How a prayer rug and asking people to feel their feet are changing the way I do Design

I explain in detail my critique on design and what I’m doing about it

Myriam Diatta

Published in

Our Everyday Forms

30 min readJun 21, 2019

On May 2, 2019 in Melbourne, Australia, I presented my Ph.D. research project to a panel, my supervisors, and my peers.

Confirmation Sample Writing
Student: Myriam Doremy Diatta
Confirmation Milestone Date: May 2, 2019

Un/settling Design Research: Reflexivity and critical autoethnography for a by us, for us approach to design

Abstract
This writing sample describes critical autoethnography and reflexivity as agents for developing a critical approach to design research that is by and for Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPoC) and Queer, Trans People of Color (QTPoC). Beginning the essay with the ‘by us, for us’ principle established by theatre group founders W.E.B. DuBois and Regina Anderson during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s as a stronghold, I write self-affirmingly as a Black Asian American design researcher. This essay asks us — as design researchers of color — to radically imagine methodologies and methods that honor each of our vernacular, haunted ways of knowing and being.

Introduction

“The plays of a real Negro theatre must be: 1. “about us.” That is, they must have plays which reveal Negro life as it is. 2. “By us.” That is, they must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continued association just what it means to be a Negro today. 3. “For us.” That is, the theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences and be supported and sustained by their entertainment and approval. 4. “Near us.” The theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro peoples”
(Locke 1926).

The “about us, by us, for us, near us” principles for operating and organizing were established by Krigwa, a theatre company founded during the Harlem Renaissance by, for and about Black American people. There isn’t much published about the playwrites’ process that make explicit statements about their by us, for us methodologies, but stories produced by the guild did unapologetically center on language, motifs and sites that were specific to their Black community. Krigwa writers used their own dialects. In Fool’s Errand, a character uses language native to them stating, “It’s mah ‘pinion dey’s bin outer han’ a mighty long time” (Krigwa 1926). Even still, Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most prolific Black woman writers and an anthropologist during the 1920s, highlights the problematic representations of Black Americans by the theatre group by stating, “With only the fractional, ‘exceptional’ and the ‘quaint’ portrayed, true picture of Negro life in America cannot be” (Staple 2006). Alain Locke, revolutionary writer and philosopher of the time believed the Black art of the period “must have the courage to develop its own idiom” (Locke, 1926).

Contemporary makers pursue the principles set by Krigwa and have carefully and energetically applied them their domains — with and without explicit connection to and predating Krigwa Players. For instance, filmmakers Arthur Jafa and Ousmane Sembène have each made clear statements their work is for Black and African audiences, respectively. Dr. Nicole M. West organized a summit in 2014 of higher ed workshops to establish bonds between people who identify as People of Color in predominantly white institutions. BUFU, a Pan African, Pan Asian artists collective who named themselves after the by us, for us principle, creates living archives and organizes large community solidarity events in New York City (BUFU 2018). Akel Kahera informs their pedagogical practice by teaching architecture students these principles. He uses the principles as a response to architecture and design traditions patronizing vernacular and Indigenous forms of making and doing (Kahera 2014).

I don’t identify as Black American; my contemporary culture is not directly rooted in my grand and great-grandparents being survivors of anglo-american chattel slavery, and the story of the Harlem Renaissance is not mine. I am an immigrant West-African Asian who grew up in the United States. I am a person settling into my politicized position in the world. And I am educated and practice as a Transdisciplinary design researcher. These ‘mixed’, layered intersections of the axes of my own identity begs the question of how I settle into a design research approach and set of ethics that is ‘authentic.’ I use this term throughout this paper to more specifically mean an approach that is grounded in the politicized axes of my identity and honors my own vernacular ways of knowing and being. Michael McMillan clarifies that for ‘others’ assessment of “authenticity is problematic in terms of how it is constructed, policed, and legitimised” (2009, 45). It is particularly the case when it comes to defining the Black aesthetic where there is no pure point of origin (2009, 45).

