for itself.

Now, I’m being very Hegelian here, so it might be difficult to understand what I mean. But that’s okay. If you repeat it in your mind many times, you might eventually get a different meaning from it—and that’s fine. Designing the self in and for itself means moving away from designing the other for another. Who is the “other” that we usually design for? The user. And who is the “another”? The manager.

In a hetero-management system, we design users for managers. Essentially, we’re helping managers exploit users. But in self-conscious design, we design in ourselves for ourselves, fully conscious of who we are. That’s what it means. Diagrammatically, this can be conveyed as follows: there are interfaces at the center, workers on the top and bottom, and users on the left and right.

You might ask, “Where are the designers? How should we position ourselves in self-management and self-conscious design if there are no place for designers?” In self-management, designers create interfaces as workers. That’s already well established. If you want to join self-management as a boss, you haven’t understood what it’s about—you need to be a worker to engage in self-management. Similarly, in self-conscious design, designers create interfaces as users. All right, folks. You can check the references later if you want to explore these ideas in greater depth.

References

CrimethInc. Work. (2011). CrimethInc.

Bonsiepe, G. (1999). Interface: An approach to design. Jan van Eyck Akademie.

Chaplin, Charlie. Modern times. Beverly Hills, CA: United Artists, 1936.

Gray, D. Brown, S. and Macanufo, J. (2011). Gamestorming. O’Reilly Media.

Rumsfeld, D. (2011). Known and Unknown: A Memoir. Sentinel.

Luft, J., & Ingham, H. (1955). The Johari window, a graphic model of interpersonal awareness. Proceedings of the western training laboratory in group development, 246.

Žižek, S. (2006). Philosophy, the “unknown knowns,” and the public use of reason. Topoi, 25, 137-142.

Elizabeth, B. N. S., & Stappers, P. J. (2021). Convivial toolbox.

Hooks, B. (2014). Teaching To Transgress. Routledge.

Angelon, R., & van Amstel, F. (2021). Monster aesthetics as an expression of decolonizing the design body. Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 20(1), 83-102.

Zukowski, Alanis Louise de Mello; Kosake, Maria Vitória Ribeiro; Amstel, Frederick Marinus Constant van; “Codificação gráfica de crises existenciais: reflexões sobre um experimento de educação crítica em design”, p. 1756-1763 . In: Anais do 11º Congresso Internacional de Design da Informação e 11º Congresso Nacional de Iniciação Científica em Design | CIDI+CONGIC 2023. São Paulo: Blucher, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5151/cidiconcic2023-121_649945

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Quest 1 course (open to all majors), School of Art + Art History, University of Florida, 45 hours, Spring 2025

Letter Forms, Delmo Dela Cruz (2008)This course asks: How does design work as a tool for shaping, understanding, and communicating identity—“the fact of being who or what a person is”—in everyday life? Designed environments, objects, and interfaces allow us to shape the “facts” of how we see ourselves and others. Today, design organizes how we navigate public spaces and digital environments, impacts the way we understand everything from our political positions to our brand preferences, and positions us within both our local communities and the global commodities marketplace. Specific places, times, and cultures influence how humans understand and use design, and knowledge of these environmental contexts allows us to recognize our own context(s) as particular rather than universal. With a diverse and global range of design artifacts as our case studies, we’ll interrogate issues related to form (the visual and physical qualities of design), function (what design is used for, and how), and philosophy (the underlying conceptual and ethical frameworks that inform the design process). Readings, viewings, discussions, critical making activities, and design-thinking exercises provide a shared framework for investigation. Through these, we’ll seek to understand the interactions between design and identity in order to become more informed and empowered makers and users of design.

Learning experienceThis Quest course immerses students in an embodied and reflective exploration of design and identity in everyday life. This exploration consists mainly of observing and sketching things and places in visual diaries, actively engaging in dialogical culture circles, and critically analyzing real-world designs encountered in students’ environments. Participating in these activities encourages students to slow down, pay close attention to their surroundings, and physically engage with the design elements that structure their daily lives. This approach prioritizes reading worlds over reading words. However, selected academic texts, documentaries, and podcasts are prescribed as a means to expand reading the world. Self-reflection is at the heart of the course. The sustained practice of documenting and analyzing observations in visual diaries, sharing insights during culture circles, and synthesizing learning into a visual essay puts self-reflection into practice. Through these embodied and reflective practices, students develop a nuanced understanding of design’s role in everyday life and their capacity to engage critically and creatively with it to shape their identities, individually and collectively, as part of a world of many worlds. As a side effect of this course, students will have an overview of the Design Studies field and a selected range of practical design skills they may develop: observation, visualization, problematization, and dialogue.

Assignments1) Dialogical participation

In this course, each in-person session will include a culture circle—a participatory space inspired by Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, designed to foster dialogue and critical reflection. These culture circles will allow students to discuss their observations of design in everyday life, drawing from their visual diaries and engaging with their peers in small and larger group discussions. The goal is to collaboratively explore design’s visible and invisible dimensions, enriching our understanding of its role in shaping culture, identity, and society. Dialogue is fundamental to understanding the interplay between design and identity in everyday life because these phenomena are inherently relational and contextual. To receive a full grade for this assignment, students must:

Bring their visual diaries to class
Share their observations
Express their views in a democratic manner
Ask thoughtful questions
Actively listen while others are speaking

Students who miss an in-person session can still get the dialogical participation grade if they submit a conversation history with 20 prompts minimum with ChatGPT or NaviGator Chat about the session theme. The first prompt should either upload the reading files or copy and paste some articles content so that the artificial intelligence learn about what you are going to discuss.

Both in-person and virtual dialogical participation must respect the following UF Policies (see their definitions below): Generative Artificial Intelligence, Academic Freedom and Responsibility, Academic integrity, Academic honesty, Disruptive behavior, Non-Discrimination Policy, Title IX, In Class Recording, and others that apply.

2) Visual diary

The visual diary is a key physical (not digital) tool in this course, designed to help students hone their observational skills by documenting the role of design in everyday life. This assignment focuses not on the technical quality or aesthetic beauty of the sketches, but on the depth and thoughtfulness of their observations. The purpose is to cultivate an ability to see and analyze the often-overlooked ways in which design shapes identity, culture, and daily interactions.

Students will use their visual diaries to capture instances of design they encounter—objects, spaces, systems, and interactions—through sketches, notes, and reflections. These sketches, better framed as tools for framing and recording observations, serve as a medium for exploring the relationships between design and identity. No previous drawing skills are required, as the emphasis is on what is observed and interpreted, not how it is drawn. The visual diary is meant to encourage critical engagement with the designed world, helping students to slow down, notice details, and connect their findings to the themes of the course. These entries will also serve as a foundation for the culture circle discussions, where students will share and collectively reflect on their observations.

3) Visual essay

For this final assignment, students will write a visual essay of 2000 words + 10 pictures that critically examines how design has shaped their everyday lives and reflects on how it could be different in the future. Drawing on insights from their visual diaries, course materials, and personal experiences, students will explore the visible and invisible dimensions of design in shaping their identities, routines, and interactions.

The visual essay must integrate visual elements—such as sketches from the visual diary, photographs, or other artworks—alongside the written content. These images should not be relegated to an appendix but incorporated seamlessly into the essay, extending and deepening the analysis presented in the text. Images should be appropriately captioned and positioned to enhance the narrative, illustrating key points or providing additional layers of meaning.

Semester outline01/13/2025 – Design as culture

The first week is an overview of the learning journey ahead. The course starts from the fundamental idea that design plays a significant role in any human culture, particularly in giving form to social identities and personalities. This is not a standard view; most academic courses and publications focus on design as a professional know-how. Here, we will understand design as something everyone can and is already doing. To grasp this uncommon frame of reference, students need to distance themselves from what they have heard, seen, or done about design.

In the first break-out session, teaching assistants will provide a guided tour through the course syllabus and Canvas space, answer questions, and show examples of the materials needed for the assignments, mainly the visual diary. They will also host a class discussion around 10 images created by artist Francisco Brennand for Paulo Freire’s famous literacy program in Brazil. These images are explained in his book Education for Critical Consciousness, which students are advised not to read until the class is over. Since these images have no right or wrong interpretations, it is best not to know what Freire and Brennand wanted to convey by them. Later, students can look at and compare their classmates’ interpretations with the original goal. In addition to this image-text association, students are encouraged tolisten to the Design Observer podcast episode with Dr. Frederick van Amstel before or, at the latest, right after the class. All required readings need to be completed before the in-person session so they may inform the interactive learning experiences.

Required reading/listening/watching for an expected self-study time of 70 minutes:

Moreau, Lee (Host); Cheng, Alicia; Van Amstel, Frederick; Noel, Lesley-Ann. (2023). Design As S1E1: Culture Part 1. 47 minutes. Design As [Audio podcast]. Design Observer.https://designobserver.com/design-as-s1e1-culture-part-1/
Freire, P. (2005). Education for critical consciousness. Continuum. Appendix, 55-75.

01/13/2025–01/20/2025: Martin Luther King Jr. day

01/21/2025–01/27/2025: Design culture as world-making

This week explores design’s cultural and existential dimensions, emphasizing its role in shaping the worlds we inhabit. Ben Highmore, Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, and Otl Aicher wrote very different but essential texts to understanding design culture as a world-making activity. Röyksopp’s “Remind Me” music video made by Studio H5 vividly illustrates these ideas, showcasing how design makes certain aspects of everyday life more visible or invisible. Due to the amount of information packed into each frame, replaying and pausing the video is required to get the best viewing experience. Students should take note of the frames they would like to discuss with the class in person by using the following format: Xmin Xsec. Students can also print selected frames and analyze them in their visual diary. In class, teaching assistants will load that frame and facilitate/complicate the discussion supported by the readings.

Required reading/listening/watching for an expected self-study time of 90 minutes:

Röyksopp. (2002). Remind Me music video. 5 min. Studio H5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQpXcLD4wHk
Highmore, B. (2019). Taste and attunement: Design culture as world making. In: Julier, G., Folkmann, M. N., Skou, N. P., Jensen, H. C., & Munch, A. V. (Eds). Design culture: Objects and approaches, Bloomsbury Publishing. p.28-38.
Colomina, B., & Wigley, M. (2016). Are we human? Notes on an archaeology of design. Chapter 1: The mirror of design. Zürich, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016. 9-19.
Aicher, O. (1994). World as Design: Writings of Design. John Wiley & Sons. 179-189.

01/28/2025-02/03/2025 – Reading the designed world

This week introduces Paulo Freire’s concept of “reading the world,” which reframes literacy as more than the ability to decode written words. For Freire, reading is an act of interpreting and critically engaging with the world around us. To explore this idea in action, we watch Peru: Literacy for Social Change (1978), a documentary that illustrates Freire’s critical pedagogy in practice. The film follows educators working with peasants on a Peruvian cooperative cotton farm, using literacy as a tool for organizing to build community houses.

Jane Fulton Suri’s Thoughtless Acts?’s excerpt connects Freire’s ideas to design. By engaging with social scientists like her, designers at IDEO (a major design firm), have learned to read the world before drawing their ideas. Suri’s approach highlights how everyday, intuitive interactions with objects and environments reveal the unspoken needs and behaviors of people. Together, these perspectives challenge students to see design as a process of critical engagement with the world, rooted in understanding and transforming the realities of daily life.

Students should carry their visual diaries to all in-person gatherings from this week onwards. In this session, students may share their childhood world memories like Freire does in his article. Besides drawing from memory in their visual diaries, students can attach copies of their drawings and photographs. Questions to be explored: How did you learn to read your world? What was your world like? What are the significant differences to the world you now live in?

Required reading/listening/watching for an expected self-study time of 70 minutes:

Strobel, Hans R. and Osterreid, Susanne. (1978). Peru: Literacy for Social Change [Documentary]. 31 minutes. Osterreid Productions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSgBkbJbzRs
Freire, P. (1983). The importance of the act of reading. Journal of education, 165(1), 5-11.
Suri, J. F. (2005). Thoughtless acts?: Observations on intuitive design. Final chapter: Framing thoughtless acts. Chronicle Books. 162-180.

02/04/2025-02/10/2025: Culture circles and the social design of everyday life

When one reads the real world and understands its underlying contradictions, a seed of hope for changing the world is planted. From this seed, the field of social design emerged in the 1960s. This week introduces the work of Victor Papanek, a pioneer in the field, and the work of Dr. Frederick Van Amstel, one of his many contemporary followers. Professor Alison Clarke presents Papanek’s vision for social design in the video Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design. It is worth reading Papanek’s in his own words. Hence, we have the preface to his Design for the Real World here. Papanek critiques traditional design practices, arguing that design should serve human needs rather than perpetuate wasteful consumption. His philosophy calls for socially and ecologically responsible design that prioritizes the well-being of marginalized communities.

Building on this foundation, we explore how Dr. Frederick van Amstel implements these principles in his pedagogy and research. In the podcast Design Pedagogy, the Body, and Solidarity in Designing Commons, Dr. van Amstel discusses how participatory methods like Theater of the Oppressed foster solidarity and shared ownership in design education. In Social Design at the Brink: Hopes and Fears, coauthored by Dr. van Amstel, there is a description of an application of the Culture Circles method devised by Paulo Freire to discuss contemporary social design issues. This method underscores much of the pedagogical approach for this class. In the in-person session, the teaching assistants will present and discuss a few social design projects they are working on as part of their graduate research.

Required reading/listening/watching for an expected self-study time of 90 minutes:

Design Museum Den Bosch. (2022). Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design with Alison Clarke . 5 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E_4d9vxuBA
Papanek, V. (2005). Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. Ix-xiv.
Poderi Giacomo (host); Marttila, Sanna-Maria (host); Saad-Sulonen, Joanna (host); van Amstel, Frederick. Design pedagogy, the body, and solidarity in designing commons. Commoning Design & Designing Commons . 46 minutes. https://fredvanamstel.com/blog/design-pedagogy-the-body-and-solidarity-in-designing-commons
Fonseca Braga, M., M. C. van Amstel, F., and Perez, D. (2024) Social Design at the Brink: Hopes and Fears., in Gray, C., Hekkert, P ., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1538

02/11/2025-02/17/2025: Observing and sketching design in everyday life

This week consolidates the most important skill to be developed and evaluated in this course: observing, reflecting, and sketching design in everyday life. First, Georges Perec’s essay Approaches to What? Introduces the concept of “extraordinary”—the seemingly mundane aspects of daily existence that we often take for granted, like design. Perec challenges us to find meaning in the ordinary, framing it as a rich site for inquiry and interpretation. His perspective encourages us to slow down and pay attention to the unnoticed details that shape social life.

Inspired by Perec, Lynne Chapman, a fine artist, assisted a group of sociologists in her residency at the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, University of Manchester, to use drawing as a means to grasp everyday life. Most of them thought they did not know how to draw. However, as Lynne explained in the video Unfolding Stories, any simple doodle could do it. Her chapter for the Mundane Methods book, coauthored with one of these sociologists, describes the collaboration in detail. The final section includes an exercise suggestion that students of this class should execute in their visual diaries to read the designed world. Andrew Causey’s book chapter, Dare to See and Dare to Draw, encourages even the most insecure to observe culture through sketching. In the in-person session, graduate teaching assistants will suggest other exercises. Students who experience creativity blocks while trying to sketch can reach out to the assistants during office hours for personalized instruction.

Required reading/listening/watching for an expected self-study time of 100 minutes:

Perec, G. (2002). Approaches to what?[1973]. In: Highmore, Ben (Ed.).The everyday life reader, 176-178.
University of Manchester Sociology department (2016). Unfolding Stories: Sketching the everyday . 15 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAK1PhY-pyo
Heath, S., & Chapman, L. (2020). The art of the ordinary: Observational sketching as method. In Mundane Methods (pp. 103-120). Manchester University Press.
Causey, A. (2017). Drawn to see: Drawing as an ethnographic method. Chapter 3: Dare to see and dare to draw. University of Toronto Press. 49-70.

02/18/2025-02/24/2025: Sensing the rhythms of everyday life

Observing everyday life without a specific focus is hard. In this week, we are going to focus on rhythms. Before discussing the role of design in shaping rhythms in the following weeks, we pay attention to the role of technology in its broadest sense (not just digital). We begin with Dr. Frederick van Amstel’s lecture, Dancing Algorhythms in the Theater of the Techno-Oppressed, which examines how algorithms disrupt the human body (circadian) rhythms. Next, we watch Grasping the Rhythms of the City by Dr. Dawn Lyon, which takes us to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to observe urban rhythms in practice. Produced as part of the University of Kent’s Urban Ethnography Summer School, this short film demonstrates rhythmanalysis—a method for studying city life’s flows, patterns, and interruptions. Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Regulier’s seminal text The Rhythmanalytical Project provides the theoretical foundation for rhythmanalysis, examining the interplay of natural, social, and technological rhythms.

