Design as Curry: Lesley-Ann Noel teaches emancipatory design thinking to IIPP students
By IIPP MPA student Jordyn Fetter
Dr Lesley-Ann Noel, an Assistant Professor of Media Arts, Design and Technology at North Carolina State University, gave an enrichment lecture on 25 January 2023 to Master of Public Administration (MPA) students at University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), as part of a module looking at using strategic and digital design methods to create, implement and evaluate public policies and public services.
Her talk focused on practising emancipatory design thinking — an innovative and collaborative approach to solving end-user problems — by focusing on equity, social justice, and the experiences of people who are often excluded from design research.
From working with primary school students in Trinidad and Tobago and providing them an awareness of their rights, to running students through a curriculum in Puerto Rico after Hurricane María, applying design pedagogy — an approach to teaching — in a time of crisis, Lesley-Ann explores ways to apply a design thinking lens to civic engagement and innovation in work with cities that have identified problems such as youth violence, homelessness, health care access and more.
In this lecture, organised by Professor Rowan Conway for IIPP’s Transformation by Design module, Lesley-Ann discussed the design discipline’s role in creating a space for people to dream, the limitations of current process-oriented practices, and practical emancipatory approaches that avoid replicating oppression.
The Creation of Dreams
“Creating a space to dream about the future helps individuals to visualize and change their story.” — Eric Liu, 2017
To kick off a participatory design and co-creation effort, Lesley-Ann often uses the concept of ‘Utopia’‘ as a starting prompt for this conversation — for the purposes of both critique and imagining. Asking “What is wrong with something?,” “What is the future we want?,” “What is your Wakanda?,” and other exploratory questions. Often, people haven’t been asked these questions before and it introduces a new paradigm for thinking about challenges they face and what an improved future state could look like.
Referencing Arjun Appadurai’s essay on The Capacity to Aspire, which reflects on how different groups have exercised this muscle to propel them to success, Lesley-Ann reinforced the importance of understanding our agency to achieving liberation.
And while design should be geared toward the development of actionable solutions, the act of collective dreaming and knowing how to contribute to change is, in and of itself, a revolutionary act that supports future action and solution implementation even when the two aren’t sequentially linked.
Design Beyond the Process
Design is squarely seated in the realm of action rather than theory. This has, over time, led to the development of multiple frameworks and processes including Stanford D School’s Design Thinking Process and the Design Council’s Double Diamond. While this quantification is helpful in making design more tangible for those learning, Lesley-Ann said fortifying this process often leads people to treat the practice as a linear checklist or recipe.
As an alternative, she proposes thinking of design as curry — a combination of ingredients that can be tweaked and altered according to meal needs and desires of the day and throughout the cooking process. In this metaphor, ingredients can include empathy, flexibility, relevance, critical awareness, pattern finding-ness, multidisciplinarity, future-focus, creativity, stick-to-it-iveness, openness, multi-sensory-ness, risk, and cool.
An Emancipatory Approach
Putting emancipatory research into practice involves producing knowledge to benefit disadvantaged people. Ultimately, Lesley-Ann said, “If we can’t see issues of equity, we’re going to perpetuate inequity.”
To help surface this concern and keep it top-of-mind for practitioners, Lesley-Ann has created guiding principles for critical design including, but not limited to, abolition, community, equity, flourishing, indigeneity, freedom, and interdependence.
Some tools for designers intended to avoid replicating oppression include:
- Dialogical and Anti-Dialogical Cards from Marco Mazzarotto, Bibiana Oliveira Serpa, and Design e Opressão based on Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy which are used at different points of a design project to a) reduce the perpetuation of actions that shut down constructive dialogue and b) support actions which support constructive dialogue.
- Designer’s Critical Alphabet from Lesley-Ann which can be referenced, shared and reflected upon in groups or individual activities during design projects to build common awareness around topics such as neo-colonialism — the continuation of imperialist rule by a state over another — and linguistic hegemony — in which dominant groups create and maintain consensus through language norms — to help push students further in their research.
With themes such as building the capacity to aspire, surfacing issues of equity, and designing to benefit disadvantaged people through an emancipatory approach, Lesley-Ann’s enrichment lecture introduced and built upon critical theory concepts and vocabulary in the robust Transformation by Design curriculum.
For a student such as myself with some prior experience with design disciplines — ranging from UX/UI to user-centred design to design thinking — this was a welcome challenge to look beyond the surface of how design is commonly taught and incorporate principles that put it to use for creating a more equitable world.
And the curry metaphor certainly rings true for the way I’ve put design into practice in the past by lifting the burden of ‘following directions’ and instead challenging myself to operate well with skill and intuition while faced with ambiguity. It was a hearty and savoury lecture, indeed!