The intersectionality of the target audience of this research project (the “us” in by us, for us) is directly informed by the impossible task of my coming across a defined group of people who are Senegalese-Japanese southern U.S. immigrants with whom to identify, and is informed by my constant state of being able to navigate between and across social identities. “BIPoC”- and “by us, for us”-identifying organizations, collectives and communities operate in ways that prioritize forms of solidarity that are restorative within and across communities. While “resisting romantic notions of the diaspora” (Hanna 2017), many are critical of the way we “tend to use as our standard the systems we want to dismantle” (Southbank Centre 2017) and therefore collectively identify with each other due to the shared experience navigating ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ (hooks 2001).

The work described in this paper aims to make a contribution to these contemporary efforts echoing the by us, for us principles — through the domain of design research. This paper frames critical autoethnography and reflexivity as agents for developing a design research approach that is by and for Black, Indigenous, People of Color and Queer People of Color.

The pace of the conversation allowed for me to bring my attention to how I sat on the prayer rug. … Without exaggerating the importance or being overly-fixated, it was one of several moments that made me aware of my role as a guest in her home and as a researcher.

1 | Research Question

My personal purpose for doing the research is to ultimately affect my day-to-day practice. This is the primary reason I am pursuing a doctorate in design. The goal for affecting the discipline of design is to develop methods and a methodology that is by us, for us — and also contributes to the work of contemporary artists, community organizers and researchers. Through this research, I ask:

In what ways might a design researcher — who identifies as Black, Indigenous, People of Color — use ethnographic research methodologies to slowly move a design practice towards one that honors vernacular ways of knowing and being of both the researcher and participants — who also self-identify as Black, Indigenous, People of Color?

The following sections specify each component of the overarching research question.

My current design practice is the design studio I run with former graduate school colleagues. The work is client and project-based. We work with non-profit public health and violence prevention organizations, a tech startup, an after school program, design conferences, and others. My practice is often either large scale and long term — for example, consulting for twenty management staff members at an organization and ultimately impacting two thousand of their staff — or a smaller scale — hosting up to fifteen people in thirty minute drop-in workshops or facilitating a series of workshops over a period of three months. The large-scale work has never sat well with me due to it’s unsettling fast pace and hierarchical nature of the client’s culture. I’ve set the relatively smaller-scale work up to be in accessible public spaces and operate in a way that allows the participant to work independently and to steer their own direction during the workshops. In each of these cases, I’ve put myself in a removed state in one way or another. While stepped back, I see my practice is hard-pressed for situations where the work is intimate and slow enough to diligently attend to my own ways of showing up and exchanging with a person. This proposed Ph.D. research deliberately uses the affordances of academic research to affect my day-to-day practice and the methodologies that found my work.

Asking them to take a deep breath, feel themselves in the room and feel their feet on the ground is a micro-experiment on adjusting the home tour technique.

2 | Self-Critical, Reflective Writing — The instrument for affecting my practice

In March of 2019, I was invited to the home of Azar. She lives in the suburbs of Atlanta in the southern United States. My visit was part of a new archival service I started for documenting the objects people use in their private spaces. During my interview with her, Azar told me about the essential oils she uses before going to work, throughout the day and before bed. Before describing the oils to me, she invited me to sit down on her prayer rug to talk. Earlier in the interview, Azar shared with me she used to fold and put away her prayer rug between each of the five daily prayers. Lately she’s created a corner in her home dedicated only to prayer. Having partially grown up in Islam myself, I understood the kind of space the practice on the prayer rug can be. The pace of the conversation allowed for me to bring my attention to how I sat on the prayer rug. I noticed I was sitting at the front of the mat where she would normally touch her forehead when kneeling for prayer. While sitting, I chose not to put my feet on the mat. Later, before we both stood up to move to another room together, I patted the mat in a light, but sincere gesture and very briefly thanked her for letting me sit on it. Without exaggerating the importance or being overly-fixated, it was one of several moments that made me aware of my role as a guest in her home and as a researcher.

Design research and facilitation work involves navigating power dynamics, knowing when to speak up or pivot, attending to how and where I move my body, and when to ‘move up or move back.’ The nature of these new in-home interviews, as opposed to parts of my ongoing design practice, are closer to the slowness and intimacy that lets me tap into ways of knowing and being that are authentic to the way I prefer to show up in the world. Moments of reflection and self-critique like these, collectively, bring my attention to the methods I use and the values that underpin my actions. Writing about this particular moment here in this paper invites me to name my actions and shift them from being arbitrary towards becoming part of my technique for being with people. This reflection and writing brings attention to my subjective experience (with Islamic prayer, in this instance) that briefly intersects with Azar’s and how it informs my behavior. It surfaces the self-doubt (of how methodical I was or needed to be) and the constructive self-critique I need to make sense of this momentary interaction with Azar. Consistently accompanying this in-person work with regular practice of self-critical, reflective writing before and after the work primes me to be more intentional and aware in the moment. This process gives shape to the pace and scale of work I personally value most. This kind of writing actively puts into perspective the degree of unease I have with the client-based work I am also working on simultaneously.