Finally, we watch Koyaanisqatsi, a cinematic masterpiece juxtaposing natural and human-made rhythms. Directed by Godfrey Reggio and scored by Philip Glass, the film provides a meditative exploration of the impact of technological progress on the environment and human existence. Students are encouraged to take visual notes while watching this movie and going through the entire week. In the in-person session, teaching assistants will share examples and exercises of sketching everyday life rhythms.

Required reading/listening/watching for an expected self-study time of 120 minutes:

Van Amstel. Frederick M. C. (2023). Dancing Algorhythms in the Theater of the Techno-Oppressed . 11 minutes. https://fredvanamstel.com/talks/dancing-algorhythms-in-the-theater-of-the-techno-oppressed
Lyon, Dawn. (2019). Grasping the rhythms of the city: doing rhythmanalysis at the Arc de Triomphe, Paris . 5 minutes. Kent School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBOD089o5WE
Lefebvre, H., Régulier, C., & Zayani, M. (1999). The rhythmanalytical project. Rethinking Marxism, 11(1), 5-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935699908685562
Reggio, G., & Glass, P. (1983). Koyaanisqatsi [movie]. 86 minutes. MGM Home Entertainment.https://tubitv.com/movies/302693/koyaanisqatsi (also available at Amazon Prime and MGM+ with no ads).

02/25/2025-03/03/2025: Visible designs: identity and difference

This week, we examine the contradiction between identity and difference as it manifests through design. Objects function as markers of identity, signifying shared belonging, yet they simultaneously differentiate individuals and groups, reinforcing social divisions. This dialectical tension shapes how objects are designed, used, and interpreted, making visible the broader social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. By engaging with this contradiction, we uncover how design mediates the forces that unite and divide society.

Gary Hustwit’s Objectified highlights how designers balance universal functionality and individual expression. The movie showcases objects that aim to connect users while reflecting personal identity. Adrian Forty’s chapter Differentiation in Design delves deeper into how design historically facilitated social distinction, particularly in consumer goods. Forty examines how objects have been imbued with meanings of status, class, and exclusivity, often through deliberate design strategies. Together, these materials challenge students to reflect in their visual diaries how their belongings and lack thereof include or exclude them in certain groups, communities, and spaces. The in-person session will consist of a discussion about the role of design in sustaining and distributing material privileges.

Required reading/listening/watching for an expected self-study time of 120 minutes:

Hustwit, Gary. (2009). Objectified: Manufactured Objects and their Designers [movie]. 65 minutes. https://www.kanopy.com/en/ufl/video/2931959 (requires UF’s VPN connection)
Forty, A. (1986). Objects of desire: designs and society 1750-1980. Chapter 4: Differentiation in Design. London: Thames and Hudson. 62-93.

03/03/2025-03/10/2025: Invisible designs: alienated work and everyday life

This week, we explore the invisible dimensions of design—those that structure our environments and interactions in often unnoticed ways. Invisible design shapes everyday life, from the systems behind urban infrastructure to the processes that regulate social behavior. However, this very invisibility can alienate individuals from the labor, intentions, and decisions that underpin their environments, leaving critical aspects of design’s influence obscured. Gary Hustwit’s Urbanized demonstrates how urban design embodies this invisibility. The film unveils the hidden strategies and compromises behind city planning, showing how transportation systems, public spaces, and urban layouts are designed to structure daily life without being consciously acknowledged. Lucius Burckhardt’s Design is Invisible essayextends this idea, emphasizing that the most impactful designs operate behind the scenes, embedded in the planning and systems that shape societal functions.

Finally, John Heskett’s introduction to Toothpicks and Logos reflects this week and the prior week, asking the foundational question: What is design? Is it visible, invisible, or both? Heskett avoids a single definition of design, instead presenting design as a complex and multifarious practice that mediates between purpose and form, intention and materiality. Students should take visual notes and pictures, attach product wrappings to their visual diaries, and collect any invisible designs they come across throughout the week. These will be shared with classmates in the in-person session, during which a map of the invisible design will be compiled.

Required reading/listening/watching for an expected self-study time of 120 minutes:

Hustwit, Gary. (2009). Urbanized: The Issues and Strategies Behind Urban Design [movie]. 85 minutes.https://www.kanopy.com/en/ufl/video/2874827 (requires UF’s VPN connection)
Burckhardt, L. (2017). Design is invisible: planning, education, and society. Birkhäuser. p. 15-26
Heskett, J. (2002). Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life. Chapter 1: What is design? Oxford University Press. p.2-11.

03/11/2025-03/17/2025 – Spring break

03/17/2025-03/24/2025: Visible designs with invisible consequences: Typography

This week, we explore the dialectical tension in typography (a.k.a. as fonts) as a design practice that is both visible in its forms and invisible in its broader cultural and political consequences. On one hand, typography conveys text. On the other hand, it conveys context: cultural identity, authority, and belonging. Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica examines the rise of a famous font as a global design standard, celebrated for its supposed clarity and neutrality. Kurt Campbell’s article The Sociogenic Imperative of Typography reflects on the failed attempt by South Africa to craft a new national identity through imported supposedly neutral typefaces after apartheid. Campbell shows how typography, rather than unifying, revealed the contradictions of a society grappling with its diverse and fractured identity.

Students are encouraged to explore these contradictions through their visual diaries by observing the expression of American multiculturalism in typography. Pay attention to how typefaces reflect cultural diversity or reinforce dominant narratives in your home (e.g., on packaging, books, or digital interfaces) and in public spaces (e.g., shop signs, billboards, or public transportation systems). Teaching assistants will provide technical details on analyzing a font in the in-person session.

Required reading/listening/watching for an expected self-study time of 120 minutes:

Hustwit, Gary. (2007). Helvetica: Typography, Graphic Design and Global Visual Culture [movie]. 80 minutes.https://www.kanopy.com/en/ufl/video/2874825 (requires UF’s VPN connection)
Kurt Campbell (2013) The Sociogenic Imperative of Typography, European Journal of English Studies, 17:1, 72-91, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2013.755002

03/25/2025-03/31/2025: Visible designs with invisible consequences: Toys

This week, we examine the contradiction inherent in toys as visible designs that simultaneously reveal and obscure their use to shape children’s and adults’ identities. Toys are not just objects of play; they are used as models for idealized selves and/or prejudiced others. Jason Godfrey’s Japan’s Obsession With Being Kawaii documentary introduces the power of cuteness in toy design, revealing how Kawaii aesthetics shape cultural expressions and norms. However, as L. Bow’s Racist Cute: Caricature, Kawaii-Style, and the Asian Thing article demonstrates, the seemingly benign aesthetics of cuteness can mask racial caricatures and reinforce stereotypes.

Finally, curator Dominique Jean-Louis walks us along the exhibition Black Dolls at The New York Historical Museum. She explains that while some Black dolls have historically perpetuated stereotypes, others have liberated Black children by providing affirming representations of their identity. The topsy-turvy doll is fascinating to grasp the contradiction behind the White-Black racial difference. Students are encouraged to remember, look at pictures, and draw from memory in their visual diaries how their childhood toys shaped who they were back then and now.

Required reading/listening/watching for an expected self-study time of 90 minutes:

Godfrey, Jason. (2022). Japan’s Obsession With Being Kawaii . 24 minutes. Beyond Documentary. Beyond Distribution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IODXpVVyU4
Bow, L. (2019). Racist cute: Caricature, kawaii-style, and the Asian thing. American Quarterly, 71(1), 29-58.https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2019.0002

The New York Historical. (2022). If These Dolls Could Talk: The Hidden History of Black Dolls . 6 minutes.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prNuSUjWa00

03/31/2025-04/07/2025: Visible designs with invisible consequences: Yards

This week, we challenge the notion that yards are natural spaces, revealing them instead as designed environments shaped by cultural ideals and ecological trade-offs. While often perceived as organic extensions of the home, yards are highly curated landscapes that reflect societal values about order, beauty, and property. However, these designs have hidden consequences, such as water overuse, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution. Roman Mars’ podcast episode Lawn Order from 99% Invisible offers a fascinating exploration of this topic, including the story of a Florida man sent to jail for not caring for his lawn. As a podcast dedicated to the hidden stories of everyday design, 99% Invisible is highly recommended for listening along following this course.

Joan I. Nassauer’s Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames is a design research that reconciles cultural aesthetics with ecological needs: creating landscapes that integrate natural, “messy” elements within visually “orderly” frames. This approach is exemplified in Flip My Florida Yard: The De Las Alas Family, a real-world transformation developed in partnership with the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS). Students are encouraged to walk around their neighborhoods, notice the gardens, yards, and lawns, and wonder: How do these designed environments create an identity for this place? When appropriate, sketch down some views and talk to neighbors about that. Which changes are considered possible or impossible concerning environmental sustainability? Students may share the contradictions they found using Lego Serious Play during the in-person session, a technique explained in Dr. Frederick van Amstel’s recorded lecture.

Required reading/listening/watching for an expected self-study time of 120 minutes:

Mars, Roman. (2015). Lawn Order [podcast episode]. 19 minutes. 99% Invisible. Episode 177.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/lawn-order/
Nassauer, J. I. (1995). Messy ecosystems, orderly frames. Landscape journal, 14(2), 161-170. https://doi.org/10.3368/lj.14.2.161
Crawford, Chad. (2023). Flip My Florida Yard – The De Las Alas Family . 21 minutes. S1E1. Florida Department of Environmental Protection and University of Florida IFAS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s2f7YJJTms
Van Amstel, Frederick M. C. (2023). Reading the world with Lego Serious Play . 30 minutes.https://fredvanamstel.com/talks/reading-the-world-with-lego-serious-play

05/07/2025-04/14/2025 – Design across worlds

At the end of this course, we consider design in other worlds, across worlds, and within many worlds. These two weeks are going to be the hardest of all to follow as they raise consciousness of worlds unlike the world(s) where this course is taking place. Since each instructor came to the United States of America from a different world, this is a great opportunity to reflect on such differences. First, we watch Hubert Sauper’s reflective documentary Epicentro, a poignant exploration of a Caribbean island grappling with the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. The depiction of everyday life in a place where people are constantly challenged to make do is illuminating. The chapter Coloniality of Making Design Philosophy by Van Amstel, Saito, and Gonzatto offers a deep reflection on the consequences and possibilities for design in such contexts. None of these references suggests clearly what to do with the remnants of colonialism, a suggestion reserved for the next and final week.

To prepare for this culture circle, students should take pictures, notes, and collect product labels around them. The question we are going to discuss is: where is your world made? US? China? Where else? Where is it designed? What are the implications of this design across worlds?

Required reading/listening/watching for an expected self-study time of 140 minutes:

Sauper, Hubert. (2020). Epicentro [movie]. 110 minutes. https://www.kanopy.com/en/ufl/video/11178020(requires UF’s VPN connection)
Van Amstel, F. M. C. Saito, C. Gonzatto, R. F. (forthcoming). Coloniality of making design philosophy. In: Verbeek, P., Secomandi, F. (Eds.) Design Philosophy after the Technology Turn. Bloomsbury Academic. 1-15.

04/14/2025-04/21/2025 – Designing a world of many worlds

In this final week, we confront the challenge of designing not just across multiple cultures but multiple worlds—distinct ways of knowing, being, and designing that may coexist in the pluriverse, a metaphor that suggests what the United States of America designed world(s) could be something else than a multicultural nation. We begin with the podcast Design as Pluriversal Design, hosted by Lee Moreau, and featuring Dr. Frederick van Amstel and Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel. Subsequently, we read Victor Udoewa and his colleagues speculative dialogue on the conditions for the pluriverse. Dr. Noel’s article Redesigning the Field complements these perspectives by proposing actionable steps to reimagine design education and practice as tools for embracing plurality. Together, these materials invite students to join the closing in-class debate on the transformations required to observe and design for a world of many worlds.

Required reading/listening/watching for an expected self-study time of 90 minutes:

Moreau, Lee (host). Leitão, Renata. Van Amstel, Frederick. Noel, Lesley-Ann. (2025). Design as Pluriversal Design. Design Observer. 43 minutes. https://designobserver.com/design-as-pluriverse/
Udoewa, V., Gutiérrez Borrero, A., Noel, L., Ruiz, A., Borchway, N.K., Lodaya, A.,and VAN AMSTEL, F.M.(2023) When Is the Pluriverse?, in Derek Jones, Naz Borekci, Violeta Clemente, James Corazzo, Nicole Lotz, Liv Merete Nielsen, Lesley-Ann Noel (eds.), The 7th International Conference for Design Education Researchers, 29 November – 1 December 2023, London, United Kingdom.https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2024.109
Noel, L. A. (2023). Redesigning the field. Arcos Design, 16(1 (Suplemento)), 72-86. https://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/arcosdesign/article/view/79288

04/21/2025-04/28/2025 – Exams

A week reserved for receiving feedback on the writing assignment.

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Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Smith, R. C., Amstel, F. V., & Botero, A. (2025). Decolonisation and Participatory Design. In Smith, R. C., Loi, D., Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Huybrechts, L. & Simonsen, J. (Eds.). Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Participatory Design. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003334330

Abstract: Decolonising design is increasingly a matter of concern in global design and technology research and practice. Decolonising discourses address the ongoing societal challenges of political, economic and racial justice rooted in coloniality and perpetuated within global Eurocentric structures and worldviews. In attempts to counter systemic biases, design and research communities call for diversity, equity and inclusion of the marginalised in collaborative design processes.

This chapter presents contributions from Participatory Design and decolonising movements and how they engage across four core strands: the anticolonial, postcolonial, decolonial and the pluriversal. Each of the strands addresses attempts to reconcile different worlds, knowledges and epistemologies that can contribute towards new framings and directions for (de)colonialites in Participatory Design. Based on our survey of literature and research cases on Participatory Design and decoloniality, we demonstrate how researchers, designers and users in diverse contexts across the globe are working with and adapting modes, concepts and methodologies. They provide significant contributions at different levels of theory or practice and generate new trajectories for diverse and inclusive forms of knowledge production. The final section discusses the challenges and potentials raised by and across the strands and appeals for a relational agenda in Participatory Design.

Contemporary debates on decolonisation in Participatory Design need to be understood within their past interrelations grounded in anticolonial movements and how historical and geopolitical issues continue to shape the conditions for design and knowledge creation. The chapter provides a lens that enables Participatory Design researchers to position themselves and engage with the possible pasts-presents-futures of these concerns, in support of sovereignty and self-determination of future-making. It provides a starting point for participatory researchers to engage with a relational agenda in which introspection, challenging epistemological hegemonies and responsibilities in situated actions are central to the wider decolonisation movements.

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Throughout the 20th century, there were many attempts to make design into a single and unified discipline, similar to (or even engulfing) architecture. These efforts failed as new design disciplines kept popping up and creating distinctive professions. The possibility of disciplinary unification under elusive labels like design studies became less and less realistic as designers embraced collaborative, participatory, and open approaches.

Designers wanted to be recognized as a discipline in multidisciplinary teams. Instead, they were called in by society to facilitate, complicate, or integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines. Design, as a mode of disembodied thinking, was then reconceptualized as an interdisciplinary activity, “the glue between all disciplines”, as Arne van Oosterom (and many other consultants) proclaimed, probably inspired by the 2005 interview of David Kelley by GK VanPatter.

This did not last either. Stark conflicts arise when mending the work of different disciplines. Disciplinary boundaries are typically laid out by their pioneers with no appreciation, recognition, or respect for those who have thought or made something in that same knowledge space before them. Most disciplines rise from visionaries who once looked above everyone else. Knowingly or not, they colonized people’s mental space pretty much like the metropolises colonized Indigenous territories as “unused lands”.

Disciplines rarely openly negotiate their boundaries and designers are in no position to act as interdisciplinary referees. After all, designers have no discipline of their own—at least not one recognized by other disciplines as a discipline (most see it as undisciplined art). Then, the most resourceful discipline prevails over the others, even if claiming interdisciplinarity.

To avoid the contradiction of intra-inter-disciplinarity, designers are recently experimenting with transdisciplinarity. Working across (or despite) disciplines seems more peaceful but it is not. What differentiates transdisciplinarity from interdisciplinarity (which also unfolds across disciplines) is the transcendence of discipline itself!

Who in the hell would think that disciplinary people would happily join a space where they would lose their disciplinary power? Even the best motivation for the greater good of (Noratlantic) humanity cannot persuade codesigners to collaborate despite disciplines. Disciplines always strike back.

The only way to keep a balance of forces is to have codesigners who embody non-disciplinary or non-academic knowledge present, like Indigenous people and other people kept apart from academia. Academics like to think of themselves as being caretakers of the entire knowledge of the history of (Noratlantic) humanity, yet they can only sit on top of a small fraction of it. Most of it has been ignored, erased, neglected, forgotten, or burnt down.

First of all, there are other humanities, or in other words, other ways of being human that aren’t covered by the Western notion of “humanity”—hence why designing for humanity is not transdisciplinary at all. Second of all, there are other (non-designerly!) ways of knowing that never end up written in a paper or manufactured into an industrial product.

