Whose Design knowledge am I holding space for?
Methodology Series | Critical Practice
- Critical Practice: Asking, ‘Whose Design knowledge and I holding space for?’ and drawing from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color feminisms.
- Me and Reflexivity in Design Research: Meaning, how I, as part of the Black, People of Color community, work with people.
Whose Design knowledge am I holding space for?
Whose Design knowledge needs space held? Why?
Critical Practice
By capitalizing the “d” in Design, it’s not to fit or award people’s objects of resistance with the formal Design title that stems from the industrial revolution. Instead, I’m claiming that people’s private coping methods are sophisticated, ancient, functional, valuable, deliberate, methodical, made things.
When I ask ‘Whose Design knowledge am I holding space for?’ I think of three things.
- First, I define Design (knowledge) and making as a personal, subjective process of making the inner, outer.
- Second, the reason this inner-to-outer process is important is because what is inner is invisible. Or, further, in the case of the cultural memory of the people I’m working with, people’s inner world is made to be silent and never externalized.
- Thirdly, I’m making a statement and applying in my work with people the idea that in the silent and invisible coping across generations, individuals have an abundance of wisdom for quietly making the inner outer, physical, and material in some Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color and Queer, Trans, Non-Binary People of Color’s private spaces.
Each of the three things above help describe whose Design knowledge I’m sitting with. Below are expansions on each of the three things.
1 | Design as Materializing
Design and the knowledge it takes to practice making is the process of making the inner outer. Designers may use color guides and reference case studies to design a chair or a service system, but exactly how a person decides what formal qualities a thing may take on is a more delicate and valuable process. My personal professional design practice outside of this research work is centered around a process called Materializing. This process translates what’s intangible (an experience, emotional state, therapy skills, community values, etc.) and gives it physical form (weight, temperature, scale, location, movement, color, etc).
Elaine Scarry writes about that valuable inner-to-outer making process in The Body in Pain: Chapter 5 Interior Structure of the Artifact.
Political power — as is widely recognized and as has been periodically noticed throughout this book — entails the power of self-description. Part of the work of this book is to suggest that achieving an understanding of political justice may require that we first arrive at an understanding of making and unmaking.
Scarry names examples of different ways we make the inner outer.
When, for example, the woven gauze of a bandage is placed over an open wound, it is immediately apparent that its delicate fibers mime and substitute for the missing skin, just as in less drastic circumstances the same weave of threads (called now “clothing” rather than “bandage,” though their kinship is verbally registered in the words “ dress “ and “ dressing “ ) will continue to duplicate and magnify the protective work of the skin. …
The second way of formulating the phenomenon of projection is to identify in the made object bodily capacities and needs rather than the concrete shape or mechanism of a specifiable body part. … The printing press, the institutionalized convention of written history, photographs, libraries, films, tape recordings, and Xerox machines are all materializations of the elusive embodied capacity for memory, rather than materializations of, for example, one cubic inch of brain matter located above the left ear. …
She describes making as a process as turning oneself inside out. It’s my position that by making visible Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color making for ourselves, that in it of itself is a radical act and shift of power. It’s a gesture to say that we are making, we are designing by doing that turning of the inner outer. There’s power in turning oneself inside out when there isn’t much space or expectation for the complexities of our world views and inner, private lives. Scarry also reminds us when things are put on the table, we risk erasure.
The habit of poets and ancient dreamers to project their own aliveness onto nonalive things itself suggests that it is the basic work of creation to bring about this very projection of aliveness. What in the poet is recognizable as a fiction is in civilization unrecognizable because it has come true.
2 | Coping and Emotional Health
In the case of the cultural memory of the people I’m working with, people’s inner world is made to be silent and never externalized. Language is stripped, formal coping strategies to make sense of and express inner thoughts and emotions are withheld from being taught. Of course, people work it out despite this. When it comes to whose Design knowledge is considered Design, this immense, generations-old need for healthy coping (making and unmaking) begs the idea over time, people must have Designed rich, healthy coping methods for themselves out of survival.