Methodologies

Here, I draw initial connections to formalized methodologies: critical autoethnography and reflexivity. I demonstrate these methodologies create the conditions that most effectively transform myself into a person whose design research approach is authentic.

Critical Autoethnography

Critical Autoethnography centers the self as a site of inquiry (Marx et al. 2017). Stacy Holman-Jones argues it is possible to “[do] theory and think story by using … the ideas, concepts, and languages of theory and the mode of story … to tell complex, nuanced, multiple, and critically reflexive narratives” (Holman Jones, 2016). In my research project, my intersectionality and the contradictions (Gordon, 2004) of everyday life as well as those of each individual who participates in the work and the ‘group’ (the “us” in by us, for us) is an important concern to work through using a critical autoethnographic lens.

The ‘critical’ in critical autoethnography means, for me, an investigation into the layered politicized histories, community, and identities of individuals involved in this work. For researchers Sherry Marx, Julie L. Pennington and Heewon Chang, critical autoethnography provides a way to bring forward their socially marginalized stories and ways of knowing into dominating cultures — in their case, the discourse of academics (Marx et al. 2017). They assemble a handful of critical autoethnographic essays that, as a collection, call attention to each others’ individual and collective experiences “encased within larger … sociohistorical contexts” (2017). The ‘critical’ in critical autoethnography also speaks outwards towards patriarchal design traditions. Further, it demands I examine my responsibility in doing work that critiques corporate institutions while conducting research through one. Yea-Wen Chen uses critical autoethnographic writing to process and act on her need to give up tenure in the academic institution in which she worked. Her writing gives her space to “rethink silence and voice in the context of institutional whiteness from the standpoint of a racialized Asian/immigrant/woman faculty” (2018). Satoshi Toyosaki and Sandra L. Pensoneau-Conway frame “autoethnography as a praxis of social justice” to “claim the experiential, unfinished, intersubjective self” in a way that authenticates the experiences and knowings of people who live with injustice (Toyosaki and Pensoneau-Conway, 2013).

Reflexivity

Being reflexive enables me as a design researcher to “unsettle” the design traditions and the dominant culture of running a design consultancy with which I’ve bolstered myself up. As a result, it also lets me “perform”10 an approach and set of ethics. Reflexivity is a fundamental component of critical autoethnography that, by investing in practicing it, requires me to sit with and own my “location(s) in culture and scholarship” (Berry, 2013). Being reflexive about having indoctrinated myself in design traditions and running a design consultancy has begun to bring attention to my subjective experience, how I situate myself in a room, and has surfaced the unease or doubt that hasn’t yet been thoroughly addressed.

Donna Haraway expands on the notion of reflexivity and interrogates its potential shortcomings by stating reflexivity alone cannot produce self-visibility. It is “diffraction… the production of difference patterns in the world, not just the same reflected — displaced — elsewhere” (Haraway 1997, 168). With the layeredness of my identities and the axes of identities of each person who identifies as a Black, Indigenous, Person of Color and Queer Person of Color that I cross paths with in this research project means the re-telling of our (each participant of the research and my) stories must also be presented in a way that is entangled, “re-turning” — as in “turning over and over again,” “defracts” (Barad 2014, 169) and interferes with the way I do the re-telling (Haraway 1992). Throughout the development of this work, I as the researcher will dig up my own personal and cultural histories which will become entangled in my relationship to and with each participant and the larger ‘us’ as defined by the research project. Reflexivity and the interconnected apparatus, diffraction, take on the role of maintaining the messiness of the research.