Whenever disciplinary boundaries curtail the necessary knowledge to overcome a pressing contradiction in society, these need to be temporarily lifted or destroyed. For instance. Eugenics used to be a scientific discipline of human improvement that prevented society from overcoming the contradiction of racism. Even if disciplinary people still try to revamp it to design babies and surveillance systems, this is still considered to be a harmful pseudoscience.

What can designers do in such cases, if they are commonly associated with construction instead of destruction? Can designers, let’s say, destroy racism or systemic oppression in general? Can designers design against something instead of for something? As you can see in the previous links, I’ve been thinking (and doing something about) deeply about this.

Yes, I believe designers can do a lot, but they first need to overcome their inherited prejudice over transgression, an attitude consolidated and embodied by social movements. Once overcome, designers can then see that transdisciplinarity is transgression, a praxis that fundamentally challenges the existence of fixed disciplinary boundaries.

Make no mistake. Every academic discipline exists to control knowledge, which is not per se a bad thing. If disciplines could not overrule another, we would still have Eugenics (and we may have it back if current established disciplines do not stand against its new incarnations and traces left in other disciplines). Still, boundaries can, by themselves, be very oppressive.

In my transdisciplinary adventures, whenever I felt excluded and oppressed by a discipline, I’d jump to another and see if I could continue my work there. Sometimes, I’d return to the oppressive boundary, leave marks on its cracks, and indicate to other people how they can cross or break them. The freedom I seek cannot be contained by one single discipline, therefore, my adventure never ends.

Here is a recent story from my adventures. Earlier this year, I was invited by Cristina Zaga, Julieta Matos-Castaño, and Mascha van der Voort (former PhD supervisor) to join their DRS 2024 conversation. The title was Transdisciplinarity: Taking stock beyond buzzwords and outlining an agenda for design research. You can read the conversation report by following the link above.

In it, I spoke a few minutes about my vision of transdisciplinarity, summarized by them as such:

Dr. Frederick van Amstel (University of Florida) represented a perspective from pluriversal design, decolonial design and the politics of design related to matters of oppression. He introduced a figure sharing his “transdisciplinary adventures, moving from one discipline to another, eventually going through uncharted knowledge spaces, in a never-ending expansive spiral. Transdisciplinarity for me
is transgressing the disciplinary inward-facing linear movement of knowledge production” (Zaga et al., 2024).

After that, the attendants were divided into groups. The ones who flocked around my vision of transdisciplinarity as transgression had a surprising moment. Instead of the traditional speech-based conversation model, I invited them to experience transdisciplinarity with their full bodies. I told them that I had a Theater of the Techno-Oppressed workshop proposal rejected by the DRS 2024 committee. The proponents were me, Bibiana Serpa, and Fernando Secomandi, from the Design & Oppression Network. This is what we proposed:

The workshop is a full-day, in-person, full-body experience. The first part of the workshop is dedicated to demechanizing the participant’s bodies, thus avoiding automated behavior such as academic conference interactions and White supremacist design discourse.

This is how it was received by one reviewer:

At a first glance, the proposal looks promising in questioning current models and mindsets in design, however the focus is more on the role of technology in mediating oppression relations and explicit connections with design and design research are announced but not fully elaborated.

Clearly, disciplinary boundaries were evoked to protect the design research field from our anti-racist creative criticism. Looking at technology as mediation is already a well-established design research approach, particularly in the interaction design discipline. My Master’s thesis already made that claim in 2008. Why would we need to fully elaborate on that in a 750-word workshop proposal? Citing our paper on user oppression seemed to be enough to us but unfortunately, it wasn’t enough for the reviewer.

We could have complained about the poor reviews we got but we preferred to accept it as part of the rigged game we accepted to play. I say rigged because we from the Global South lose or are excluded from the game most of the time, be that through language (English is not our mother tongue), money (our Brazilian institutions are not plenty), epistemological differences (what is knowledge to us is not knowledge to others), and unequal citation patterns (we receive fewer citations than other authors).

As authors coming from the Global South and some of us (me and Fernando) now positioned in Global North institutions, we are still a historically oppressed social group in academia (because our bodies accumulate a history of denied access), we wanted to share embodied knowledge traditionally neglected in design research, and we were dismissed by those who are privileged enough to ignore this history and get away with that… as usual. This is surely not the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. That is why we need to keep pushing those oppressive boundaries away.

As I saw it, the conversation on transdisciplinarity was the opportunity I had to reclaim what was taken from us—and from the Noratlantic design research community who never joined a Theater of the Oppressed workshop. It is worth mentioning that reading descriptions about such workshops, attending paper presentations, or watching tutorial videos is far from the actual lived experience of actually joining a workshop. When the oppressed lose, the oppressor also lose the opportunity to humanize, as Freire has remarked.

Only someone who never has gone through a similar embodied experience, i.e. who never experienced developing critical body consciousness, can deny that. For those people, several exercises are necessary to warm up the body and raise critical consciousness. That is why we proposed a full-day workshop in the first place. Unfortunately, this aspect of the proposal was the main argument used by another reviewer, who just wrote the following:

An interesting concept but think the ambitions and the scope (in particular, a full-day session) are beyond our constraints for this conference. I also have concerns that the activities mentioned here don’t seem well-delineated or detailed enough to suffice a full day.

If no full-day workshops were accepted, we would be ok with this comment. But that wasn’t the case; another full-day workshop moved forward. Again, I am not sharing these reviews to complain about such poor reviews. I am just making the design research disciplinary boundaries explicit in a field that proudly (or naively) claims to be interdisciplinary and sometimes transdisciplinary, a contradiction I cannot remain silent about.

Authentic transdisciplinarity means transgressing disciplinary boundaries. I prefer to call it transgression instead of transcendence to emphasize the objective nature of such action. Zaga, Castaño, and van der Voort know that very well, hence, they did not block my attempt to hijack their conversation. Here is what I proposed to my group (the smallest in the in-person space I must say):

Let’s have a full-body conversation. Let’s talk through our body postures, silent gestures, and enacted rituals. Let’s avoid talking through speech, which is by the way, how anglophane people take privilege in international conferences.

We played several dramatic games, including one of my favorites: Toré Yanomami, which I learned from Bárbara Santos, an artist-researcher who is at the forefront in that praxis, and the CTO Jokers. The purpose of this game is to dance what brings us together through the vowels of our names. It is a form of Indigenous embodied knowledge translated by Theater of the Oppressed practitioners to emphasize unity in diversity. Full disclosure: I have Indigenous ancestors from the Apurinã people, but I know as little of their culture (due to the systematic erasure of that ancestor’s contribution to our family) as I know of the Yanomami culture.

I just wanted to make the point that Indigenous knowledge has been historically excluded from academic disciplinary knowledge and that embodied knowledge was precious and very much needed in times of extreme social fragmentation. We also played further dramatic games originating from other social movements. By the way, social movements often promote such embodied interactions to produce mutual awareness (or as I prefer to call critical body consciousness) of their collective bodies.

After the speechless conversation, we resumed talking and included permanent materials to express how we felt about the topics we discussed. Each one of us made something different with our hands. To integrate them, I fetched a staircase hanging at the corner of Northeastern’s University acting studio—a fortunate location for the conversation. What came out of that ressembles what typically comes out of an Aesthetics of the Oppressed workshop, an expansion of Theater of the Oppressed left by Boal in his final years and picked up by Bárbara Santos. We did all of this in less than 40 minutes with no rush, which is an amazing achievement of that open-minded and body-positive group.

Having the following recognition by Zaga, Castaño, and van der Voort in their report is priceless as it stands as an example of how people from the Global North can acknowledge and learn from people from the Global South:

Frederick van Amstel invited to reflect participants about crossing boundaries intertwining transcultural relations, de/colonization and disciplinary practices. Transdisciplinary exchanges involve multiple worlds and contradictions that tend to remain hidden and tacit. To foster transdisciplinary practices, it is therefore important to make them visible. Transdisciplinary calls for ‘hijacking’ the system, challenging the status quo and predetermined scripts on how disciplines and activities have traditionally operated. By not accepting traditional ways of thinking and doing, transdisciplinarity encourages the exploration of alternative methodologies, and questioning the underlying assumptions that govern disciplines and societal structures. While this might disturb usual practices causing confusion and discomfort, it ultimately provides alternative and insights through disruption and subversion (Zaga et al., 2024).

Of course, I would have preferred to have hosted our Theater of the Techno-Oppressed workshop (as we did in ServDes in Rio de Janeiro). Yet, I took the opportunity to hijack a piece of that workshop as part of an accepted conversation to make a valid point (at least from the point of view of its hosts) on transdisciplinarity as transgression. Not many people joined us and not many people understood why I did that. For those puzzled or suspicious, I hope this blog post helps.

In sum, transdisciplinarity is not yet another way of making (Noratlantic) design richer, more diverse, and more effective. Instead, it is better understood as an opportunity to transgress boundaries, welcome historically excluded non-disciplinary knowledge, and lay the path toward decolonizing design research. Transdisciplinarity that does not welcome transgression is just interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, or plain disciplinarity, blatantly disguised as transdisciplinarity.

References

Zaga, C., Matos-Castaño, J., and van der Voort, M. (2024) Transdisciplinarity: Taking stock beyond buzzwords and outlining an agenda for design research, in Gray, C., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA.https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1566

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Culture circles is a participatory educational method developed by Paulo Freire to foster literacy and critical consciousness through dialogue. It emphasizes horizontal, dialogical learning, where participants and facilitators engage as equals in analyzing their lived experiences and co-creating knowledge. The term “circle” underscores this horizontal structure, symbolizing equality among participants and rejecting the top-down dynamics of conventional education.

Generative image made for the PNA literacy program by Francisco Brennand (1963).A key aspect of the culture circles method is its redefinition of culture as something created and shaped by all people, regardless of their literacy or educational background. In this method, participants are encouraged to see themselves not only as consumers of culture but as producers of it, capable of critically analyzing and transforming their realities. Freire believed that even those marginalized by systems of education and literacy possessed valuable cultural knowledge and experiences.

Culture circle in a design research conference (Fonseca Braga et al., 2024).Freire introduced the culture circles during his literacy campaigns in 1960s Brazil, aiming to empower marginalized communities. Unlike traditional methods that treated learners as passive recipients of knowledge, culture circles encouraged active dialogue rooted in participants’ realities. Freire saw education as a means of liberation, and the circle provided a democratic space for participants to critically examine their social conditions and envision collective transformation.

Generative themes are central to the culture circles’ approach. These themes, drawn from the daily lives of participants, are introduced using visual or verbal representations to spark dialogue. Through the process of decoding, participants analyze these themes against broader societal structures. This dialogical exploration not only enhances literacy but also cultivates critical consciousness, making learning a transformative experience.

Culture circles can be applied to design education, participatory design, ethnographic design, and any other project where culture, horizontality, dialogue, and critical consciousness would be relevant.

References

Fonseca Braga, M., M. C. van Amstel, F., and Perez, D. (2024) Social Design at the Brink: Hopes and Fears., in Gray, C., Hekkert, P ., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P . (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1538

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Research and Practice (Fall 2024) is a 45-hour course at the University of Florida that immerses Design and Visual Communications (MXD) graduate students in the practice of doing design research. Students explore qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods through discussions, case studies, writing, fieldwork, and presentations. My approach emphasizes participatory and critical learning, treating students as design researchers rather than learners.

In Fall 2024, researchers learned why and how design research was practiced in this graduate program, in the US, and other nations, both in industry and academic settings. Their learning journey was characterized by developing the metacognitive skills that differentiate design research from design practice. This was explained in two recorded lectures:

Reading the world with Lego Serious Play

The life cycle of a design research object

In simpler words, researchers consolidate their trajectories as design researchers by learning how to learn and designing how to design. We had several opportunities to hone metacognitive skills: lectures, codesign experiments, interaction analysis laboratory, seminar presentations, visual diaries, writing assignments, peer review assignments, and book autopsies.

These activities explored several designerly ways of knowing as a means to develop a critical consciousness of the main product of design research: design knowledge. Instead of learning how to apply design knowledge to design products, design researchers will learn how to apply design products to produce design knowledge. It is the opposite of what design students typically learn in their undergraduate studies.

To understand the underlying rules of learning/design that can be metadesigned/metalearned, we employed both low-tech technologies such as visual thinking and generative artificial intelligence. These technologies are introduced in these two recorded lectures:

Expansive Visual Thinking

Subverting generative AI by playing surrealist games

The course generative themes have been carefully chosen out of the knowledge gaps identified by the Critical Pedagogy Seminar hosted by the design researchers Azadeh Jalali and Lucia Londoño in the Spring 2024 Graduate Seminars. In the figure below, the chosen themes are highlighted by the translucent orange bubbles.

Semester outlineWeek 1 – 08/27/2024 – The MXD studio and field experience

Course overview. Making a Lego Serious Play model of the MXD studio/field experience and its political context. Intro to visual diaries, self-managed studio policy, and graded assignments. Walking through our social network channels (Teams, LinkedIn, Instagram, Canvas, etc). Use of AI policy. Working with faculty. Master roadmap and other UF’s resources. How to download and read an academic paper. Self-reflective studying habits.

Reading assignment for this class:

Freire, P., 1983. The importance of the act of reading. Journal of education, 165(1), pp.5-11. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42772842

Lecture:

Reading the world with Lego Serious Play

Week 2 – 09/03/2024 – Differences between design and design research.

Peculiarities of design research knowledge, design epistemology, intellectual property, and knowledge commons. The role of visual thinking and artificial intelligence in design research.

Reading assignments for this class:

Permission to Muck About (2024), 60 minutes, by David Philip Green and Joseph Lindley. https://designresearch.works/permission-to-muck-about/

Jalali, Azadeh; Londoño, Lucia and van Amstel, Frederick M. C. (under review) Now we know: Findings from a critical pedagogy experiment on design research knowledge. Visual Arts Research Journal.

Lecture:

Expansive Visual Thinking

Week 3 – 09/10/2024 – Participant observation and interaction analysis methods

Observing in the studio X observing in the field. Watching and interpreting the recording of an interaction analysis session. Using artificial intelligence in qualitative data analsys. Choosing a physical book to read.

Reading assignment for this class:

Jordan, B., & Henderson, A. (1995). Interaction analysis: Foundations and practice. The journal of the learning sciences, 4(1), 39-103. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327809jls0401_2

Week 4 – 09/17/2024 – Design research at the MXD studio and field

Each researcher will present an overview of a research paper published by a MXD former or current researcher, taking into account the author’s Curriculum Vitae. Design research career prospects and trajectories.

Reading assignment for this class (each student picks one):

Rogal, M. (2000). South of the Border. Down Mexico Way. Visible Language (pp. 142-161).
Griffin, D., & Hull, B. (2024). Making Space Online: Situating Complex, Intersectional Identities.
Ghiotti, N., Clulow, D., Cheon, S., Cui, K., & Kang, H. (2023, October). Prototyping Kodi: Defining Design Requirements to Develop a Virtual Chat-bot for Autistic Children and Their Caregivers. In Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 126-131).
Ghiotti, N., Clulow, D., Cheon, S., Cui, K., & Kang, H. (2023, October). Prototyping Kodi: Defining Design Requirements to Develop a Virtual Chat-bot for Autistic Children and Their Caregivers. In Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 126-131).
Corona, G. (2024) Participatory design research, documenting the experience of Gainesville local drag performers., in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1287
Rogal, M. (2015) Dsign Research. DECOLONIZING GRAPHIC DESIGN https://ead.yasar.edu.tr/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/EAD-11-1394.pdf
Hernandez, M. (2016) Design Research, Storytelling, and Entrepreneur Women in Rural Costa Rica: a case study, in Lloyd, P . and Bohemia, E. (eds.), F uture F ocused Thinking – DRS International Conf erence 2016, 27 – 30 June, Brighton, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2016.417
Rogal, M., & Sánchez, R. (2017). Codesigning for development. In Routledge handbook of sustainable design (pp. 250-262). Routledge.
Hernández, G., Rogal, M., & Sánchez, R. (2018). Conversation: Transforming Design: Indigeneity and Mestizaje in Latin America.
Rogal, Maria, traduccion del ingles por Membreño Leila y Salazar, Graciela, Radicales Con Voz Radicals with a Voice, 1999 Zed: Edges and Intersections. Latin America/Florida. https://www.academia.edu/7339930/Radicales_con_Voz_Radicals_with_a_Voice
Links to an external site.
Rogal, M.(2020) Embracing Many Worlds: The Wixárika Calendar, in Leitão, R., Noel, L. and Murphy, L.
(eds.), Pivot 2020: Designing a World of Many Centers – DRS Pluriversal Design SIG Conference, 4 June,
held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2020.101

Week 5 – 09/24/2024 – Pluriversal seminar: design research across worlds

Each researcher will present an overview of design research in a world they know well using a long-term Lego Serious Play model as a presentation device. Before that, they will share their visual thinking on the reading assignment.