Dr. Joy Degruy Leary, in a 2008 lecture in London describes the precise degree of need for ways to cope from a historical and clinical standpoint specifically of Black Americans.
When we look at the fundamental premise of trauma and the multi-generational impact of trauma, when it comes to looking at [Black Americans], it’s a curious thing why you get so much push-back. 256 years of American history, American chattel slavery–you can’t have 246 years of trauma and expect that nothing happened especially when that trauma was followed by more trauma. It’s not deep or philosophical. It really makes sense but what else is true is you can’t have 246 years of folks who are white who aren’t affected.
When you look at trauma in its very clinical sense, you can experience a single trauma indirectly, meaning that you didn’t have to be present for the trauma. For example, people who can’t get on planes because they watched 9/11 on television. But, when we start talking about chattel slavery, we’re not talking about one trauma. We’re not talking about a specific event. We’re talking about generations of trauma with no intervention. Does anyone right now ever recall mental health assistance to slaves? After slavery was officially over, now you’re free, does anyone remember whether or not trauma continued? Do you think there may be a residual impact of that trauma? African people and of African descent are extremely resilient.
We are profoundly resilient. Without even the ability to have this discussion.
The need I’m referring to is a heavy and humid one. Yet at the same time, when the need becomes an action or when it takes form towards healing, resisting, or just being, it’s solid and strong. 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 Designing happens under the radar of outsiders’ eyes. It happens behind closed doors.
Kevin Quashie, in The Sovereignty of Quiet asks, “How can quiet, as a frame for reading black culture, expose life that is not already determined by narratives of the social world?”
Stephanie Camp, in Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South … notices 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.
The case for quiet is, implicitly, an argument against the limits of blackness as a concept. Quiet is often used interchangeably with silence or stillness, but the notion of quiet … is neither motionless nor without sound. Quiet, instead, is a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life — one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears. … In fact, the interior — dynamic and ravishing — is a stay against the dominance of the social world; it has its own sovereignty. It is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no less potent in its ineffability. Quiet.
The idea of quiet, then, can shift attention to what is interior. This shift can feel like a kind of heresy if the interior is thought of as apolitical or inexpressive, which it is not: one’s inner life is raucous and full of expression, especially if we distinguish the term “expressive” from the notion of public. … Anything we do is shaped by the range of desires and capacities of our inner life.
I would argue that we (actively, not passively) do the shaping and designing of our ‘desires and capacities of our inner life.’ And I’m up for the the challenge that the sovereignty is ‘hard to see, and even harder to describe.’
3 | Knowledge and Traces
Lastly, answering the question, ‘Whose Design knowledge am I holding space for?’ is about making a case that this knowledge exists. It’s about naming in what ways it’s difficult to understand and be witness to the kind of knowledge I’m interested in.
What is the nature of this knowing? Avery Gordon explores this in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.
The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. …
I admit .. 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. … To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it. This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge, in our mode of production.
Gordon gives examples of knowing through haunting.
Norma Alcarcon 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.
In her YouTube video titled “Why Some People Wear Makeup (And Why That’s Okay), content creator Rian Phin talks about her knowing about the way she navigates her day to day life. In particular how she uses makeup — eyeliner, foundation, lipstick, highlighter, etc. She beautifully shares all of her knowing about these objects she owns, how she applies the products on her face, and how, in her words, the makeup helps her and others “navigate systems of oppression” and not wearing it lets her and others “be counter hegemonic.”
When it comes to food service, retail operations where people earn commission, or you need job security, sex work, and a huge part of your job is dependent on like, direct interpersonal interaction, in a lot of instances the way that you look is important. And it shouldn’t be. And we can challenge that. We can say, ‘I don’t care what anybody thinks. I’m just going to wear no makeup, natural hair, and dress however I want.’ And not adhere to hegemonic standards of white supremacist, fat-phobic, trans-misogynistic standards of beauty. But I’m also here for people who are made to feel Iike they have to adhere to these standards of harmful beauty ideals to navigate that, you know?