Critical autoethnography and the components of reflexivity are important for the rigor of the research project, but even more imperatively, I depend on them in order to affect how I interact with the people I work with and what they share. I hint at Carol Rambo’s technique for autoethnography, “layered accounts” (Rambo, 2005; Rambo Ronai, 1995), to accurately portray the entangled, layered, intersubjective experience of being in the research — both in my critical analysis but also in the structure of the writing. It means that, in the following pages, I juxtapose vignettes, the identities of researcher and participant briefly shift and I begin to incorporate my subjective experience and theoretical voice in an otherwise traditional format (Rambo, 2005; Rambo Ronai, 1995).

3 | Home Tours — The testing grounds for self-critical, reflective practice

The research question needs a prompt (a specific situation) to which it can respond and expand. I am aiming to shift my ongoing design practice towards a pace and scale that is intimate and slow enough for me to diligently attend to my own ways of showing up and exchanging with a person. This specific situation through which to explore the research question should also be distinct from my current design practice yet still invested in my design background; making and theorizing around objects and spaces.

The case-project for the research question takes the form of a one-to-one home tour and interview for Black, Indigenous, People of Color and Queer People of Color. The project is called Our Everyday Forms. It operates through the design studio I run.

Our Everyday Forms involves myself (as researcher) and participants in their private spaces (homes, apartments, rooms, possessions etc.). For the participant in the work, the home visit is framed as a service for individuals, co-habitants and families who want their care tools documented for personal, community, and legacy purposes.

In the case-project, there are four scenes I cover: (1) Recruiting, (2) being in participants’ spaces with their object(s), (3) documenting the objects and stories, and (4) sharing the stories with self-identified communities. Through these four scenes I have created the context in which the design research question about my practice is situated.

The scope of the case-project is defined by the following criteria for participation: All of the individuals involved in Our Everyday Forms self-identify as Black, Indigenous, People of Color or Queer People of Color. They must self-identify as an individual who experiences displacement or marginalization. Thirdly and lastly, they also identify as an individual who uses things and places in their private space (house, apartment, suitcase, small collection of belongings etc.) specifically to deal with a displacing or marginalizing experience(s). I am calling this particular type of object or space objects of resistance. Preceding my use of the term, ‘objects of resistance’ has been used to describe tools and skills in a social and historical perspective (Gerevini 2017). In Our Everyday Forms, objects of resistance refers specifically to belongings or spaces used to respond to and/or navigate the ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal’ (hooks 2001) interactions a participant has with other people and systems.

The conversations we have during the home tour and interview are about how the participants came to possess the object(s) and how they are used. Specifically, once a participant and I are together and they identify one of their objects, I ask questions like, ‘What purpose did this object serve?’ For instance, to cleanse, to center, to destroy, to calm, to restore? And, ‘What incident or phase of life had you reaching for it?,’ ‘How did you decide to use this over another thing you own?’ ‘How did you acquire the object?’ ‘What are its physical features?’ And, most importantly, ‘Where did you learn to do this?’ i.e. listening to your body, a spiritual framework, or from a friend, for instance.

Our Everyday Forms is not a project that interrogates whether or not Black, Indigenous, People of Color and Queer People of Color experience marginalization and displacement nor does it ask if they have or use objects of resistance. The scope of the project concerns cases of individuals who self-identify as meeting all three criteria. While the case project is the testing grounds and happens to take the form a home tour, the scope of the research remains concentrated around reflexive and critical autoethnographic development processes for my practice.

The discrete, tacit knowing I am referring to happens through the body and is an intimate experience. Experiencing this bodily knowing has a felt, internalized quality to it which isn’t easily spotted — but when you do feel it, you sense you’re deeply connected to it, historically, and on a greater scale socially.

4 | Methods — How thinking and writing manifests itself as technique

In this section of this paper, I piece together a collection of self-critical, reflective writing I’ve done previously, new writing generated for this paper, and references to specific theoretical frameworks I use in this work. Through the writing in this section of the paper itself, I aim to demonstrate reflexivity and critical autoethnography as the instrument for affecting my practice. I begin by asking:

How might I be cognizant of the trauma and/or anxiety that may be tied to some of the objects people own and the stories they share?
How might I create an appropriate condition for participants to identify objects and unpack the use and meaning tied to them?

I begin to stitch together components of the research — namely, pinning the procedures of the case-project to positions that critically theorize on Black, Indigenous, People of Color and Queer People of Color ways of knowing and being.