Reading assignment for this class:

Noel, L.-A., Ruiz, A., van Amstel, F. M. C., Udoewa, V., Verma, N., Botchway, N. K., Lodaya, A., & Agrawal, S. (2023). Pluriversal Futures for Design Education. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation (Vol. 9, Issue 2, pp. 179–196). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2023.04.002

Week 6 – 10/01/2024 – Writing design research and design languages

Overview of the MXD thesis project proposal and the writing assignment for this course. On the fly peer review of a paper. Writing with Lego Serious Play. Exchanging visual diaries.

Reading assignment for this class:

João Ferreira (2020) Writing Is Seeing – towards a Designerly Way of Writing,

The Design Journal, 23:5, 697-713, https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2020.1806521

Lecture:

Tips and tricks for writing design research

Week 7 – 10/08/2024 – Pattern-based codesign and virtual exchange

Pattern language in architecture, interface design, and participatory design. Producing shared design spaces. Experiment with design card decks.

Reading assignment for this class:

Leitner H. (2015). “Working with Patterns: An Introduction.” In Bollier, D., and Helfrich, S. (Eds.). Patterns of Commoning. Levellers Press.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305618591_Working_with_Patterns_An_Introduction

Lecture:

Pattern-based collaborative design with cards deck

Week 8 – 10/15/2024 – Representing contradictions in expansive designs

Identifying contradictions through qualitative data analysis. Representing contradictions through imagery, games, theater, and other means.

Reading assignment for this class:

Phan, Hien; Van Amstel, F. M. C. (under evaluation). The contradiction of diversity in design student body. Diseña Journal.

Week 9 – 10/22/2024 – Dealing with the contradiction of race in design research

Design thinking and codesign. Design toolkits. Producing shared design activities. Experiment with the Racism Untaught Toolkit.

Reading assignment for this class:

Mercer, L. E., & Moses, T. (2023). Chapter 1: The Framework. In: Racism Untaught: Revealing and Unlearning Racialized Design. MIT Press.

Week 10 – 10/29/2024 – Life cycle of design research

Overview of the processes of data generation, collection, analysis, theorization, writing, and publication. Emphasis on data analysis.

Reading assignment for this class:

Costa, N., Patrício, L., & Morelli, N. (2018, June). A designerly-way of conducting qualitative research in design studies. In ServDes2018: Service Design Proof of Concept (p. 164). Linköping University Electronic Press.https://vbn.aau.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/307052443/13.pdf

Pontis, S. (2018). Chapter 7: Making sense of field data. Making sense of field research: a practical guide for information designers. Routledge. p. 129-168

Lecture:

The life cycle of a design research object

Week 11 – 11/05/2024 – Artificial Intelligence (AI) in qualitative data analysis

How to use Whisper and chatGPT for qualitative data analysis. Visual diaries are handed in for evaluation.

Reading assignment for this class:

Morgan, D. L. (2023). Exploring the use of artificial intelligence for qualitative data analysis: The case of ChatGPT. International journal of qualitative methods, 22. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069231211248

Lecture:

Subverting generative AI by playing surrealist games

Week 12 – 11/12/2024 – Peer review in design research

Delivery of the research paper draft. What is peer review. How to write a good review. Conferences, journals, committees, and other venues. Peer review process starts. Researchers submit their papers. Visual diaries are returned.

Reading assignment for this class:

Jessica Barness, Dan Wong, Aaris Sherin, Robin Landa, Alex Girard (2020). Basics of Peer Review for Communication Design Scholarship. Design Incubation. https://designincubation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Design-Incubation-White-Paper-Peer-Review.pdf

Aaris Sherin, Jessica Barness, and Robin Landa (2020). Advice to Authors Navigating Peer Review. Design Incubation.https://designincubation.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/White-Paper-Peer-Review-Advice-Final.pdf

Week 13 – 11/19/2024 – Book festival

Each student presents a contextual book reading and a codesign project interpretation based on the book’s concepts. Researchers revise their peer’s papers.

Week 14 – 11/26/2024 – Holiday

Week 15 – 12/03/2024 – Last day of class – Evaluation and reflection

Peer review ends. Reflection and evaluation of the learning journey. Strategic planning of future publications. Updating the Rumsfeld/Zizek Matrix.

Download the syllabus PDF

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Democratic design experiments, as explored by Binder, Brandt, Ehn, and Halse (2015), are participatory processes that bridge the boundaries between “parliamentary” and “laboratory” practices. These experiments bring people together to explore and discuss the controversies around a thing or a matter of concern. Instead of aiming at creating products or solving problems, these experiments turn design into public deliberation.

A democratic design experiment at the nascent DesignLab at the University of Twente (2014)Designers create tools like models, prototypes, or activities to help people engage with the controversy in a meaningful way. What makes these experiments powerful is their focus on opening up the design space for more possibilities, never narrowing them down to the best or less worst. By involving diverse voices, especially those often left out, they allow for fairer, more inclusive design processes. The results of these experiments can go beyond the designs themselves—they can inspire changes in how people think, collaborate, and act.

Democratic design experiments can be understood as a designerly way of making politics. Through their emphasis on collaboration, questioning norms, and exploring possibilities, democratic design experiments actively contribute to social change, positioning design as a political tool for empowerment and transformation.

References

Binder, T., Brandt, E., Ehn, P., & Halse, J. (2015). Democratic design experiments: between parliament and laboratory. CoDesign, 11(3-4), 152-165. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2015.1081248

Angelon, Rafaela and Van Amstel, Frederick M.C. (2021) Monster aesthetics as an expression of decolonizing the design body. Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 20(1), pp. 83-102(20). https://doi.org/10.1386/adch_00031_1

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Every community practices the design of itself, as Arturo Escobar has pointed out in his book Designs for the Pluriverse. How can this metadesign process be more creative, imaginative, and conscious? Lego Serious Play can support Community Design in a few ways: materialize abstract values that a community wants to express, map community assets, anchor conversations about complex services, identify the most pressing contradictions to tackle, and plan community action. This lecture provides the background research, examples, and limitations of this method when supporting design in communion.

This is a post-recorded lecture from the MXD Spring 2024 Graduate Seminar, University of Florida.

Video

Full transcript

Community design with LEGO Serious Play is an approach in which a community can design itself using LEGO pieces, leveraging the historical role that play has in the development of human cognition and social skills.

Children learn how to interact with other children and with other adults through play. These make-believe games are very important to develop imagination and creativity skills. This development does not cease with childhood; it grows and develops further throughout adulthood. However, it takes a different shape, a different form, and a different appearance. We could go as far as to say that sports are a kind of structured way of playing. That’s why athletes sometimes celebrate their achievements in make-believe rituals, like the Brazilian national team did during the last World Cup, which has been criticized. On the other hand, they remind us that sports come, at least historically and culturally, from childhood play.

I’m going to focus on a specific toy used to support several kinds of play. It’s called LEGO. It’s a system to build many kinds of toys. The LEGO patent registered in the middle of the 20th century highlights the modularity characteristics of this playing material. By following simple rules attached to the material itself, a child does not need to learn abstract building rules before trying it out; they can immediately use the material to learn how to build. It’s a system with immanent features that can be learned by doing, allowing for many different kinds of emergent performances.

LEGO has evolved to become one of the largest toy manufacturers in the world. However, in the 1990s, they faced a crisis due to growing competition from video games and other toys. They didn’t have the same kind of appeal as video games at that time. Initially, they tried more complex and integrated challenging puzzles for LEGO sets, but that didn’t work, and the company was almost bankrupt. At some point, the president of LEGO had the idea that maybe LEGO itself could be used to insert more creativity into meetings at LEGO. He partnered with two university professors who developed the method called Lego Serious Play. These professors wanted to encourage in-house innovation at LEGO. After trying it out inside LEGO, they extended the method so it could apply to any organization. LEGO even created and produced a LEGO Serious Play introductory set. There are many other sets and custom-tailored sets for LEGO Serious Play. I have a custom-tailored LEGO Serious Play set based on Duplo. There are also books, conferences, and training sessions. I will present a short introduction to what LEGO Serious Play can be in the context of community design.

This method has been very important for LEGO’s revival. The company grew by introducing ideas of having licensed heroes from existing brands as themes for new sets. This exploration is nicely synthesized in the LEGO movie. The contradictions of playing and working are also part of this movie, which is very interesting to watch. I recommend it as additional material if you haven’t watched it before. The LEGO Serious Play method has many different techniques, but the most important one is the metaphor. What you build with LEGO Serious Play is not a realistic one-by-one or one-by-ten scale of the object you’re representing. You are using an analogy scale. What you represent is never something directly related to your objects; your presentation is different from the object of representation. This is called a metaphor in linguistic studies. For example, a LEGO piece that doesn’t resemble a dinosaur can become a dinosaur if you add a story to the set. Interpretation is required because the shape of the model is not explicit. This is where creativity has space to flourish, and storytelling, the second most important technique, connects tightly with metaphor.

In design research and science, there is always the challenge of presenting findings in a way that someone who hasn’t gone through the process can understand their consequences and importance. Many scientists and design researchers refer to a diagram that has many versions and has become a meme on the internet. Data is just pieces scattered together and sorted. You organize them by some rules, like color, arrange and connect them to express a quantity and present them visually through graphs and charts. However, the most powerful way for someone who hasn’t gone through the process to understand is through storytelling with LEGO. With those LEGO metaphors, you have a good ground for storytelling so that the speaker does not get lost. Amateur storytellers sometimes diverge from their stories, but if you have a physical anchor, like a LEGO metaphor, your story becomes clearer and easier to follow.

There are many different ways to apply LEGO Serious Play. I will first focus on a few applications that pertain to community design. The most obvious one is when a community wants to express its values in a design product, such as a visual identity. In 2016, I partnered with community members of Curitiba traffic education schools in Curitiba and proposed that the community design its logo instead of having an expert like me or my students at the university. They were excited because the school existed due to the community of teachers, public school guards, drivers, and social workers who used the school for various educational and political activities related to traffic safety and education. Each co-designer in the workshop materialized their perception of the school’s value to the community using a metaphorical model. The metaphor materializes something hard to express through speech and creates an anchor for people to convey the value they want to express in the visual identity using the LEGO metaphorical model.

It’s powerful to quickly see the diversity and different perspectives and expectations of the visual identity project and the institution itself that the community wanted to support and develop further. This experience strengthens the bond among community members, mostly volunteers, making it a fun way to engage them. I won’t go into details on how this process unfolded later on; several phases didn’t directly involve LEGO. However, LEGO Serious Play was the spearhead of this process and set the tone for the co-design activity. It’s an excellent way to start, more than just an icebreaker because the LEGO Serious Play result can be taken further to the next step. The values represented using LEGO led to finding more imagery in scrap paper to create a collage. The next steps are described on my portfolio if you’re curious.

What I want to emphasize is that LEGO was key for us to get to this visual identity that the community felt included in. The final logo has three different persons with different colors, embraced by dynamic activity that represents traffic but in a safe, roundabout way, symbolizing the fun gathering that the community wanted.

LEGO Serious Play can do much more than this. It’s also used for producing maps of things that are not entirely known or known by some but not by others. In 2020, the Federal University of Technology Paraná Industrial Design Department asked me to help figure out all the outreach projects and promote synergies between them because the federal government wanted to emphasize outreach in public universities. We used LEGO Serious Play as a mapping activity. Each circle represents a set of outreach projects a professor is pushing forth, and the strings connect potential synergies between those projects, which are topics for future conversations. One synergy discovered was the possibility of working on outreach projects designed against oppression. Several professors later came together to form the Laboratory of Design against Oppression.

Before diving deeper into that story, let me introduce a more theoretical understanding of this situation. Designing a community is not commonplace; it’s usually related to organizing or the historical accumulation of culture. However, it’s also about design, as any community is always designing itself. This idea is described in the book “Designs for the Pluriverse” by anthropologist Arturo Escobar, who claims that a community always wants to become more than what it is and is always trying to redesign itself to have different spaces, activities, and even different bodies.

This concept of community design means the design of the community itself. When a community designs itself, it’s meta-design, the design of a design, creating complex arrangements of many entities that are hard to align and make sense of their relationships. This overall picture usually comes after the co-design process and can emerge from a LEGO Serious Play session. The basic distributed cognition principle behind it is that when dealing with complex situations, there is a lot of tacit knowledge, or knowledge not yet articulated into language or thoughts. You want to use and appropriate that knowledge because it’s part of the community. Laying down these elements on a table, roughly matching how they relate to the world, makes it almost like having the world in your hand. This manipulation and relation while speaking amplify meaning beyond what is said, as spoken language quickly attaches to the material language of LEGO Serious Play.

LEGO Serious Play is a metaphorical language, where things represented with plastic materials on a board, table, or hand do not reflect their exact shape but represent deeper concepts. It’s hard for others to follow new ideas that are difficult to convey, but LEGO metaphorical models help others reconstruct these ideas in their heads. For example, a person playing LEGO Serious Play pitches a new concept for service, explaining that the same truck that picks up food on a farm can deliver garbage. The collaborator, confused, asks for clarification. The pitcher uses LEGO language to explain, pointing out and asking the collaborator to imagine the scenario, locating the idea in a relationship between community entities.

There’s a video where they record an amplified version of LEGO Serious Play by telling a story with a smartphone. This practical and easy method doesn’t require showing people in the picture, allowing characters to be voiced. The video shows a driver picking up food at a local farm, delivering it to a restaurant, collecting food waste, and returning it to the farm as fertilizer. This reverse logistics service concept is complex even in its name, but LEGO Serious Play speeds up conversations, especially with people unfamiliar with such concepts.

To theorize further, there is a complex theory about meta-design. A Brazilian researcher called Caio Vassão wrote about meta-design, defining a working object as a representation of an object coming into existence as a meta-object. This meta-object can be changed before it becomes real, representing and manipulating it instead of building the object right away. This is similar to sketching, modeling, or prototyping. With LEGO Serious Play, we build a metaphorical model useful in the early design phases, called the fuzzy front end of innovation. Manipulating a meta-object creates a meta-space, referring to the possibilities of the object’s form, structure, and function relationships.

In explaining the reverse logistics service, the main character uses the driver as a meta-object to tell the story, representing not just the driver or the car but the service being delivered. Service design is tricky because it involves human relationships, but LEGO Serious Play effectively represents these metaphorically. Meta-space represents these relationships and creates a context for the meta-object, in this case, the different points of interest on the road between the countryside and the urban environment where the restaurant is located.

This is the model that Larissa Paschoalin and I developed in 2021 to explain the physical, material, and relational properties that LEGO has, which enable the exploration of meta-spaces. Why is it so useful to use LEGO instead of other materials like Play-Doh or post-its? We could have used those materials, but they have biases due to their physical properties, dictating what you can and cannot do with them. We scrutinized and found that modularity, different colors, bright colors, and the simplicity of building and unbuilding, making and unmaking quickly with LEGO, are the reasons we exploit it so much. There are other reasons, which you can find in the published paper.

Imagine that farmers and restaurant owners in the previous example joined that particular co-design session. At that session, only design students or experts participated. The driver didn’t have a full-body person there to represent himself or herself. If we tried doing that, welcome to what I call participatory meta-design. This design includes the people being designed, so the community designs itself with their own hands.

This experience has been realized in many ways at the Laboratory of Design against Oppression, which stemmed from the first industrial design department outreach project mapping activity. In that activity, Marco Mazzaroto, Claudia Bordin, and I, the three founders of the Laboratory of Design Against Oppression, concluded that we had to unite our outreach projects under a single umbrella, which became known as LADO. Once we started having face-to-face activities, we began the process of community design using LEGO Serious Play. We built a huge metaphorical model to explore our dream for LADO. This activity was well-supported by one of our bright students, William Bizzotto dos Santos, who documented this process marvelously in his final work, published as a journal paper and conference paper.

ScreenshotThe model had multiple aspects of the dream. It mapped the separation in Brazil between the “us” (leftists) and the “them” (rightists). We were concerned that rightists had to be engaged in these dialogues; otherwise, society would stay divided, and extreme far-right politics would win by fragmentation. Resisting Bolsonarism was our priority, and we also focused on liberating the oppressed, connecting the oppressed, developing critical consciousness, and talking to invisible people in society who support right-wing politicians. These people need to be aware of their alienation.

We developed many approaches for dreaming and re-dreaming our dreams. At LADO, dreaming was constant. We had a diverse chair project and a moment of reflection on what we were doing and our new dreams, symbolized by tying our dreams on the roof of our lab. Later, the dream fell on someone’s head by accident, and we had to re-dream it. Many things happened, but LEGO Serious Play was a spearhead of that process. At LADO, we don’t want to be like the oppressors. We approach ourselves and our visions of the future differently, with dreaming being crucial for that. Paulo Freire, an important Brazilian educator who inspired us, once said, “When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor.” We need more powerful dreams that are completely different from that.

We need practical experience designing with the oppressed, by the oppressed, for the oppressed. An example of using LEGO Serious Play in this context involves designing a community out of nothing on the outskirts of Curitiba. Curitiba had many violent slum removal actions, still ongoing, with rightists believing that people without a place to live should leave or be killed. These slums and occupations are just the result of the city attracting workers from afar without providing public housing solutions for them. The city made a poor design when they relocated people to the outskirts with improper infrastructure, poor bus routes, and self-sufficient community management.