Like, I’m going to speak from one personal experience and say that like, if you work somewhere where you earn commission and you’re Black and you’re femme presenting, and you’re me, looking in a certain way, unfortunately did help me earn more commission than not looking in a certain way. I didn’t like it and I felt so trapped. And I felt like I can’t believe that I have to wear my makeup in a certain way. And even change my hair or even wear my hair but then be nicer. And if my hair is different I don’t have to be as nice. It’s like, that’s so sad and so scary to me. These are some people’s actual experiences. Like, did I not actually have that experience? I had to look a certain way for customers to trust me more, because I’m Black. Not everyone gets to wear makeup for fun or for the art of it. … Some people need that check and it’s extremely important to them.. .. I’m not suggesting makeup would dismantle systems of oppression at all. But I am saying that the ways in which I was privileged allowed me to navigate successfully. And the ways that I’m not, didn’t allow me to navigate successfully. And that’s not right.
In my own most recent experience, a nonna in Italy spit on me from her third story balcony while I walked my dog. It shook me. I kept walking around the block, managed to shake it off for a new minutes, but a pang of rage kept coming back. So I went home, started to text a rant to a friend but deleted it and never sent it. It didn’t feel like what I needed for the specific feeling I had. I thought of taking a shower. I thought of watching a YouTube video to distract myself. Over a period of 5 minutes I had scanned my brain for ways to deal with this pang. I finally landed on a smudge stick of Palo Santo wood. I burned it. In an article I wrote in August 2018, titled I Scrambled to Cope with an Incident on the Street I described the knowing that let me know how to deal and resist against the incident in a short period of time.
What it looks like:
After burning it every morning, it’s now an inch long and sits on a windowsill with plants, skincare stuff, books and jewelry. It’s a piece of wood from a tree native to South America that I burn.What I used it for:
I used it to shrink and kill the thoughts and image about this person that, knowing myself, could easily turn into a sleepless night stewing in anger and bleeding into other parts of my life. I took it, burned it, and wrapped my head with smoke. That swirling does the same work as a hug, but for my thoughts. The smell fills the vacant space of the thoughts and image that I just cancelled out.How I picked it:
As I was trying to process in my mind, I felt like I needed something to be engulfed in. I needed a shower of some kind. A sprinkle wouldn’t pacify it and I was trying to prevent my thoughts and the negativity from spreading into my sleep and onto the next day.Where I learned to do that:
I’ve used white sage smudge sticks before, but I taught myself to use things like this to cleanse weighty experiences. I bought my first smudge stick in the Bronx in New York City in a Dominican neighborhood in a shop / hair salon owned by a West African family. It was half of the price of herbalist stores in trendy parts of the East Village or Brooklyn. So I bought it and took it home. At first, I used it for the nice smell. I slowly started to feel peaceful when I lit it and smelled the smoke.
As a collective group, Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color, and Queer, Trans, Non-Binary People of Color, the knowledge about our personal histories and our wisdom about how to navigate everyday life is already rich. The guiding principles around this work is about holding that to be true, and consequently, asking where does that knowledge live? How do we tap into hauntings? How might we remember where we learned these things from? How might we describe that and filter that through to others with whom we want to share?
I started with the question ‘Whose Design knowledge am I holding space for?’ as a way to frame the values underlying a critical practice. One of the kinds of knowing I’m framing is about how we make, i.e. how I am defining Design. It’s less of a procedural, intellectual way of knowing, it’s a bodily thing where what we make is a flipping inside out of our inner experiences and private ways of knowing. What am I holding space for? What currently doesn’t have space? Institutions historically and in contemporary policies and attitudes withhold Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color, and Queer, Trans, Non-Binary People of Color from easily accessing formal coping tools — language, coping skills, self-care community — to deal with displacement and/or marginalization, so we find our way to get them or develop our own. Of those, the inner, private, quiet ways of taking care are sometimes done without language. These acts of taking care, because they’re not formalized by an institution or authority, don’t have the same kind of visibility within our community for our community.