Methods for Being in the Home

Interview and Home Tour
Once I enter the home, we usually begin with casual conversation and especially if it is the first time meeting, I spend time to establish rapport and allow ourselves to orient to one another through casual conversation. The interview begins by my telling the story of how this archival service came to be, reiterating what objects of resistance are and explaining to the participant, “It is a part of a research project that investigates the way that I enter your home, ask you questions, navigate each others’ boundaries, and share your story with others.” I then ask them where most of their belongings live, and we move to that space.
To begin the process of selecting objects, participants are asked to do a silent walkthrough of each relevant room to take stock of their belongings and to mentally bookmark any spaces or things they use as objects of resistance. I leave the room for them to walk through alone. I then ask them to walk me through to show me the belongings they bookmarked. We sit down with one object at a time, and we begin to talk about them. I ask them the questions about how they acquired the object, how they learned to use it, etc.
After talking through three or four objects, we begin closing out the home tour with another silent walk-through where I step out, but instead of bookmarking objects, participants are asked to ‘feel whatever they feel about their belongings and who they are.’ They are then asked to name who their story is for by looking into the camera and starting their sentence with ‘Dear…’ and stating what they want this person, group of people, or community to know about their story. The home tour concludes with my asking participants to name ‘highs and lows’ of the past two hours.

1.How might I be cognizant of the trauma and/or anxiety that may be tied to some of the objects people own and the stories they share?

We’re in Brooklyn, New York, and I am in the middle of a home tour. The participant I’m visiting just finished the silent walkthrough to bookmark their objects of resistance in their bedroom. She starts to talk through each object, one by one to review what she mentally bookmarked. One is sitting on her bookshelf, another is on a shelf above her desk. We come to a lovely small canvas painting. She rested her hand on it and shared ‘I made this during a really difficult time of my life.’ She moves on to point out a few of her journals. She also pointed to a series of objects in a bookshelf and noted, ‘…but I don’t want to talk about that.’ She lastly showed me a deck of cards on her bookshelf. As excited and eager as I was in that moment to learn about her objects, I gave her the lead on what objects to talk about and not. After surveying the objects she bookmarked, I ask her to start by picking one object at a time to talk in-depth to begin the sit-down interview.

This work involves the physical space and personal stories shared by participants. It concerns potentially vulnerable moments and situations. This participant had pointed to several objects, but chose not to talk about two of them in-depth as objects of resistance. I offer space for participants to work out what objects are relevant (in the silent walk-through), and of those, which objects they want to expound on with me (by selecting objects one by one). This is for the purpose of giving participants space to calculate or weigh their comfort and willingness that day, that moment, and with me in particular. I did not ask nor will I consider making assumptions or judgements about what an unturned object means to a person, but I work with the understanding making is easily tied to grieving, coping, and trauma. I use Joy Degruy Leary (2005) and Karen B. Hanna’s (2017) work on trauma and resilience alongside Elaine Scarry’s notions of pain, justice, and making (1988) to demonstrate there is an arc of felt needs to made objects. Participants’ viceral, felt needs — i.e. To respond, squash, cope, sit with — are what gives rise to the situation — i.e. Of making and being a person who owns objects of resistance.

Dr. Joy Degruy Leary’s work on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (2005) describes trauma as something that can be experienced directly in front of your eyes, and very indirectly, residually. It’s about the depth and vastness of the old and new compounding messages and harmful acts. Without any formal institutionalized mental health care for 250 years, Black Americans remain resilient. About herself and her community, Leary states, “We are profoundly resilient. Without even the ability to have this discussion” (2017). This kind and degree of resilience must generate a vast richness and breadth of ways of coping, thriving and making.

In her work about “transphobia, homophobia, and historical trauma in Filipina/o/x American activist organizations,” Karen B. Hanna (2017) describes traumas as being “inherited through legacies of colonialism, feudalism, imperialism, hetero-patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy.” Part of Hanna’s work points to physical built spaces some Filipina/o/x American Left organizations have created as an integral component to grieving, coping and thriving. She argues “releasing emotional pain can take many forms” (2017).

Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (1988) powerfully investigates how we unmake and make the world, the torture, war and pain done onto our bodies. Through the last chapter of The Body in Pain, she stunningly combs through the way in which we don’t quite know how we make, and yet it’s intrinsically tied to our bodies, pain, and justice. She describes this as ‘The Interior Structure of the Artifact.’ Scarry details, “The woven gauze of a bandage is … substitute for the missing skin, just as clothing continue(s) to duplicate and magnify the protective work of the skin. … The printing press, the institutionalized convention of written history, photographs, libraries, films, tape recordings, and Xerox machines are all materializations of … memory” (Scarry 1988, 283).

To be a person who has the ability, skill and support to make their interior self visible, examinable, and legible means one is not limited to carrying, for instance, their thoughts, trauma, anxieties and dread within in their body. Making is a process of turning oneself inside out (Scarry 1988, 284). Our inner thoughts are then borne externally, open to judgement, interpretation and response. It’s my position that Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color and Queer People of Color visualise and make by and for ourselves is in and of itself is a radical act and shift of power. “Political power entails the power of self-description… Achieving an understanding of political justice may require that we first arrive at an understanding of making and unmaking” (Scarry 1988, 279).

The need for making is a heavy and humid one. Yet, when it manifests into an action or when it takes form towards healing, resisting, or just being, it’s solid and concrete. And sometimes, it’s a quiet, private, intimate thing. It sits on a mantle. It’s in a box under the bed. It’s brought out during dinner. It sits on a nightstand. It hangs on the wall. This making happens under the radar of outsiders’ eyes. It happens behind closed doors.

Back in Brooklyn towards the end of the interview, I asked the participant to name who their story is for. I gave her time to think about it, and she began. She addressed her ‘peers’ and her ‘queer community.’ In her message to them, I watched her bring back up the subject of the collection of objects in her bookshelf she previously passed up. In this address, she explained she didn’t want to talk about it because she felt her mom watching. With that period of self-awareness, she passed on advice to her peers and queer community that it’s ok to have objects that aren’t from your culture. I sat behind the camera she was looking into as she spoke and took in that healing advice for myself. From this I personally gained the awareness of the effect my own family’s traditions and judgements on other cultural and spiritual traditions. This participant gave me permission to feel o.k. about my own objects of resistance.

I deliberately hold on to my assumption that a Black, Indigenous, Person of Color or Queer Person of Color already has material ways of dealing with imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal interactions with people and systems. This case project concentrates on the ways of dealing that happen to take the form of physical objects. Refraining from searching for ‘problems’ participants have, judging the appropriateness of their objects or spaces, or solving those ‘problems’ for them is a way to make actionable this part of this design research approach.

2. How might I create an appropriate condition for participants to identify objects and unpack the use and meaning tied to them?

The subtext of this method question asks, ‘What are the conditions that need tending to?’ and ‘What might make it appropriate?’ I am sharing space with a fellow person that has translated incidents and phases of their life into objects of resistance in discrete, understated ways.

The discrete, tacit knowing I am referring to happens through the body and is an intimate experience. Experiencing this bodily knowing has a felt, internalized quality to it which isn’t easily spotted — but when you do feel it, you sense you’re deeply connected to it, historically, and on a greater scale socially. It’s a kind of knowing you receive from listening to your chest (Williams 2016), your body telling you what you need to nourish yourself, a philosophical oral essay on youtube that hits you in the right spot (Phin 2018). It’s a kind of knowing you receive from entering a home (hooks 1995), sitting in a living room (McMillan 2009), an invitation to visit someone’s hometown (Akama 2017), reflecting on your morning routine (Phin 2016), pieces of clothing you put on yourself (Lee 2015). It’s a kind of knowing you experience from a collection of poems you can sit with for an hour to connect to yourself (Waheed 2014), getting struck while dancing (Unknown 2016), an ancient Andean code (Remezcla, 2017), time at community events (BUFU 2018), or years of living life, for instance. Without being able to pinpoint or name the kind of knowing I’m referring to, I can say it’s the kind that will tell you what you need to do — to leave the space as soon as you feel uncomfortable (The Tumeric Project 2017), to say ‘no’ assertively when you need to and will let you learn about yourself (StreetKom 2012) and where you come from. My understanding of Black, Indigenous, People of Color knowings is also informed by Avery Gordon’s theory of ‘haunting’ as a form of knowledge that is lost or taken away, and Kevin Quashie’s investigation of “quiet” as “a stay against the dominance of the social world” in Black life. Understanding these many qualities allows me to iterate on the environment I create to encourage participants to surface their knowings during the home tour.