We met some of these people from this community through LADO and a project called Uniperifa that connects universities with the periphery of Curitiba. They approached us for support in their co-design activity, using materials and approaches from the university. Our students also learned about community design in a harshly oppressed community. In 2022, we partnered and met the Condomínio Residencial Parque Iguaçú III community, starting with mapping the community meta-space, including physical appearance and social texture. We identified leaders, followers, relationships, and conflicts.

After cool explorations and discussions, we focused on how to engage the community in actions. The community was fragmented due to poor design by City Hall. They needed to nurture a new dream of being together. After theater-like experiences, we mapped actors in space, identified objects of dispute, and discussed problems like garbage piles and water contamination. We decided to focus on the community center, which was underused. The students and community members decided to renovate it, starting with painting. This successful community action started with LEGO Serious Play.

LEGO Serious Play is not just a meta-object because, in this case, people are committing to action, making it a shared object in the present. This insight stems from my PhD research on building hospitals, where contradictions in collaboration among stakeholders could lead to constructive or destructive outcomes. My thesis, “Expansive Design,” describes a constructive approach that welcomes contradictions. In the expansive hospital board game inspired by LEGO, players realized different design approaches. In a journal paper, we analyzed a team that managed a participatory design activity, engaging health practitioners and engineers to create a more synergetic hospital.

Making a shared object is not enough to foster a community. Community is about having a collective subject, a way of being together and acting in concert. People must understand that they are more than a sum of parts; they are a community. Sometimes, LEGO Serious Play and games like the Expansive Hospital can lead to competitive or individualistic outcomes due to inherent contradictions in capitalist society. In the game, financial incentives can lead to collaboration or self-interest, resulting in excitement and conflict. An example showed a team that played competitively, created a cartel, and caused the hospital to go bankrupt.

These contradictions are important to learn in design education. Our students at LADO have this experience, and we explore other methods beyond LEGO Serious Play. I particularly love Theater of the Oppressed dramatic games like the Circle of Knots, where participants untangle a human knot without releasing their hands, requiring coordination and movement. We also use colorful, multi-layered capes called Parangolés to celebrate Brazilian popular culture and express political concerns in design education. In 2019, our women students became hopeful about the future, giving a big hug and becoming one monstrous collective body, representing their majority in that class and hoping for a politically wise design future.

One example conducted online involved a workshop at a participatory design conference where participants designed a collective body. They represented themselves as one entity despite coming from different parts of the world. They used the pseudonym P.D. Commoners and created a collage on a mirror board, resulting in a chaotic and monstrous representation. This approach welcomed strong differences while creating unity.

To conclude, effective community design increases shared objectivity and subjectivity. It’s not just about great ideas, plans, or designs but having a stronger sense of the community’s reality and identity to transform that reality. That’s it for now. Thank you very much for watching up here.

References

Vassão, C. A. (2021). Metadesign: ferramentas, estratégias e ética para a complexidade. Editora Blucher.

Paschoalin, Larissa and Van Amstel, Frederick M.C. (2021). Materialidade no codesign: análise interacional de um experimento com blocos de montar (Codesign Materiality: interactional analysis of a building blocks experiment). Design e Tecnologia, 11(23). https://doi.org/10.23972/det2021iss23pp82-92

Bizotto dos Santos, W., Mazzarotto, M., & Van Amstel, F. (2024). Tomando um LADO: formação crítica e prática de liberdade no Laboratório de Design contra Opressões. Arcos Design, 17(1), 143–175. https://doi.org/10.12957/arcosdesign.2024.78425

Amstel, F. M.C. van; Zerjav, V; Hartmann, T; Dewulf, G.P.M.R; Voort, M.C. van der. 2016. Expensive or expansive? Learning the value of boundary crossing in design projects. Engineering Project Organization Journal, 6 (1), Pages 15-29. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21573727.2015.1117974

Angelon, Rafaela and Van Amstel, Frederick M.C. (2021) Monster aesthetics as an expression of decolonizing the design body. Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 20(1), pp. 83-102(20). https://doi.org/10.1386/adch_00031_1

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Every doctoral design researcher must go through the existential crisis of not knowing for a while if that daunting research actually makes any difference in the world. After going through that and reflecting on my trajectory, I concluded that this crisis, and many others that doctoral design researchers face, is not personal or individual. These existential crises are the manifestation of deeper contradictions that deserve investigation. By the end, I share theoretical concepts and tools that can be used to meet people undergoing similar crises and collective existential projects about them, particularly, the Crisis Deck.

Keynote address at the DRS 2024 PhD Consortium.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA9x17O08aQ

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Botter, F., van Amstel, F. M. C., Mazzarotto Filho, M., and Guimarães, C. (2024) Prospective design: A structuralist design aesthetic founded on relational qualities, in Gray, C., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA.https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.883

Abstract: Prospective design is a research program founded on critical dialogues between Global South and Global North philosophies of design. Prospective design expands the current work on designing sociotechnical transitions by including the contradiction between “forces of nature” and “human forces” as a structural feature of Western society, which generates patriarchal and feminist worldviews, colonies and metropolises, and capitalist and socialist economic systems. In prospective design, contradictions are sensed, expressed, and worked out through a structuralist design aesthetic founded on the concept of existential structures, i.e. an accumulated set of relationships needed to reproduce human life. Instead of changing them directly, this design aesthetic guides designers to prospect thriving relationships in their metastructures and infrastructures through a poetics of resensitization that reunites our bodies and minds.

Donwload the paper from its publisher (open access)

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Saito, C., Freese Gonzatto, R., and van Amstel, F. (2024) Anticolonial prospects for overcoming the coloniality of making in design, in Gray, C., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.255

Abstract: Design has been instrumental in preserving the coloniality of making – a set of ideological, cultural, political, market and relational processes that operate to identify, categorise and hierarchise different making practices that benefit the metropolises at globalised production structures. This paper presents a theoretical examination of the coloniality of making based on the anticolonial scholarship of the Design & Oppression Network. The examination proceeds with three prospective studies to overcome this form of coloniality in fashion, interaction, and graphic design. The first part of each study denounces how design reproduces the hierarchy between intellectual and manual labour and justifies class, gender, race, technology, international geopolitics and further oppressive hierarchies. The second part announces the possibilities for reconnecting manual and intellectual labour while designing alter/native ways of being and living together.

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Some months ago, I joined Lee Moreau, Lesley-Ann Noel, and Alicia Cheng in the inaugural episodes of the Design As podcast (Apple/Spotify), connected to the Design Observer project. We discussed Design as Culture. The conversation was so rich and dense that we split it into two parts. Luckily, Design Observer published a transcript for those not willing to listen to our two-hours conversation. For the sake of archiving my thoughts, I’ll share excerpts of my talk. I highly encourage readers to listen to the other voices in the full episodes, as I could not have come up with these without their dialogical partnership.

Talking about this topic is almost a never-ending discussion, right? I would say that culture can have many meanings. The common understanding relates to customs, habits, food, and art styles. However, this is a superficial understanding of what is visible in culture. There are always more invisible structures that are not easy to discern, distinguish, or identify. If we delve deep into understanding culture, we might also see conflicts and contradictions, especially between habits and customs considered low culture and those considered high culture. For example, visiting a museum is considered high culture, while attending certain music style parties is considered low culture. This contradiction also spreads through different regions of the world. Some countries are seen as having a mission to conserve high culture, while others are viewed as destroying culture. For instance, the U.S. is often seen as destroying European culture, which Europeans try to conserve. Brazilians are also seen as part of this destructive trend, but this destruction sometimes creates new forms of culture. Thus, culture can be understood as dynamic, a way of overcoming these contradictions. Culture is something we cultivate and change, much like the way we eat. Our food cultures change across centuries, which is why it’s important to have a history of culture. You cannot understand culture without understanding its past and future history. This is perhaps where design comes in.

Excerpt from Design As S1E1: Culture Part 1

I did not mention it in my talk, but I had the concept of cultural alienation of Álvaro Vieira Pinto at the back of my mind, which influenced Paulo Freire’s anthropological concept of culture. In Ciência e Existência (1969), Vieira Pinto writes:

Cultural alienation is the stage of consciousness in which people are unable to conceptualize the ideas possessed by themselves and for themselves, and therefore only uses ideas for their value as consumer goods.

Instead of drawing a boundary between a high and low culture within one culture, like done in Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1972) culture industry concept, cultural alienation is about intercultural relations.

A DALLE 3 image generated from the transcript excerpts herein.The alienated culture is unaware of having its own due to borrowing from another, typically a former colonizer culture. They borrow so much that they even borrow their concept of culture, like the one devised by Adorno and Horkheimer. High and low distinctions are, thus, imported hierarchies that preserve the coloniality of making and other forms of coloniality. They are not liberating for nations like Brazil and cannot be overcome by a simple denial.

And that’s a contradiction we experience in everyday life here in Brazil. Many people in colonial or former colonial settings believe that if they have inheritance from the colonizers, they still have a culture of the colonized to maintain. Even though Brazil has been politically independent for 200 years, culturally, we are still tied to Europe and more recently to the U.S. culture. These cultures are presented to Brazilians as high culture. But what about design? Is design high culture or low culture? In the past, design was considered applied art for the masses, low culture. But now, design is entering museums and could be considered high culture. In the U.S., this distinction might not hold, but in Brazil, design is definitely high culture, at least canonical design. Everything else that people do in the streets, for example, the material culture produced by everyday people not trained in design, is considered low culture or no design at all.

Excerpt from Design As S1E1: Culture Part 1

To overcome cultural alienation, alienated people must understand its origins and reframe low culture as the authentic culture. That is what I tried to do in my contributions to this podcast: to leverage the design found on the streets, design of the people, popular design.

In Brazil, we even use the word “design” coming from Anglophone influences. We don’t use a Brazilian word for that. If we want to use a Brazilian word, we use “projeto,” which is considered not fashionable. It’s not cool enough. If you say “design,” it’s something well done, right? But something done by Brazilians in their own way is just “projeto,” or even worse, “gambiarra.” We have this specific Brazilian word for a bad design that is improvised based on available materials, essentially upcycled things. They call it “gambiarra,” but it’s considered lower design in relation to formal design, or not really design at all. Our work in the laboratory is to tell students: Look, this is the kind of design we can do here in Brazil. If we design from “gambiarra” and develop it further, we might create something much more relevant to our Brazilian culture than if we start designing the way designers do abroad.

Excerpt from Design As S1E1: Culture Part 1

My students are initially skeptical about such reframing of design and culture. They pursued higher education to achieve some sort of superiority in their designs and in their designer status.

If you look at design history, you’ll see that many designers have created things that represent and synthesize culture in a material way. These designs can be used in everyday life for functional purposes, but they can also be displayed in museums as statements about historical times, capturing the spirit of the times. This idea attracts many design students who want to become famous designers. However, they often believe they don’t know anything about producing culture and see it as something to acquire, like putting something in a Chanel bag and taking it with them. In our laboratory of design against oppression, we try to deconstruct this notion. We show students that they are already producing culture, even if they are not recognized as famous designers. They are everyday designers, constantly designing their lives, bodies, and how they present themselves in society. This is already a form of design. As they go further, they realize they are culture producers as citizens. If you are breathing and part of society, you are already producing culture. This realization is liberating because culture is not something distant or unattainable. It’s something they already have, which empowers them to pursue their own paths instead of following someone else’s.

Excerpt from Design As S1E1: Culture Part 1

However, as we progress into problematizing the role of design in cultural alienation, they come to realize that what they don’t know about design that they think they need to know has been designed to appear as such: a cultural barrier to becoming a recognized designer. This is particularly daunting for disenfranchised students who dream of leveraging their education for social mobility.

If they start from reading the world to reading the words, there is a connection. It’s not something imposed by someone else to divide high culture and low culture, literate and illiterate. No, it’s a continuum. You can always develop further, even if you are already literate. There’s so much more to read and also to write. You can also be a culture producer on your own. That’s why Paulo Freire always said that we are part of culture. We are culture. Actually, that’s the definition: humans are culture.

Excerpt from Design As S1E1: Culture Part 1

I acknowledge that this discussion might seem detached from the current design practice and education. Yet, this is precisely due to the phenomenon I am underlining here: cultural alienation. Here is what happens when design students become aware of that. In her final work in graphic design degree at UTFPR, Polyana de Andrade Tavares developed critical consciousness on cultural alienation through personal reflection, critical pedagogy, and collective action. Using autoethnography, she examined her engagements in the Design & Oppression Network. By sharing her narrative publicly and advocating for transformative design practice, Polyana came to the conclusion that designers are cultural producers and should, therefore, act more consciously to fight cultural alienation in their territories and communities.

Having the opportunity of working with Polyana and other LADO students led me to state this final thought on design education in the podcast conversation:

We’re not just making things; we are also making ourselves. Approaches like the positionality wheel help us become aware and self-conscious about this process of making ourselves while making things for others. We always imbue our values, habits, cultures, and the contradictions we experience into the things we create. Understanding where we are sourcing things from and expressing them deeply helps us contribute to our culture. This is probably an overlooked issue in design education. We don’t usually think about design education as citizen training; we think about professional training. But before being a professional, you are a citizen in the world, and understanding your place and its history is crucial. Besides being a professional, you are also responsible for many other things. Learning about your own positionality and its relation to material culture and privileges is important. For example, have you ever had access to an ergonomic chair like the one you are sitting on now? The kind of design you’ve had access to throughout your life impacts and limits the kind of person you can become because you make yourself based on the materials around you, whether they are designed or un-designed like the “gambiarras” I mentioned earlier. If you make yourself out of a “gambiarra,” can you really become a designer? What kind of designer will you become? If you design based on “gambiarra” and then make a statement that this is still design, you broaden the scope of design education. This broader approach is much needed right now because, as Lesley-Ann mentioned, there are not many secure jobs for all students. However, society needs people who can handle these harsh contradictions and create new roles beyond the professional realm.

Excerpt from Design As S1E2: Culture Part 2

As a design educator, it is my moral duty to counter cultural alienation. However, I also see that changing societies requiring people like our former student Polyana: good theoretical practitioners, committed activists, coalition articulators, material speculators, environmental bricoleurs, socialist entrepreneurs, everyday politicians, and many new ways of being designers in the face of strong contradictions. My engagement with the decolonizing design movement aims at overcoming cultural alienation in former colonial worlds but not just that. There are other forms of alienation to be unveiled in other worlds.

If you have come all the way here, please listen to the entire podcast episodes liked above. We covered so many other topics that are currently neglected in design education and practice.

References

Vieira Pinto, Á. (1969). Ciência e existência problemas filosóficos da pesquisa científica. Rio, Paz & Terra.

Max Horkheimer; Theodor W. Adorno (1972) [1947]. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder. ISBN 0-8047-3633-2. OCLC 48851495.

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From the outset of their design education at UTFPR, Alanis Louise de Mello Zukowski and Maria Vitória Ribeiro Kosake were struck by a disconnect between their aspirations and the education they received. The design curriculum seemed narrowly focused on technical skills and market demands, leaving little room for critical reflection or social engagement. As they progressed through their courses, they began to feel the weight of unspoken crises—questions about purpose, identity, and the broader impact of their work.

Their journey took a turn when they enrolled in an elective course on Design for People. This class, unlike others, embraced a critical pedagogical approach inspired by Paulo Freire. It emphasized dialogue, collective learning, and exploring personal and social issues through design. In the class of 2022, students engaged in dynamic discussions about existence, professional aspirations, and personal crises. The Crisis Deck was born out of these discussions. The students recognized that many of their peers were experiencing similar existential challenges and created a tool to help others navigate these turbulent waters.

Students interviewed a few colleagues and compiled their findings in a sympathy map. They devised their representation strategy after evaluating various card decks used in other design classes and learning about Theater of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Similar to the Chinese ideogram for crisis, which is composed of two elements (a representational strategy they took from Theater of the Oppressed), each card would have two sides: one representing its dangerous side and the other its turning point side. Like the first cultural sheets developed in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, their cards wouldn’t have any labels. The goal was to stimulate questioning oneself and debating with others. Hence, a certain level of ambiguity would make sense. They printed their first prototype with photographs of Lego Serious Play models. The students behind this project were Haruka Ozawa, Isabela Luiza Molin de Siqueira, Isabelle De Santis Souza, and Paulo Henrique Blosfeld Santos.

Once they had a prototype, students invited their peers to try the cards and have a debate about the existential crisis they were feeling while getting closer and closer to graduation. Here was when Alanis and Maria Vitória learned about the project and decided to take it further as their final work in their Graphic Design degree. Since the project was licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license by its authors, Alanis and Maria Vitória could build on it.

Their first design action was to devise a proper visual language for the cards. They wanted to create a tool that transcended cultural and linguistic barriers, making it accessible and relevant to many students. They blend fantasy elements with generic human figures in their visual representations. This approach allowed them to create imaginative and grounded images in relatable human experiences without resourcing to gendered or racialized representations of the human body.

The students created initial prototypes of the cards and tested them with their peers. These tests helped to assess the clarity, impact, and engagement level of the cards. Observing the interactions and discussions prompted by the cards provided valuable insights into their effectiveness as a reflective tool.

Creating the Crisis Deck was more than an academic project; it was a journey of self-discovery and empowerment. Through their work, Alanis, Maria Vitória, and their classmates found a way to articulate and address their crises, transforming them into a source of collective strength and wisdom. They aimed to inspire their peers to critically engage with their educational and professional experiences, fostering a sense of freedom and purpose.

The Crisis Deck’s representation strategy was deeply rooted in the educational and theatrical philosophies of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. By integrating critical consciousness, dialogical learning, and interactive visual storytelling, the students created a powerful tool for self-reflection and collective empowerment. This approach addressed the immediate needs of design students and fostered a broader understanding of how design can be a transformative practice in education and beyond.

Print the Crisis Deck on US Letter paper flipped on short edgesDownloadSome rights reserved (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA). Alanis Louise de Mello Zukowski and Maria Vitória Ribeiro Kosake.

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Abstract: Service Design draws heavily from ancient Greek Ethics and Aesthetics, beginning with the foundational theater metaphor that separates frontstage from backstage. When Service Design engages with cultures that do not cultivate the Greek canon, the decolonization challenge comes to the fore. People who work to decolonize their cultures wonder whether Service Design will remain a tool for cultural imperialism or change to become a tool for autonomous development. This talk presents the author’s effort to develop distinct Ethics and Aesthetics for Service Design to address corporate responsibility, work exploitation, workplace racism, and gender disparities in service codesign sessions. This work is primarily based on Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Theater of the Oppressed.

Keynote address at the Service Design Network (SDN) Next Gen Conference 2024 (online).

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References

Eltis, D., & Richardson, D. (2010). Atlas of the transatlantic slave trade. Yale University Press.

Talbot, M. (2018) The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture, in The New Yorker. 29th October.

Boal, A. (2000). Theater of the Oppressed. Pluto Press.

Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). New York: Continuum, 356, 357-358.

Grove, S. J., & Fisk, R. P. (1992). The service experience as theater. Advances in consumer research, 19(1), 455-461.

Eleutério, Rafaella P. and Van Amstel, Frederick M.C. Matters of Care in Designing a Feminist Coalition. (2020). In: Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference. Manizales, Colombia.

Van Amstel, F. M., & Serpa, B. O. Theater of the Techno-Oppressed. Workshop at the Service Design and Innovation Conference (ServDes 2013), Rio de Janeiro. https://servdes2023.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/ServDes_2023_paper_9776.pdf

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Abstract: Twenty years of designing and researching across several disciplines led me to realize that transdisciplinarity is not the same as combining knowledge from different fields. Transdisciplinary design research means moving from one discipline to another to follow an expansive object. This is a reflection I presented as my first lecture in the MXD program at the University of Florida. Presented in the following linear format, this narrative does not account for all the moments of despair, frustration, sorrow, and feeling lost in my career. I underplay them here to paint a positive big picture in the spirit of US culture.

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References

GONZATTO, R. F.; AMSTEL, FMC Van; COSTA, R. C. T. Jogos e Humor nas Metodologias de Design. Proceedings do IX SBGames, p. 138-44, 2010.

AMSTEL, Frederick; VASSÃO, Caio A.; FERRAZ, Gonçalo B. Design Livre: cannibalistic interaction design. In: Innovation in design education: proceedings of the third international forum of design as a process. 2011. p. 3-5.

GONZATTO, Rodrigo Freese et al. The ideology of the future in design fictions. Digital creativity, v. 24, n. 1, p. 36-45, 2013.

SILVA, Claudia Bordin Rodrigues da et al. Consciência e ação em design de interação: recursos e práticas educacionais abertas para o esperançar. PPGTE (Tese de Doutorado). 2019.

GONZATTO, Rodrigo Fresse ; VAN AMSTEL, Frederick M.C. ; JATOBA, P. G. . Redesigning money as a tool for self-management in cultural production. In: PIVOT 2021, 2021, Toronto. Proceedings of PIVOT 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling Tools for Alternative Futures, 2021. p. 39-48.

Van Amstel, F.M.C; Hartmann, T; Voort, M. van der and Dewulf, G.P.M.R. The social production of design space, Design Studies, 46, 2016, p. 199–225

VAN AMSTEL, Frederick MC et al. Expensive or expansive? Learning the value of boundary crossing in design projects. Engineering project organization journal, v. 6, n. 1, p. 15-29, 2016.

VAN AMSTEL, Frederick MC; GONZATTO, Rodrigo Freese. Design Livre: designing locally, cannibalizing globally. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, v. 22, n. 4, p. 46-50, 2016.

VAN AMSTEL, Frederick MC; GONZATTO, Rodrigo Freese. The anthropophagic studio: towards a critical pedagogy for interaction design. Digital Creativity, v. 31, n. 4, p. 259-283, 2020.

VAN AMSTEL, Frederick MC; GONZATTO, Rodrigo Freese. Existential time and historicity in interaction design. Human–Computer Interaction, v. 37, n. 1, p. 29-68, 2022.

DORS, TANIA MARA ; VAN AMSTEL, FREDERICK M. C. ; BINDER, FABIO ; REINEHR, SHEILA ; MALUCELLI, ANDREIA . Reflective Practice in Software Development Studios: Findings from an Ethnographic Study. In: 2020 IEEE 32nd Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T), 2020, Virtual Conference. 2020 IEEE 32nd Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T), 2020. p. 1.

GONZATTO, R. F.; AMSTEL, FMC Van; COSTA, R. C. T. Jogos e Humor nas Metodologias de Design. Proceedings do IX SBGames, p. 138-44, 2010.

GONZATTO, Rodrigo Freese et al. The ideology of the future in design fictions. Digital creativity, v. 24, n. 1, p. 36-45, 2013.

SILVA, Claudia Bordin Rodrigues da et al. Consciência e ação em design de interação: recursos e práticas educacionais abertas para o esperançar. PPGTE (Tese de Doutorado). 2019.

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Bizotto dos Santos, W.B., Mazzarotto, M.,and Van Amstel, F.(2023) Learning design as a human right: the beginnings of a design lab founded on critical pedagogy, in Derek Jones, Naz Borekci, Violeta Clemente, James Corazzo, Nicole Lotz, Liv Merete Nielsen, Lesley-Ann Noel (eds.), The 7th International Conference for Design Education Researchers, 29 November – 1 December 2023, London, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2023.104

Abstract: Understanding design as problem-solving leads to a seemingly neutral praxis, yet still very much linked to the interests of dominant social groups. This research introduces a dialectical-existential perspective over design education based on the works of Brazilian philosophers and educators Álvaro Vieira Pinto and Paulo Freire. This perspective puts problem-posing on a dialectical relationship with problem-solving, and the production of existence at the core of design. Not being able to handle this dialectics and produce existence autonomously is characteristic of oppression, a contradiction that design education should alleviate instead of intensify. Framing design as human right is the path found by the outreach praxis of a Brazilian university’s design lab to avoid oppressing while supporting liberation efforts. This paper describes the foundational years of the Laboratory of Design Against Oppression (LADO) and how it came up with this concept of design as human right.

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Udoewa, V., Gutiérrez Borrero, A., Noel, L., Ruiz, A., Borchway, N.K., Lodaya, A.,and VAN AMSTEL, F.M.(2023) When Is the Pluriverse?, in Derek Jones, Naz Borekci, Violeta Clemente, James Corazzo, Nicole Lotz, Liv Merete Nielsen, Lesley-Ann Noel (eds.), The 7th International Conference for Design Education Researchers, 29 November – 1 December 2023, London, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2023.109

Midjourney v.6 generated variation image. Prompt: indigenous people of diverse nations, a giant bubble with many bubbles inside lying in infinite space, each bubble is a planet with colorful creatures inside. The sun is shining through all these bubbles. Latin American indigenous painting style.Abstract: Currently design is in the midst of several potential upheavals including the postcolonial, decolonial, ontological, and pluriversal turns. This conversation among design educators explores these turns under the inclusive umbrella of pluriversal design by focusing specifically on the temporality of the pluriverse in design education. By engaging in communal sensing, living in a world of many worlds, we relationally engage and question whether pluriversal design is a struggle for emergence, a past history, a possible future, a current reality, some combination, or something else entirely for design education? The reason we find this question important is because it determines what we do today, as design educators across many worlds. If the pluriverse is truly a future experience that we do not have today, we want to know what we need to do today to aid its arrival in design education. We engaged in an asynchronously written conversation in which Victor Udoewa, served as a facilitator and complicator of a conversation between design educators Adolfo Ruiz, Alfredo Gutierrez Borrero, Arvind Lodaya, Frederick van Amstel, Lesley-Ann Noel, and Nii Botchway.

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Abstract: The never-fulfilling promise of a bright future has justified modern colonization for centuries. Modern design follows suit. Modern design has been exported to former colonies as a neutral, non-political way of making. The futures that came with them have contribute to maintain the coloniality of making, nurturing a sense of nostalgia and a conservative attitude that does not contribute to breaking free from dependence. Design futures may only contribute to decolonizing worlds if these are collectively designed by, with, and for the oppressed. Experiments of doing so in Brazil are presented.

This was a guest lecture in the Design Futures Course, Politecnico di Milano, 2024, hosted by Prof. Manuela Celi.

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I’m really happy to be here and have this conversation with you. I know it’s going to be maybe a difficult conversation. I’ll probably touch upon some sensitive topics, but bear in mind that my final goal is to give you a sense of hope for the future. I’m going to raise a lot of critical issues within the way how design futures have been developed in our field. I’m interested in taking something out of design, right? Decolonizing is all about taking the colonization out of something but also being in a fight against colonization because you cannot take that from colonizers that easily.

I hope that you also become inspired by the work that people in the former colonies like Brazil or the US and other places that have been subjected to colonization are also working on. I’m going to actually draw on that kind of visions of the future. If you are interested in any of these topics, I will not be able to go deep into them but you can do that later on if you check my references by the end of my slides.

First of all, I need to establish the relationship between design futures and colonization. I mean, why talking about this? What do they have to do? For that, I will have to go back to the past, of course, because we need to scrutinize and check the role futures played out in colonization. Colonization is a modern phenomenon that spread through the world from Europe and European nations, erecting this geopolitical divide or division between a world that was already made, ready-made, or the best made possible, which is Europe, or the metropolises and a world to-be-made, the colonies.

Usually, this is referred to as the old world and the new world, but this division does not help to understand that the difference is based on making. The world-to-be-made was considered to be a world that had nothing there, an empty, a void world that has to be made, whereas the European world or the old world was considered to be ready-made and the world in the Americas and later on in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and other parts of the world, they should all be made to become closer to the European worlds.

However, there worlds in the new world before it became a new world to European. European had to unmake those old worlds to make their new worlds there. If you consider the indigenous communities that lived in those worlds, they were already making different ways of living together, producing a culture of very high standards, sometimes even more advanced than Europe in some aspects. They refer to those worlds as Abya Yala, Turtle Island, Pindorama. These names are still in use today by indigenous people to remember that this is still a different world even after centuries of colonization.

For every Thing that was made in Italy (and now I’m poking you) but in Europe in general, or any other metropolitan space, there was something else unmade in a colonized space. This is still somehow a reality, because even to make a industrial product in China, you need to unmake sacred mountains, rivers, or reserves of any kind of material that is needed for this production in the so-called underdeveloped world or colonized space.

After looking at this phenomenon, I developed the concept of coloniality of making to characterize this divide based on theoretical engagements with the Modernity/Coloniality Group and the work of Álvaro Vieira Pinto. It emphasizes the mutual dependence between those different worlds. Metropolises are making their world out of unmaking colonies. This is similar to what Escher tried to convey with his Drawing Hands (1948), although not in such a symmetrical appeal. There’s definitely one side getting most of the benefits in the colonial relationship, reason being why it is not a sustainable one. It’s a relationship that harbors conflict and frustration because one hand becomes tied by the other hand.

Philosopher Álvaro Vieira Pinto developed a much more fundamental concept called handiness to explain what’s going on in this relationship. Underdeveloped handiness never reaches the same level of the developed handiness, in this case, the colonizers, because the colonizers continue to develop themselves after the relationships was established. This is why the distinction between developed and underdeveloped nations remains current, as it helps to understand how the coloniality of making still plays a role in such international relations. For instance, if you visit an artificial intelligence image generation website like craiyon.com and search for ‘design in developed nations’ compared to ‘design in underdeveloped nations,’ the disparity becomes clear. There will never be a point, under this unequal relationship, where underdeveloped nations will achieve the same design standards as developed nations, because the development of the latter depends on the former.

What AI currently demonstrates is the hierarchy in world-shaping methods; the approach on the left side is deemed modern, while on the right, it’s considered unmodern. This includes the notion that the past should be viewed as superior to the future, which is not a perspective imposed by the colonies on the colonized. In fact, it’s the reverse; it’s a response from the colonized against the colonizers, who perpetually promise a bright future that never materializes. Consequently, the colonized often find themselves drawn to imaginaries of a significant period in their history, whether it be before, during, or just after colonization—a moment to which they aspire to return, as exemplified by the “Make America Great Again” campaign promoted by former President Trump. This issue with the futures promised by colonization, which have failed to materialize, often traps these nations in a cycle of reverting to their past following crises, thereby undoing what they have already achieved.

How, then, can society obscure the political dimension of world-making? I’ll now shift focus to explore the role of design in this context, aiming to replace politicized creation with a seemingly neutral form of making. This includes indigenous practices of creation, which we often label as handicraft or artisanship. Indigenous people do not perceive their work in these terms sometimes; they view it as an art form or as something akin to spirituality, in either case, inherently political. Their creations are manifestations of their world and the world they aspire to preserve, aiming to sustain the proliferation of these objects. Indigenous artifacts often depict various animals they coexist with, desiring to maintain this coexistence. This is a direct political challenge to the colonial approach of exploiting land through plantations or monocultures, which are inhospitable to biodiversity.

Design intervenes in this process, attempting to make the coloniality of making appear less political and more like a technical issue. For instance, if you consider the discourse around modern design—how it defends, markets, and theorizes itself—it’s always striving to appear purely beneficial and not at all political. The sentiment by Dieter Rams, along with his famous Braun radio, that “Good design is as little design as possible,” subtly suggests through implication that good design is essentially European design, perceived as inherently good and apolitical. When we look at politicized forms of making, such as the favelas in Rio de Janeiro and other major cities in former colonies, one might think this isn’t design. Favelas are a lack of design that should be replaced by proper design, like the buildings in the background of this picture of Rocinha, one of the largest favelas in Brazil. I was born close to there, so this division between where I was living and our neighbors just around the corner had made me think about this inequality since I was a child.

Exploring the history of design schools in our regions, the concept of coloniality of making offers a compelling rationale for the desire to emulate or adopt teaching and learning methods from Germany’s Bauhaus, or similar institutions that emerged later. This explains why, in Brazil, there was Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI), or in India, the National Institute of Design, and in the United States, the New Bauhaus later Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. There’s a prevailing belief that local ways of making aren’t as effective as those developed abroad, leading to an inclination to adopt foreign practices. This perspective is indicative of a colonized mindset, preferring to lean on colonial influences rather than valuing indigenous traditions of handcraft and artisanship.

There have been efforts to counteract this trend. For instance, the Italian designer Lina Bo Bardi, who became a naturalized Brazilian, endeavored to establish a unique design school that would integrate lessons from artisans from marginalized communities, teaching urban dwellers. Unfortunately, her project did not progress much. One of her final efforts to highlight the significance of this approach in Brazil was the exhibition “A Mão do Povo Brasileiro” (The Hand of the Brazilian People), a remarkable showcase that was revisited in 2016. Many attendees, however, failed to see its relevance to design, missing Bo Bardi’s argument for basing our design practices on local artisanship instead of European models.

Regrettably, Lina Bo Bardi’s insights were largely ignored, and she faced persecution by the military dictatorship in Brazil, sidelining her and her contributions to the discussion on design education and practice.

Before the military dictatorship took hold, Brazil embarked on the ambitious project of building its new capital, Brasília, in the middle of nowhere. This project was a monumental feat of modern architecture, perhaps one of the most striking globally. However, the promise of Brasília to the Brazilian people has largely been unfulfilled. Many Brazilians harbor a sense of disappointment towards Brasília, feeling disconnected from this space. Politicians have adeptly used the promise of a bright future to perpetuate the coloniality of making, diverting attention from the present with visions of a better tomorrow. Yet, sometimes, these envisioned futures are far from desirable. For instance, Sol Nascente, recently surpassed Rocinha in the number of inhabitants, becoming the largest favela in Brazil. This sprawling favela highlights a missed opportunity for the country. Rocinha, almost a century old, could have served as a lesson to build a better city than Brasília, avoiding the necessity of such extensive favelas, since Brasília was planned and constructed much later.