Avery Gordon describes this kind of knowing as a haunting. “Norma Alarcón is following the barely visible tracks of the Native Woman across the U.S.-Mexico border, as she shadows the making of the liberal citizen-subject. … Maxine Hong Kingston is mapping the trans-Pacific travel of ghostly ancestors and their incessant demands on the living. The ghost … is one form by which something lost, or barely visible … makes itself known” (Gordon 2011, 5–7).

In The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012), Kevin Quashie writes about Stephanie Camp, who in Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South demonstrates how “black women’s acts of resistance appear in day-to-day activities as much as (if not more than) in formal planned rebellions or revolts” (2012, 5). Quashie warns quiet isn’t to be mistaken with silence, stillness, motionlessness, or without sound, but is instead “a stay against the dominance of the social world (2012, 6).” Quiet is the volume at which our dreams, devastations, fights, fears, and vulnerabilities make themselves lived and felt. “The idea of quiet, then, can shift attention to what is interior. … It has its own sovereignty. … Anything we do is shaped by the range of desires and capacities of our inner life” (2012, 8).

By using these theories to shape the decisions I make and actions I take in the case project, the approach becomes about making the conditions quiet enough to listen if something is telling us — participant and researcher — something. Gordon admits “sociology certainly — but also the human sciences at large — seemed to provide few tools for understanding how social institution and people are haunted, for capturing enchantment in a disenchanted world (Gordon 2011, 11).” By letting the process of the home tours be affected by the qualities of participants’ knowing, my technique changes.

Before we get into things, I’ll ask you to do a walk-through. Its purpose is to acknowledge all the things you have in your possession. You’ll bookmark and take mental note of the stuff you’ve used to navigate or respond to racist, homophobic, misogynistic, ableist, transphobic, and/or elitist/classist interactions. You’ll start here at the door, work your way clockwise around the room and end at the door. You can open drawers, closets, up above your head, under the bed, and in boxes and things.
I’ll step out of the room now.
First, take a breath… Feel yourself in the room… Feel your feet on the ground.
Start whenever you’re ready. Take your time.

Asking participants to do silent walk-throughs is for the purpose of haptically scanning all their possessions to give opportunity to surface objects and spaces they may have not thought of immediately. Asking them to take a deep breath, feel themselves in the room and feel their feet on the ground is a micro-experiment on adjusting the home tour technique. I come to realize what I am doing as an overall approach is adjusting my home tour technique to match the discrete, understated way that participants have created and used their objects of resistance. This is the first iteration towards matching the discrete, understated way that participants have used their objects and space. It echoes the bodily knowing in listening to your chest (Williams 2016), your body telling you what you need to nourish yourself, or getting struck while dancing (Unknown 2016). Because Our Everyday Forms is not about asking whether people have objects of resistance, this is an exercise that might prime some participants before their walk-through.

Diagram representing how the steps and procedures of the home tours manifests itself as a BUFU design approach

5 | Conclusion

This writing sample has introduced possible approaches and processes for Black, Indigenous, designers of Color and Queer designers of Color. If the idea is to develop approaches that are by us, for us — like initiatives in theatre, architecture, film, higher education, community organizing and other domains do — we each need to situate our unique positionalities in the world and with those we work with. It calls for us to make iterations in day-to-day work with fellow Black, Indigenous, People of Color and Queer People of Color, and find processes or vehicles to make this visible.

This paper introduced the “about us, by us, for us, near us” principles of the 1920’s Krigwa Players theatre group to set an epistemological backdrop for the research. The research question asks how a reflective, self-critical process may be used as an agent for affecting my design research work — towards honoring each of our vernacular ways of knowing and being. I preface the core methodology of this research with a vignetted moment during a home tour. Lastly, I unpack the interview and home tour method through the writing itself and connect them to theory. Stacy Holman Jones reveals the commitments of critical autoethnography as ”theory and story work[ing] together in a dance,” praxis — both material and ethical, and “engaging in processes of becoming” (Holman Jones, 2016).

The intent of this work is to produce a frame of thinking and doing that allows a designer to decipher when and how their own knowings are overtly and/or covertly being overridden by ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal’ (hooks 2001) ways of designing.

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