Despite this, politicians and society at large failed to see this as a challenge in world-making. Designers, including architects like Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer who worked on Brasília, played a significant role in that. Designers usually consider themselves progressive, capable of envisioning a brighter future. Yet, they often hold onto conservative and colonialist views more than they might admit. This critique extends even to the realm of humor in design, particularly among Italian designers known for their admirable wit. However, jokes such as “make design great again,” drawing a parallel with “make America great again,” come across as poorly timed, especially given the current political climate in the US. Such jests can be seen as insensitive, not only to disenfranchised groups in the US but also to the global community, given the broader implications. It reflects a perspective among some designers that history might not matter or that change is not on the horizon, an outlook that can overlook the profound impacts of design and architecture on society and the lived experiences of its people. They sometimes embark into nihilism.

As much as futuristic they like to think of themselves, designers also fall into the trap of nostalgia, idolizing past designs and their designers. This tendency is critiqued through a speculative project titled the Church of Divine Design (described in this article). This project imagines a church where, instead of human-like deities, products designed by revered designers are worshipped as gods. This approach highlights the absurdity of placing such high value on objects and the designers behind them, questioning the real impact of these designs on humanity’s broader history. These selected products often benefit a narrow group—primarily their creators and manufacturers—without significantly changing the world in the ways they were purported to. This critique parallels the critique of massive churches that obscure reality from their followers, suggesting that the design world can similarly distract from the truth.

The nostalgia for past designs is not limited to individuals but is also institutional, as seen in the European Union’s initiative, the New European Bauhaus. This initiative seeks to draw inspiration from the past, specifically the historic Bauhaus movement, suggesting a return to something left behind. In my understanding, simply altering the vision of the future without addressing the present’s structural issues misses the mark in addressing contemporary challenges, such as the environmental crisis. The belief that Europe holds all the answers is a flawed approach.

This perspective calls for a shift in listening and learning from those who have historically been sidelined, particularly indigenous peoples. Indigenous communities have long warned of the consequences of certain practices and hold valuable insights into sustainable living and coexistence with nature. The emphasis on returning to past European design philosophies without integrating these lessons misses an opportunity to genuinely address the pressing issues of our time, illustrating a need to broaden the sources of inspiration and knowledge in design and beyond.

Indigenous peoples have long cautioned against the unsustainable practices of colonizers and settlers, emphasizing that such approaches would lead to a future incapable of sustaining life. Despite these warnings being ignored for centuries, leading to a replication of harmful past practices into the future, indigenous communities have adapted by integrating into urban environments and employing modern mediums to amplify their messages. For instance, Kunumi MC, a prominent Brazilian rapper, uses his music and visually striking video clips to convey a vision of indigenous futurism, warning of a doomed future unless significant changes are made. His work underscores that an indigenous future, rooted in sustainable practices and respect for the land, is the only viable path forward.

This shift is not limited to cultural expressions but extends into political and academic arenas, where indigenous voices are teaching the importance of land acknowledgment not as mere formality but as essential recognition of the ongoing impact of colonization. The speaker shares a personal commitment to acknowledging the land they occupy as historically belonging to indigenous communities such as the Muscogee, Seminole, Miccosukee, and Timucua peoples, highlighting tools like Native Land Digital for educating how our past can inform our future. This approach suggests a future where multiple nation’s coexistence over the same land might be possible, contrasting sharply with the historical removal and erasure experienced in places like the US and Brazil.

Furthermore, the discussion points to innovative projects like the African Diaspora Development Institute’s Wakanda One project, envisioned as a city built for the African diaspora to return and live in a sustainable community. This example, along with indigenous futurism, represents a broader call to undo the damages of colonization by imagining and creating spaces that honor and incorporate indigenous knowledge and practices.

Of course it’s a far-fetched vision for the future, very hard to implement, but I think it’s a great, peaceful way of understanding returning to your homeland. It contrasts so starkly with what we see now in Israel. Indeed, this genocide of Palestinian people cannot go forward. We have to stop this. We have to create a mass movement to denounce this. Within that frame of reference, I’d like to point at specific evidence of why this future doesn’t work. Some Israeli people, not all of them, but the more radical ones don’t want to co-exist with Arab people, they don’t want to design together a country, a nation, or a place, or even they don’t want to discuss, at least at this moment, the possibility of Palestinians having their state in Gaza. For example, the New Gaza futures designed by an Israeli Rabbi means no space for Palestinians in that territory. This is definitely unmaking the future of people who live there. Where would they live? If they flee to other places out of Gaza, they are still being bombarded by Israel. The War will go on for generations to come. Which home will be there for the Israeli and Palestinians to go back?

Africans got a better idea on how to return from the diaspora because they are remaking their pasts while remaking their futures. Indeed, anti-colonial design futures can only emerge from deviations from the past. We cannot keep doing the same things that the colonizers did to us. Otherwise, the colonial past makes its way into the future. With that in mind, we have been trying to develop a style for speculative design. It’s called futro. It’s a mix of futures and retro, but instead of having retro design, we actually want to have the future prevails. The difference between retro and futro is that the former brings the future into the past instead of going back to the past in a nostalgic way, so that in the past we still have a chance or a better chance in the present to react to oppression.

Here are a few examples of how we have been doing this with our design students. Futro first requires understanding the personal and social histories of the objects involved in the fiction. Students do ethnographic research with objects that existed from the 60s or the 70s or the decade that we are interested in. They interview people who had these objects during those times or later on and they understand the relationship between these objects before they actually envision a future where these objects would make sense. And they also use their entire bodies to understand the contradictions between these objects and the relationship between people mediated by these objects. We rely a lot on the Theater of the Oppressed for building and creating design fictions in this style.

Time Crisis (2017) is an example of how futro ends up being well equipped to deal with very serious political matters of a country, of a nation, like the ousting of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 through a white coup that was also apparently US-backed or at least had US FBI influence on it. This became known as a reality just a few years ago, but at the time these students were envisioning the future, just a few months after her ousting, it was all speculative. They hypothesized that one reason behind the ousting of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff might have been her reliance on an artificial intelligence developed in the US. This AI, used for organizing her schedule and that of many officials, even for national planning, was speculated to have a bias favoring the US. Eventually, Brazilian politicians purportedly discovered this bias, leading to her overthrow due to her dependence on what was seen as imperialistic technology. This speculative narrative reimagined the coup as having nationalist motivations, which, in reality, it lacked, ultimately paving the way for Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, aligning closely with US politics at the time. This exercise by design students was an attempt to understand their role within such complex geopolitical and domestic political conflicts, demonstrating a highly engaged approach.

Before this speculation, I had been involved with Dilma Rousseff’s team, working on a futuristic app designed to foster dialogue within Brazil, allowing public participation in policy design. Users could provide feedback on policies, suggesting improvements. This app, which engaged 200,000 people in 2015, was discontinued following Rousseff’s ousting but was later reintroduced in a new form under President Lula’s administration last year. This revival signifies a return to the envisioned future of Brazilian democracy that was sidelined during Bolsonaro’s tenure, a development I view with great satisfaction, witnessing a denied future being reclaimed.

Returning to the general context of design, I want to emphasize that merely understanding design history isn’t sufficient for crafting anti-colonial futures. What is crucial is design historicity, or becoming more conscious about our roles in making history. Here, I’m deliberately playing with words, because historicity involves an understanding of history in which you recognize yourself as a participant, actively contributing to its making. Unfortunately, designers have historically aligned themselves with oppressors and colonizers, as I’ve tried to illustrate. However, I believe it’s entirely feasible to collaborate with the oppressed towards their liberation. The critical question for us then becomes: How might designers make history alongside the oppressed?

For nearly 15 years, I’ve been deeply involved with collaborative cultural producers in Brazil, working to preserve endangered popular cultures that fall outside the commercial mainstream. Among our projects, we’ve developed a local exchange trading system that has enabled a variety of initiatives to sustain themselves independently of conventional currency. This system allowed them to print their own money, ensuring the survival of, for example, a theater school threatened by the advent of governments less supportive of cultural initiatives. Hundreds of projects followed. This endeavor was a genuine act of making history.

Hearing about my personal commitment to making history with the oppressed, you, as a design student, might wonder about your own potential role. We have a rich example from UTFPR, where I was previously. Since 2021, the Laboratory of Design Against Oppression (LADO) has served as a remarkable hub where we’ve endeavored to design with social movements. Our work has spanned various domains, including collaboration with those responsible for garbage collection and distribution in the city, individuals dwelling new favelas, and groups aiming to prevent traffic accidents. These projects aimed to empower the oppressed, with our students leveraging university resources to envision and shape popular design futures.

What if your institution doesn’t have something like LADO? The Future of Design Education pluriversal design Working Group, which I’ve been a part of in recent years, discussing the future of design education, has published a set of recommendations aimed at design education programs. These guidelines suggest ways programs might gradually or radically incorporate the issues I’ve discussed. This paper was published by the Sheji Journal, a highly respected publication in the Design Studies field. Our suggestions include principles like designing with and by people, not merely for them, and recognizing that there is no singular universal design history but many alternative histories that need to be explored and understood by design students. If you’re a design student, you have the power to mobilize and pressure your faculty to adopt these recommendations, especially considering their publication in such a prestigious journal. This could pave the way for the kind of education we’re advocating for.

In conclusion, design futures can genuinely contribute to organizing worlds only if they are collectively designed by, with, and for the oppressed. There’s much more I could say on this topic, but I want to keep this brief. If you’re interested in diving deeper, you can find references and links on my website for further reading. I’m also more than happy to answer any questions or discuss any topic you might have.

References

Fabris, Y. (2021).A mao do povo brasileiro: cultura material popular e os projetos modernizadores brasileiros (1969-2016). Disponible en https://repositorio.uchile.cl/handle/2250/195929

De Castro, E. V. (2015). Cannibal metaphysics. U of Minnesota Press.

Gonzatto, R.F; Amstel, F.M.C.van; Merkle, L.E; Hartmann, T. 2013. The ideology of the future in design fictions. Digital Creativity. Vol. 24 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2013.772524

Gonzatto, R.F., van Amstel, F.,and Jatobá, P.H.(2021) Redesigning money as a tool for self-management in cultural production, in Leitão, R.M., Men, I., Noel, L-A., Lima, J., Meninato, T. (eds.), Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling, 22-23 July, Toronto, Canada. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0003

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Camila Kutiski heard from a friend about a shelter service for victims of domestic violence in her neighborhood. She visited the non-profit running the service and decided to support the people involved with her Graphic Design final work at UTFPR. The first thing she did was to understand the existing design activities in the non-profit. Who designed what?

She quickly learned that, although trained graphic designers were absent, the non-profit produced many graphic design products: social media imagery, pamphlets, books, and a newspaper. These products needed a coherent identity and looked amateurish, at least from her standpoint. The organization did not have enough resources to hire expert designers, so they had to rely on amateur volunteers who took the initiative to design what was needed.

The obvious idea came up: she could take over these activities for her final work. Instead of accepting the non-profit request, Camila preferred to do something else. She reflected on her limitation to keep serving the non-profit after she finished her graduation requirements. Instead of designing the products needed, she would support the people designing these products with her graphic design expertise.

She then collaborated with the amateur diffuse designers in the organization and developed a visual identity guide to consolidate the most effective communication practices. The guide had simple rules and suggestions for implementing them using the popular design tool Canva, used by the diffuse designers.

After assisting with the identity guide implementation and overseeing some design works, she left the non-profit to theorize what she was doing. She came up with an addition to the concept of diffuse design found in the design for social innovation literature. Instead of remaining diffuse, she hypothesized that the diffuse design practice in that organization would become more concentrated after using the guide for a while. She developed the concept of historical milestones to generalize this possibility of diffuse designers coming up with something less diffuse either independently or with expert assistance.

After formulating this hypothesis, she returned to the organization and gathered evidence. She interviewed the diffuse designers and checked their outputs. They gradually incorporated the graphic design rules into their work and reached a better visual consistency level. They were happy with the developments and mentioned that the guide reduced their design time since they did not need to be that creative whenever they needed to post an announcement on Instagram. The non-profit’s feed displays a gradual increase in design ability.

Camila was particularly impressed that once the diffuse designers understood the value of having a visual guide, they decided to design a service guide in a book format. This guide supported her hypothesis that the organization developed new design capabilities based on the capabilities they already had developed before.

After collecting the evidence, she came back to her methodological model and developed it further to generalize the approach. She named it conscious design after incorporating the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire in her theoretical framework. Camila learned with this project that designers can act as popular educators who assist a community in becoming more autonomous in their continuous fight against oppression. Camila’s work laid the ground for other design students working at LADO.

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Secomandi, F., & van Amstel, F. (2023). Human bodies. In: Blonkvist, J; Clatworthy, S; Holmlid, S. The Materials of Service Design (pp. 167-172). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781802203301.00032

Abstract: This chapter discusses how human bodies can be approached as materials for service design. Service design often involves human-to-human exchanges and the way humans use their bodies to mediate these exchanges can be designed and enacted as artifacts. Using a postphenomenological perspective, the chapter frames the human body as a key service interface, acknowledging that human bodies, like other forms of technology, can be designed as artifacts. The chapter also discusses how body schemata and body images, which are not necessarily co-extensive with the boundaries set by the human skin, can be extended and influenced through technology. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of understanding and designing human bodies as a material in service design to create meaningful and effective service experiences.

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Bizotto dos Santos, W., Mazzarotto, M., & Van Amstel, F. (2024). Tomando um LADO: formação crítica e prática de liberdade no Laboratório de Design contra Opressões. Arcos Design, 17(1), 143–175. https://doi.org/10.12957/arcosdesign.2024.78425

Abstract: Understanding project as a problem-solving activity may obscure
its existential dimension, which includes its political, cultural, and historical
interests. Denying this dimension in design education leads to a seemingly
neutral praxis, but in essence, linked to the interests of dominant social groups.
This research presents the dialectical-existential perspective on design projects
developed by Álvaro Vieira Pinto and Paulo Freire to support the extensionist
praxis of the Laboratory of Design against Oppression (LADO) at UTFPR. This
praxis´ description reveals paths to experience freedom in the field of design
as a collective practice of communication and dialogue between the university
and social movements.

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Guimarães, C., & Van Amstel, F. M. C. (2024). Prospectando qualidades relacionais na educação em Design através da quilt-terapia. Arcos Design, 17(1), 190–211. https://doi.org/10.12957/arcosdesign.2024.77916

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic deeply altered the well-being and mental health of humanity. People were forced to isolate, stay at home, to interactions mediated by virtual environments. The return to in-person classes was trau-matic, full of uncertainties and fears compound with stress, anxiety, decline of well-being and, most importantly, negation of Being. This study explores the relational aesthetics of quilt-therapy as a means for reconstruction of the being among Design students. The making of a quilt of pieces that reflect the experience of surviving the pandemic reveal qualities that are historically ne-glected in Design Education, such as empathy, trust and care.

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Abstract: The craft of formal and functional aesthetic qualities, overtly typical of dependent markets, characterizes Design Education in Brazil. In addition to reinforcing the cultural stereotypes conferred by colonizers on local people, such qualities contribute to maintaining the inequality that describes the historical colonial relationship. Critical Education in Design seeks to transform this reality through anticolonial praxis, even though little is known about its qualities. We conducted a prospective study on the relational qualities that emerged from the anticolonial praxis of the Design & Oppression network composed by university extension projects of associated laboratories in several Brazilian institutions. Weave this network several Brazilian educational initiatives dedicated to critical pedagogy, working with social movements. Following a practice of Latin American social movements, the choice for the term anticolonial indicates that explicit political action is associated with popular struggles in this praxis, from which six qualities emerge: freedom, criticality, solidarity, autonomy, dialogicity, and monstrosity.

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Abstract: The Future of Design Education working group on pluriversal design—with members from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, South and Southeastern Asia, North America, Oceania, and Europe—developed recommendations for higher education design curricula. The group addresses the dominance of a Eurocentric design canon and worldwide colonization by a twentieth-century design monoculture grounded in the concept of universal human experience. Curricular recommendations honor Indigenous worlds and place-based ways of being, and chime with anthropologist Arturo Escobar’s premise that every community practices the design of itself, through participatory processes that are independent of experts. The authors posit that rather than a Cartesian rationalist perspective, the group advocates a relational view of situations in which the design responses to interdependent natural, social, economic, and technical systems, are specific to places and cultures. The recommendations assert a pluriversal design imperative in which multiple worldviews thrive and diverse lived experiences inform the entire field, as well as individual projects.

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De Siqueira, Isabela L. M. Van Amstel, Frederick M. C. (upcoming). Service design as a practice of freedom in collaborative cultural producers. Proceedings of ServDes 2023, Rio de Janeiro. Abstract: Service design is strongly linked to practices that maintain workers’ dependency on management. Social movements in Brazil eschew hierarchical management, instead seeking self-management based on […]

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Van Amstel, F. M. C. Decolonizing design research. In: Rodgers, Paul A. and Yee, Joyce (Eds). The Routledge Companion to Design Research (pp. 64-74). Routledge. https://www.doi.org/10.4324/9781003182443-7 Abstract: Design research played and still plays a significant role in the coloniality of making. By transforming natural commodities imported from former colonies into manufactured Things that are later […]

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En América Latina, la colonialidad del hacer nos impide valorar lo que ya hemos hecho y, a partir de ahí, hacer lo que hay que hacer. A menudo preferimos importar el diseño europeo en lugar de construir sobre gambiarras y otras formas populares de diseño. En Brasil, sin embargo, la resistencia a la colonialidad del hacer ha llevado al desarrollo de un enfoque de diseño llamado diseño libre, que incorpora formas populares de diseño. Esta charla muestra ejemplos de diseño libre que exploran la antropofagia, la pluriversalidad y la monstruosidad como formas de combatir la colonialidad del hacer.

Ponencia invitada del curso Estudios (Críticos) Históricos del Diseño Latinoamericano, Professor Juan G. Montalván, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

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Amy Ogan, Frederick van Amstel, Gabriela Molina León, Juan Fernando Maestre, Kristin Williams, Nicola J Bidwell, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Saiph Savage, Sushil Oswal, and Vishal Sharma. 2023. Why Do We Need to Learn about Citational Practices? Recognizing Knowledge Production from the Global Souths and Beyond. XRDS 29, 3 (Spring 2023), 12–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3589256

Abstract: How do you decide which papers to cite, how many, and from which particular sources? We reflect and discuss the implications of these critical questions based on our experiences in the panel and workshops on the topic of citational justice that took place at CSCW, CLIHC, and India HCI in 2021.

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Guest lecture in the Codesign in services, TUDelft.

Abstract: Capitalist service design is grounded on a theater metaphor that guides service designers to make work invisible, away from customer scrutiny and public accountability. In this way, service design contributes to hiding the extreme work exploitation that digital service workers undergo, generating a situation in which workers can only reclaim their visibility through striking. If service design wants to contribute to making work visible and recognized, it needs another theater metaphor. This talk presents Theater of the Oppressed as an alternative metaphor and methodology for a critical Service Design practice.

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Van Amstel, F. M. C., Gonzatto, R. F., & Noel, L.-A. (2023). Introduction to Diseña 22: Design, Oppression, and Liberation (2nd issue). Diseña, (22), Intro. https://doi.org/10.7764/disena.22.Intro

Abstract: This special edition introduces eight papers at the intersection of design, oppression, and liberation. These papers refer to social structure as a common leverage point to criticize and transform different oppression relations, namely racism, gender, marginalization, epistemic injustice, and colonization. The contributions follow recent moves in social movements and social sciences that recognize that tackling different oppression relations enables seeing oppressive structures more clearly. Nurturing solidarity bonds across different oppression struggles becomes an urgent task in this new field of research we call Oppression Studies of Design. Building upon anti-colonial views on oppression, this field connects design research with the history of changing social structures through liberation struggles.

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Gabriel Gonçalves Moreira, Andreia Malucelli, Sheila Reinehr, and Frederick van Amstel. 2022. ProTesters: a board game for teaching the testing process. In XXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality (SBQS ’22), November 07–10, 2022, Curitiba, Brazil. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3571473.3571503

Abstract: Despite being the most used approach in teaching software test- ing in Brazil, the traditional teaching method might not simulate, facilitate or motivate the learning of the testing process and its ac- tivities. As a result, undergraduate students may not understand a basic testing process and its components, nor be motivated to learn about the content. One approach that can facilitate the teaching of the software testing process and promote student motivation is educational games. Although there are several educational games for teaching software testing, no game was foun on literature that addresses the entire testing process, with its roles, artifacts and activities. This work presents the development of an educational game to support and motivate the learning of a basic software test- ing process. The research method was Design Science Research. For the development of the game, several playtestings were carried out to verify if the new proposal was able to motivate and teach the proposed content. To evaluate the fulfillment of the research objectives, an experiment was performed with 16 participants, and it was possible to verify a gain of specific knowledge of the par- ticipants after the experience with the game. In addition, positive effects were observed on motivational aspects perceived by the players with the game for the learning of the themes involved.

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Eleutério, Rafaella P.; Van Amstel, Frederick, M. C. (2023). Questões de cuidado na formação de uma coalizão de design feminista [Matters of Care in forming feminist design coalitions]. Arcos Design, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.12957/arcosdesign.2023.71093

Abstract: This research questions matters of concern as the ontological basis of design coalitions, especially in oppressed social groups like women. In contrast to the literature on design for social innovation, the feminist literature points to issues of care as the aggregating element of coalitions. This reconceptualization of design coalitions is necessary to prevent an anti-sexist initiative from becoming a tool of the oppressor. This reflection arises from the experiences gained in a participatory design project that sought to amplify voices from a community of women coffee producers in an agricultural region of Brazil. The project’s experience is systematized through the historical mapping of the caring relationships established among actors to generate transformations in the ecosystems in which they are inserted.

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As part of the Participatory Design Conference 2022, I joined P.D. Commoners, a self-managed collective of researchers working at the boundaries of commoning and designing, to organize a workshop on Relationality, Commoning, and Designing. After the workshop, we recorded a podcast with Joanna Sad-Sulonen and Giacomo Poderi to summarize and share the workshop experience with those who could not attend. You can listen to the podcast episode below, subscribe to it, or read its transcript.

During the remote workshop sessions, we listened to some Brazilian songs about collective bodies (see the playlist below), and we tried to visually assemble the collective design body of P.D. Commoners (the pseudonym used by the workshop organizers) out of individual body drawings.

The resulting image may be another example of the emerging monster aesthetics. It is a monster because it is a mix of several body parts, similar to Frankenstein, but it is also a monster because it is a decolonial representation of the human subject: relational, emotional, expansive, diverse, colorful, and chaotic. The other is incorporated into the self to the point of redefining the self.

We transformed these individual body drawings:

Into this collective body drawing:

Reflecting on this process of assembling P.D. Commoners, I said the following in the podcast episode:

That’s something that we are collectively becoming conscious of slowly, that we don’t act only individually, and the sum of our actions is not just a simple sum of individual actions and coming up with a greater outcome. It’s really about building collective consciousness that somehow is supported through our bodies, our physical bodies.

But then it operates as if it was a body of its own. Body, in the English language, also has this connotation of institutions. And if you think that participatory design has worked really hard to build and transform institutions, who is transforming that? The institution itself!

In the relational ontologies, we speak a lot about autonomy as an important relational quality. And that means participatory design, once we start to reflect on this, it becomes clear that the best design is the one done by the self. The self for the self. The community for the community, as Arturo Escobar wrote in his marvelous book on Designs for the Pluriverse.

Every community practices at least the design of itself. And inspired by this, we are realizing that perhaps we need to emphasize and explore collective agents in designing a participatory session like the workshop we were organizing. And then for experimenting with that, we asked each individual to draw their body with eyes closed, using a mouse, which is always quite difficult, and challenging, especially for those who are not good at drawing.

But that’s the point. And it’s also bad for those who are good at drawing. So we equalize the expressive matter, the material. And then after each one of us drew their bodies, we open our eyes, we see the strange drawing we made, and we try to assemble those different drawings into a collective design body, which is called PD Commoners, our collective identity that all the participants are also part of. Because they are changing us while they are participating in the workshop. And we came up with this really strange, crazy, chaotic drawing of ourselves looking into a mirror that had a common feature, which is living close or at least going through, traveling through the sea. So we see a lot of wave lines in our collective body. And yes, it was really interesting having this feeling of being together in the sense of being one and being many at the same time.

With this workshop, the podcast, and a paper we are writing on that, I learned that to build commons and share resources, we need first to share our bodies to enable a collective form of consciousness that can take care of the commons.

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Uniperifa collective joined Laboratory of Design against Oppression students to plan community actions in Condomínio Iguaçu III. This slum-upgrade urban project relocated people near the city center to the city outskirts, leaving people disconnected from the city and having little sense of community. We identified several sustainability issues that required increasing this sense of community, for example, lobbying for public garbage collection.

After running a codesign workshop, we decided to focus on renovating the community center as a sign of the power of mobilizing. Design students joined Uniperifa collective to renovate Iguaçú’s community center, making things that are not usually associated with design work. The students learned that they needed to identify with the oppressed to design and make things with the oppressed, by the oppressed, for the oppressed.

Through this engagement, teachers learned that we need to increase access to design education in the peripheries to make the things needed to overcome systemic oppression.

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UTFPR Curitiba formed its first Campus Master Plan Committee in 2022 to plan its future spatial developments. The campus has three localities.

City centerEcovilleNeovilleSeeking for broader adoption, the committee adopted a participatory design approach. The entire university community will be invited to collaborate in the planning process through various activities and methodologies. The goal is to grasp the academic spaces’ social, environmental, and demographic characteristics and, from that understanding, speculate three future spatial development scenarios.

Frederick van Amstel is part of the Campus Master Plan Committee, with special duties on designing facilitation strategies for the participatory workshops.

Graphic ListeningIn the first public meeting, the committee invited the participants to ask questions about the plan, which were all mapped into a mind map in realtime.

Lego Serious PlayThe committee is experimenting with Lego Serious Play as a creative approach to invite the academic community into the planning activities. The What the Duck game series played in November 2022 discussed the impact of governance models in the production of design space. The democratic model was considered the most effective to meet diverse needs and still provide some room for creativity.

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This talk was part of the Royal College of Art Symposium on Design and Systemic Change, organized by Product Design students.

Abstract: Oppression is systemic as it is reproduced across social groups, generating complex patterns of domination. By their token, designers reproduce oppression when they try to save the oppressed from oppression through system thinking or any innovative approach. To change systemic oppression, designers may better think and make things with the oppressed, by the oppressed, for the oppressed.

VideoSlidesAudioSystemic diagrams used in this presentationOntological vocation of being moreOppression as being lessOppression as an unequal exchangeTransectional oppressionIntersectional oppressionLiberation from oppressionReferencesGonzatto, R.F. and Van Amstel, F.M.C. (2022), “User oppression in human-computer interaction: a dialectical-existential perspective”, Aslib Journal of Information Management, Vol. 74 No. 5, pp. 758-781. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-08-2021-0233

Van Amstel, F. M., Noel, L.-A., & Gonzatto, R. F. (2022). Design, Oppression, and Liberation. Diseña, (21), Intro. https://doi.org/10.7764/disena.21.Intro

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Audio lecture recorded for the online Designs of the Oppressed (2022) course. Summary: The coloniality of making refers to international relations of production that overvalue intellectual labor in developed countries and undervalue manual labor in underdeveloped countries. Design discipline plays a crucial role in maintaining the coloniality of making, establishing hierarchies between modes of designing existence […]

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Donald Norman is about to release a book on Humanity-Centered Design. I don’t plan to buy or read it, but I can’t ignore it. As I previously wrote, shifting what is at the center of design does little to reconfigure the contradictions cultivated by centralization, which is a core spatial practice of patriarchy, capitalism, and […]

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Keynote addressed at the 13th International Conferences on Design History and Studies, Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano, October 2022. Resumen: La colonialidad del hacer se refiere a las relaciones internacionales de producción que sobrevaloran el trabajo intelectual en los países desarrollados y subvaloran el trabajo manual en los países subdesarrollados. Al garantizar esta desigualdad […]

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Keynote addressed in the A & D Visitors Series, School of Art & Design, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, October 2022. This is a provocative talk on design ethics that might spark a debate with the audience. The presenter will show well-known design products and processes that promise to deliver unique experiences. His critique of these […]

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Citation patterns are not natural, neutral, emergent, or involuntary. They reveal the collective biases of a scientific community. Women, Black, Indigenous, disabled, part-time researchers, and people from the Global South receive fewer citations for their works unless the pattern is actively counteracted. There are a few of these authors in most scientific communities because they […]

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Álvaro Vieira Pinto, Paulo Freire, and Augusto Boal developed a systemic perspective on oppression based on Frantz Fanon. This perspective frames oppression as a contradiction that builds tension between different social groups. Systemic design can reproduce this contradiction unconsciously or let the oppressed see and recognize their oppressor. This short commentary pushes for a critical […]

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Visionary photomontage are grayscale photos from the past edited to look like a scene from the future with a colorful technology of the future. Image sources are found in online repositories and archives, requiring to imagine possibilities of localized futuring. It is possible to use image generation AI such as DALL-E and Craiyon to produce […]

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A mockumentary movie about a future reality that could have happened in the past if a controversial technology of the present had become available in that past. Design mockumentaries aim at creating a reality that did not exist, does not exist, but that may exist sooner or later in the near future, as any design […]

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Van Amstel, F. M., Noel, L.-A., & Gonzatto, R. F. (2022). Design, Oppression, and Liberation. Diseña, (21), Intro. https://doi.org/10.7764/disena.21.Intro Abstract: The role of design in structuring oppression has gone largely unacknowledged by design research and design history. However, we can see a recent move, pushed by social movements, to recognize design’s complicity with many forms […]

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Lucy Pei, Edgard David Rincón Quijano, Angela D. R. Smith, Reem Talhouk, and Frederick van Amstel. 2022. Assets and community engagement: a roundtable with HCI researchers and designers. interactions 29, 5 (September – October 2022), 44–47. https://doi.org/10.1145/3554975 This article provides views from HCI scholars and designers with deep commitments and varied experience in community-centered work […]

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Van Amstel, Frederick M.C.; Botter, Fernanda; Guimarães, Cayley. Design Prospectivo: uma agenda de pesquisa para intervenção projetual em sistemas sociotécnicos. Estudos em Design, 30 (2), 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.35522/eed.v30i2.1458 Abstract: In the last few decades, design research has faced large-scale and complex wicked problems, such as climate change and precarization of work. A common approach to […]

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Poderi, G., Marttila, S. M., Saad-Sulonen, J., Van Amstel, F. M., Teli, M., Tonolli, L., … & Botero, A. (2022, August). Relationality, commoning, and designing. In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2022-Volume 2 (pp. 255-258). Abstract: This workshop explores and reflects upon both how relational ontologies can support design processes that target commons and commoning as […]

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The Laboratory of Design Against Oppressions (LADO) is an open, horizontal space for critical education, scientific research, and transformative action at UTFPR. Attentive to the objectives of student involvement and participation in university outreach, LADO is organized through self-management, including collective decision-making and distribution of power among the several working groups created to coordinate each of […]

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SURU’BA (“good thing” in Tupi and “orgy” in Portuguese) is the final work of João Conrado Dembiski and João Victor Tarran in their Bachelor in Design at UTFPR. Inspired by anarchist and decolonial thinking, the duo designed a modular open-source furniture system that could be cheaply produced in Curitiba, the locality of their studies. Their […]

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Serpa, B.O., van Amstel, F.M., Mazzarotto, M., Carvalho, R.A., Gonzatto, R.F., Batista e Silva, S., and da Silva Menezes, Y. (2022) Weaving design as a practice of freedom: Critical pedagogy in an insurgent network, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June – 3 July, Bilbao, […]

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Saito, C., Serpa, B.O., Angelon, R., and van Amstel, F. (2022) Coming to terms with design wickedness: Reflections from a forum theatre on design thinking, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June – 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.668 Abstract: Contemporary design thinking is often described […]

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Ponencia a lo simposio de Arqueodiseño, X Reunión de Teoría Arqueológica de América del Sur TAAS Oaxaca 2022. Abstracto: Álvaro Vieira Pinto, Paulo Freire y Augusto Boal desarrollaron una teoría dialéctica de la existencia que permite comprender el papel de la opresión en el proyecto del ser. El oprimido no puede proyectarse a sí mismo […]

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Forum Theater provides a forum to test and rehearse actions and responses to oppressive situations in the form of an interactive play. What differentiates Forum Theatre from other interactive theatre techniques is precisely its political goal of human and social emancipation. By stimulating the spectator’s effective intervention, Forum Theatre seeks to provoke reflections about the forms of […]

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Keynote, VIII Sustainable Design Symposium, UFPR, 2021. Abstract: Design research has historical roots in the modernity project, which violently subsumes non-modern diverse cultures into colonized monocultures. Design research is also well-grounded in the development discourse that justifies unequal exchanges between nations, institutions, and communities. However, design research is also a realm of dispute where critical […]

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Podcast interview for the Commoning Design & Designing Commons show, an initiative from the Interest Group Commons and Commoning of the IT University of Copenhagen. Listen to the podcast on Anchor. Transcript Speaker Key – GP Giacomo Poderi; FA Frederick van Amstel; SM Sanna-Maria Marttila; JS Joanna Saad-Sulonen Speaker Text GP Okay, welcome to this first […]

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Reaction to computer-mediated oppression can be rehearsed in a Theater of the Techno-Oppressed session. When using the image theater technique, it is possible to capture every attempt to react to oppression and compare their efficacy in still photos. In addition to the spect-actors who stage the play, two persons are required: a photographer and a […]

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